Friday afternoon: waiting for callbacks for stories I’m working on, callbacks that rarely come on Fridays after about now. Unfortunately. Which set me to some Friday afternoon pipe-dreaming.
The Frick Collection has been thinking about expansion since at least Sam Sachs was director there; current director Anne Poulet has echoed the call for “limited expansion,” as she has termed it. For nearly a year, the gorgeous 45-foot-wide townhouse around the corner, at 22 East 71st St., has been up for sale. It was, of course, home to the late Salander-O’Reilly Gallery. Sotheby’s has the listing, and you can see what a perfect match for the Frick it would be. Or take the short-cut and read a description from the Times last year:
THE Salander-O’Reilly Galleries…provided a museumlike space to display old master paintings, tapestries and sculptures. Customers entered through the arched wrought-iron gates in the Italian Renaissance facade, up a few steps under a vaulted ceiling of coffered plaster. They stepped softly on the polished marble into a gallery with stone walls and a broad staircase designed by C. P. H. Gilbert in the 1920s.
The asking price is $75 million, out-of-reach for the Frick. But the mansion is owned by arts patron Aby Rosen, the real estate developer. It’s true his tastes are contemporary. Here’s how Phoebe Hoban described them in a March, 2008 profile of Rosen in New York Magazine:
Looking over his blue-chip collection of 80 Warhols (and counting), the naughty Richard Prince nurse, the Basquiats, the Christopher Wools, the Harings, the Koonses, the Bacon, people wonder as they did with Charles Saatchi whether it’s Rosen or the company that owns this vast trove. (Through a spokeswoman, Rosen declined to comment.)
But wouldn’t it be great if Rosen simply gave the building to the Frick? I don’t know what the real estate collapse has done to his net worth, but if websites like Curbed are accurate he is still active and out-and-about in New York. Jeff Koons, one of Rosen’s friends, is said to collect Old Masters. Maybe he can plant the idea.
Just a thought.