Michael Gross has a profile of Aby Rosen in Centurion Magazine which Rosen has posted online. The story charts Rosen’s Manhattan real estate rise and the accompanying art market posse he does double duty with as investors:
Rosen first met William Georgis when he hired him to decorate his Park Avenue co-op. He also hired Georgis’s partner, Richard Marshall, a curator. Marshall tickled Rosen’s nascent taste for modern American art. “I had the money. I had the instinct,” Rosen says. “Richard helped me; Richard showed me; he educated me.” Rosen used that knowledge at RFR and staged shows of borrowed art at Lever House during its reconstruction. Subsequently, RFR began commissioning art, and buying it to hand in tis properties too, advised by Alberto “Tico” Mugrabi, the son of a Jewish Syrian textile mogul. Like Rosen, the Mugrabis collect huge numbers of works by such brand-name artists as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. They met through the paper-mill owner Peter Brant, another voracious buyer of contemporary art, who bought 36 percent of the Seagram Building in 2011. In turn, Rosen invested in his paper company. Not long afterward, they were all accused of colluding to manipulate the prices of the artists they collect. The eminent dealer Richard Feigen has called them “the contemporary-art-market-bubble contingent.”
The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Aby Rosen (Centurion Magazine)
