Acquavella

Artelligence Podcast: Joan Miró’s Constellations at Acquavella Galleries

May 2, 2017 by Marion Maneker

Acquavella galleries has brought together the 23 gouaches in Joan Miró’s Constellations series that were last seen together in 1993 at the Museum of Modern Art.

Considered by many to be the height of Miró’s achievement as an artist, these works gain power and impact from being shown all together. Indeed, the condition for many of the loans was that the entire series had to be on view.

The suite of images was produced between January of 1940 and September of 1941—but it was not until 1958 that André Breton named them “Constellations.” When Miró and his family fled France for Spain ahead of the German invasion in June of 1940, he took virtually nothing with him apart from the portfolio of his ten completed Constellations.

“Since they were first exhibited at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in New York in early 1945, after having been smuggled out of Europe, the Constellations have been celebrated as one of the most powerful artistic statements of the 20th century,” said Bill Acquavella.

Margit Rowell is an art historian and curator who works mostly in Paris and New York. She has held curatorial positions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and as curator of drawings at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Acquavella’s Greatest Hits

October 2, 2011 by Marion Maneker

The FT’s Peter Aspden lunched with William Acquavella where he got a re-capitulation of the dealer’s best moves over half a century in the art trade.

First, Acquavella characterized the state of play today: “There are three kinds of buyers, those who do it for social reasons, those who invest, and those for whom it is a passion. It has tilted a little towards the investment side, probably because there is so much money involved.”

In 1964, father and son travelled to Paris once more, to be introduced to the “nieces of Madame Bonnard”. They negotiated the purchase of several works by Pierre Bonnard, having borrowed the money. They brought the works to New York, printed a colour catalogue (not a common practice then), and William wrote 10 letters to prospective buyers, among them Norton Simon, Nelson Rockefeller and Paul Mellon. “I didn’t know them but I knew they were wealthy and might have been interested in art,” he says. It was an inspired pitch. “Believe it or not, Mr Mellon came and bought $1m worth of Bonnards. That paid for all the works that we had committed to buy. And then the rest of the show sold out.”

In 1973, he bought 17 “fabulous” paintings from the estate of the collector Henry Ittleson Jr, including works by Cézanne, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, for $5m, again borrowed from the bank. He describes, with no little wonderment, a “beautiful” pastel by Degas, which he immediately sold. “I recently tried to buy it back. I offered $80m but [the owner] wouldn’t sell it.”

Acquavella’s greatest coup was the purchase, in 1990, of the entire stock of the Pierre Matisse gallery (the dealer was Henri’s son) in a joint venture with Sotheby’s, for $153m. […] He brought Sotheby’s on board, not least to help with the administrative burden of the purchase. “It was 4,700 works, we couldn’t have handled that.” Acquavella brilliantly made a virtue out of the sheer quantity of works on his hands. Knowing that serious collectors would try to cherry-pick the best work, he offered packages of works of varying qualities. “People had to buy the packages. I don’t think it had ever been done before.” Within 18 months, he had sold $300m worth of art.

Lunch with the FT: William Acquavella (Financial Times)

What Dealers Do: Acquavella Edition

March 25, 2011 by Marion Maneker

The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ magazine has this compelling vignette from its story on the relationship between Lucian Freud and William Acquavella:

A friend told me Lucian Freud wanted to have lunch with me when I came to London. I told a few friends. They said, “Oh, he’s doing these male nudes now, he’s difficult, it’s going to be tough.” So I go to lunch, thinking, how am I going to get out of this? And he says, “Will you come back to the studio?” He starts pulling out these pictures of Leigh Bowery. They were unbelievable. So I bought them all and made a deal that I would represent him world-wide. He said fine, we shook hands and that was the end of it.

When I took him on, he said to me, “I’ve got a bookie—and I’ve got a bill with him.” I figured, let me talk to him, I’ll pay it. So I have dinner with him—Alfie McLean, one of the largest bookmakers in Northern Ireland—and I said, “Alfie, what does he owe you?” He says, “2.7 million pounds.” I said, “OK, thanks [laughing].” We had to work this out.

The Master and the Gallerist (Wall Street Journal)

How Good Were the Sculls?

April 1, 2010 by Marion Maneker

The Master, Judd Tully, reminds us just how good the Robert and Ethel Scull art collection was by highlighting the upcoming Acquavella show of 40 works once owned by the couple:

One of the works on display, Willem de Kooning’s Police Gazette, 1955, brought $180,000 at Sotheby Parke Bernet in 1973. Years later, gallery patriarch William Acquavella acquired it for $2.2 million and eventually resold it to Steve Wynn for $12 million. Most recently, hedge funder Steven M. Cohen bought it from David Geffen for $63.5 million. Also on display are Jasper Johns’s Double-Flag, 1962; an early James Rosenquist, Untitled (Blue Sky), 1962; and Andy Warhol’s Red Airmail Stamps, 1962.