“You have to live with your art,” that’s what Thaddeus Ropac tells T Magazine in a brief feature on the 17th Century Salzburg house he restored to the exacting standards of the local preservation authorities and then filled with Contemporary art from his artists Sylvie Fleury, Tom Sachs, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Robert Longo, Tony Cragg and Matali Crasset. He also explains to T how he became an art dealer after interning for artist Joseph Beuys:
It was 30 years ago when Ropac, after no luck getting a job at a museum or gallery without an art history degree, signed a lease for the equivalent of 70 euros a month and opened an off-the-beaten-path gallery of his own. With a letter of introduction to Andy Warhol written on a paper napkin by Beuys, Ropac secured a drawing show by the Pop Art master, over the objections of Fred Hughes, then Warhol’s manager. Through Beuys and Warhol, Ropac would go on to meet, and work with, artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Georg Baselitz. “I had the luck to start with them right away,” he says. “I had all these exhibitions in this terrible little gallery, but people started to look for the address, to come and find me.”
By Design | In Salzburg, an Astonishing Contemporary Art Collection in a 17th-Century Austrian Manor (NYTimes)
