George Lindemann Journal By George Lindemann
The art dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn at her townhouse on the Upper East Side.
By GUY TREBAY
Published: November 29, 2013
As the art mob descends on South Florida this week for the 12th edition of the cross-platform marketing frenzy that is Art Basel Miami Beach — private jets disgorging art sharks and their adviser remoras — one slight and fashionable figure will stand out.
A thin and dark-haired woman with a knife-slash smile, Rooney Mara bangs and a collection of jersey weeds from Saint Laurent and Rick Owens, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn is, at 46, no one’s idea of a late bloomer
For well over a decade, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn has been a stealth force in the art world, the “art brat” daughter of a respected dealer who, after her college studies, went on to become an independent curator; a private dealer and adviser; a judge in the Bravo reality series “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist”; a widely photographed socialite with a prominent banker husband; a prodigious Democratic fund-raiser; and a proprietor of three increasingly influential galleries with clients from both inside the circles of usual art-world suspects as well as powerful and unexpected outliers like the hip-hop mogul Jay Z.
It is at her Salon 94, Salon 94 Freemans and Salon 94 Bowery that Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn came into her own, showcasing a signature knack for discovering young and emerging artists, for kick-starting the reputation of those in midcareer, and for engineering unlikely aesthetic mash-ups combining the disparate worlds of fashion, sports, entertainment and art.
Consider that when, during the 2011 Art Basel Miami Beach, Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees opened his North Bay Road mansion to a select group of Art Basel attendees, the witty batting-cage installation by the New York-based sculptor and painter Nate Lowman was Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s inspiration, generated out of a visit the ballplayer made to her gallery.
“I first came to Jeanne’s uptown space to view several monochrome Richard Prince ‘Joke’ paintings,” Mr. Rodriguez wrote in an email. “Our real conversation happened upstairs looking at a Nate Lowman ‘Smile’ painting.”
Having introduced the Yankee to the artist, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn suggested they collaborate. Thus, Mr. Lowman “tricked out my batting cage” with an array of his obsessive smiley-face paintings, Mr. Rodriguez said.
“The Smiles became a stadium audience around the room,” he added. “We joked about me hitting a baseball through one of his bullet-hole paintings hung high on the net.”
When Jay Z appeared at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea last summer to film a video for the single “Picasso Baby” with a cast of celebrated art-world conscripts, it was Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn who subtly and with little fanfare acted as a guiding force.
There she was, on a muggy July afternoon, discreetly stage-managing as the rapper mesmerized a crowd including the artists Lawrence Weiner, Kehinde Wiley and Mickalene Thomas, and the philanthropist Agnes Gund. Gliding through the white cube gallery in a one-shouldered Lanvin jumpsuit and with her signature cluster of stone talismans strung from her neck, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn supervised the proceedings, darting from improvised green room to curb, where she greeted the performance artist Marina Abramovic as she descended from a chauffeured S.U.V., a nutty lunar priestess in a self-induced trance.
“The interesting thing about Jeanne is how involved she is in the ‘becoming’ of an artist’s creations,” the artist Terry Adkins recently said.
Recruited by Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn and added to her roster after a 10-year absence from the art scene, Mr. Adkins found himself emerging from semi-obscurity as a newly minted breakaway star. For the October Frieze Art Fair in London, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn installed a cut-down version of Mr. Adkins’s totemic “Muffled Drums,” a stacked drum sculpture paying symbolic homage to the black writer and intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois.
The piece, quickly snapped up by the Tate Modern, represented an element of political engagement that is Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s signature. “I was really attracted to her in the first place because she had black artists and women, and never made a big deal out of it,” said Marilyn Minter, one of the gallery’s marquee names. In fact, her list of artists was never preferential of race or sex, yet the range of her interests and connections goes well beyond the confines of an often insular gallery scene.
“How many dealers,” Mr. Adkins asked, “would even think to collaborate with Jay Z on a video?” How many, for that matter, could hope to elicit his consent?
On a recent chill evening, the crowd for an opening of a jewelry exhibition by the sculptor Alexander Calder at Salon 94 was indicative of the atmosphere Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn specializes in creating, one bearing little resemblance to the typical art-world assembly.
Teetering about the room in the townhouse that serves as both gallery and residence for Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s family, Michele Lamy — wife and muse of Mr. Owens, the designer — wore vertiginous heelless platform shoes and a gold grille on her teeth. Gareth Pugh, the British designer, mugged for a camera in a Calder tiara, closely watched by a security guard in white cotton gloves.
Bearded and wearing a thigh-high miniskirt, the gender-torquing party promoter Andre J. took snapshots as Fran Lebowitz, in a studied Robert Benchley pose, held up a wall. Wandering through it all was Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s daughter Coco, one of her three children with Nicolas Rohatyn, a financier whose father is the eminent banker Felix Rohatyn, best known perhaps for his brinksman role in staving off New York City’s bankruptcy in the 1970s.
“You go into Jeanne’s house, and you see this phenomenal taste and incredible mix,” said Lisa Perry, the fashion designer and art collector, noting how offhandedly the valuable Calder jewelry was displayed — in a 1952 Lattes bookcase by the Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino (whose estate Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn represents); atop a Hella Jongerius Frog table; and on a charred-looking bronze sculpture by the artist Huma Bhabha. “It’s all kind of seamless,” she said.
Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn (her first name is pronounced “genie”) moved quietly about the space dressed in black leather trousers and with her hair slicked back. “This is all normal,” she said. Yet normal people seldom inhabit double-wide townhouses chock-full of costly contemporary art, including a Calder stabile and David Hammons’s backboard chandelier Untitled, a version of which sold at the recent auctions for $8 million. “The idea is to elevate the way you live your domestic life,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn coolly remarked.
Not all of her projects have been high-minded; a stint on a cable reality show struck some in the industry as a curious career move for a woman who struggled to shake off an early reputation as a Vogue “It” girl, a fashion favorite often spotted in designers’ front rows. “I’m glad I took the risk and did something unknown to me,” she said of “Work of Art,” in which she appeared alongside China Chow, the gallery owner Bill Powers and Jerry Saltz, the art critic of New York magazine. “You can’t be too predictable,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn explained in a text message. “It shook up my image.” It also “made me fix my posture,” she said.
“What is fascinating about Jeanne is the sheer force of her personality,” a New York museum official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid the appearance of favoritism. “She loves art, she loves artists and she loves objects. You look across the roster of emerging to midcareer to well-known artists she shows, and you can see there’s something there that requires a passionate, individual approach.”
For Roselee Goldberg, an art historian and the founder of Performa, the performance art foundation whose board Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn leads, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn “has an ease” in navigating the art world because it is her native terrain. A daughter of a prominent art dealer, Ronald Greenberg, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn — who studied art history at Vassar and New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and was raised in a vast Gothic Revival pile in suburban St. Louis — comes by her easy conversancy with art-world machinations and folkways naturally.
“She is comfortable across the entire spectrum, from established artists to the youngest and most emerging,” Ms. Goldberg added of the dealer’s catholicity of taste. Ms. Goldberg pointed out that at Salon 94, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn has exhibited artists, sculptors and designers as varied as Wangechi Mutu, Lorna Simpson, Mr. Lowman and also Mr. Owens, whose massive, neo-brutalist furniture she once showed in tandem with sprightly organic vessels by Betty Woodman, a beloved octogenarian ceramist.
“The thing with Jeanne is she’s not coming from a place of cold calculation,” Ms. Goldberg added, and surely few other dealers would be as willing to risk reviving the reputation of an artist like Jimmy DeSana, a gifted and all-but-forgotten photographic explorer of dark sexual impulses and an early AIDS fatality.
It was most likely her passionate and unorthodox approach that made her attractive to an equally passionate group of novice collectors, said Lyor Cohen, a music industry executive who brokered Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s introduction to Jay Z.
“Her aesthetic and taste is impeccable,” Mr. Cohen said by telephone. “She is on the front end of a lot of things.”
Unlike many who travel the art fair circuit with billionaire clients and a shopping list of fashionable requisites in hand, he suggested, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn builds collections with an intuitive eye. “If you wanted that art adviser playbook, she wouldn’t have contorted her body for that playbook,” he said.
Although requests for comment made through representatives for Jay Z went unanswered, those familiar with his collection note that, in a surprisingly short time, he has amassed a grouping notable for breadth and discernment, one that includes works by, among many others, Ms. Minter, Gary Simmons, Mr. Hammons and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
“Jeanne’s as courageous as he is, and that’s what he wants,” Mr. Cohen said, referring to Jay Z. “He wants the best of her.”
Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn, for her part, invokes omertà when discussion turns to her clients. “But, yes,” she said curtly, “art does sometimes need a lot of help.”
For Ms. Minter, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn’s editorial eye and her ability to reconfigure careers was in some ways life-changing. “I’d been somebody who was always slightly marginalized,” the artist told a recent visitor to her Garment Center studio. “When Jeanne first came to me, after I was in the Whitney Biennial, she said, ‘You’ve had such an out-of-the-box kind of career, I want to represent you.’ ”
Ms. Minter had no gallery at the time and sold few pictures; these days, there is a waiting list for her paintings, whose prices range from $45,000 to $500,000. “Now Jerry Seinfeld owns photos of my mother, if you can believe that,” Ms. Minter said. “That’s Jeanne!”
At Art Basel Miami Beach, 258 galleries from 31 countries will set up shop, and 50,000 visitors are expected to flood the halls of the city’s convention center. For her own white-walled space, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn is taking a chance by displaying only Ms. Minter’s new paintings and a motorcycle by the designer Sebastian Errazuriz customized and with a topiary bird affixed to the handlebars. “Objects have their own integrity and energy, which is something people who live among objects understand,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn said. “They speak to each other, creating a dialogue, which is what personally gets my heart beating.”
One afternoon last week, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn wandered about Ms. Minter’s studio checking the progress of her Miami pictures, as several of the artist’s nine assistants applied final touches to paintings that were not yet dry.
Musing about whether to bring along examples of the painter’s older work, Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn asked, “Do you have the singer in the studio?”
Ms. Minter, who was wearing motorcycle boots, black tights and a Kelly green T-shirt with the legend “Draw Me,” called out to an assistant, “Do we have that painting here, or is it in storage?”
“The singer,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn said.
As Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn and Ms. Minter hunched over a desktop computer, scanning images from an online inventory, a visitor suddenly recalled an observation Ms. Perry, the designer, had made about Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn. “I think her connection to Jay Z and to me and to the people she advises works because she opens our eyes to stuff we would not have even known about before,” Ms. Perry said. “We love Jeanne for that reason: She’s going to open our eyes.”
Just then, a blurred image popped onto the screen depicting a woman whose mouth was widened as if in song. The image, Ms. Minter noted, came from an early series titled “Hard Core Porn.” On close inspection, it became clear the woman was no singer and the object she gripped so tightly in her hand was no microphone.
“Oh,” Ms. Greenberg Rohatyn said, grinning wryly. “Let’s not take that.”
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