WHEN Murray Moss started taking medication for Parkinson’s disease two years ago, his doctor told him that high-risk behavior could be a side effect and that he might want to start gambling.
He told his doctor he didn’t gamble. But soon enough he found himself bidding against other compulsive collectors on eBay for quirky vintage American office chairs.
“This one looks like a Prouvé,” he said the other day, about a diminutive brown chair at Moss Bureau, his new office and showroom in the garment district, where 17 various and quirky chairs line tables and compete for attention. “I do the same thing with glasses. I buy brilliant water glasses.”
Those line a wall of his Midtown apartment, where he constantly rearranges things with the urgency of a pushy shopkeeper looking to display his wares. “I just can’t stop myself,” he said. “I miss the store so much.”
The store: Anyone who fetishizes design knows it
Moss in SoHo was a mecca from 1994 until last winter for lovers of “narrative” products that were as provocative and expensive as they were functional. Mr. Moss and Franklin Getchell, his partner in business and in life for 40 years, closed it for financial and emotional reasons, and quickly opened their “bureau,” a floor-through office on West 36th Street, where they do as much curating and consulting as selling.
“I hate retail and always wanted to put up a sign in SoHo telling people not to come in,” said Mr. Moss, 63, as he passed a vitrine displaying rings made from doll eyes and a brightly painted door hanging midair in his 10th floor loft-like emporium. “One customer didn’t see why I’d sell a glass that broke if you dropped it. The trouble with owning a store is that too many people have opinions.”
They are bound to have plenty more at an Oct. 16 auction he has spent the last seven months curating for Phillips de Pury & Company. Titled “Moss, the Auction: Dialogues Between Art and Design,” the show, which opens this week at Park Avenue, pairs objects from the personal collection of Mr. Moss and Mr. Getchell with art. Designers include many shown at his store, including Maarten Baas, Hella Jongerius, Marcel Wanders and Giò Ponti. Artists include Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson, Alberto Giacometti and George Condo, among others. Mr. Moss wants to educate the public.
Why shouldn’t a table be admired for both its sculptural and functional values?
“I don’t see things as commodities, I see them as ideas,” he said with an idealism that seemed a cross between that of Frank Gehry and Willy Wonka, and whose green eyes spark. “When I look at design, it isn’t about functionality. It’s the narrative that interests me.”
His own narrative goes like this: Born to Russian immigrants in Chicago (his father was a successful engineer) who wanted him to have a cultured life, he had a piano teacher who came to his home and always placed a little bust of Mozart on the piano. “It was ceremonial and carried such value that it was an inspiration,” he said. So was the chance his parents gave him to decorate his room, which he did with objects from the gift shop of a Chinese restaurant.
After getting a B.F.A. in theater from New York University in 1971, he threw himself into acting in experimental productions, and became known for playing mad men and wearing straitjackets. “I would do anything onstage, and go so far, I’d pass out,” he said, “which was interesting because I was in a serious relationship with a respected psychiatrist at the time.”
When he came into some family money, he started to buy objects. Then a friend introduced him to Ronaldus Shamask, whose architecturally innovative drawings of clothes inspired Mr. Moss to help him start a curious retail line that Mr. Moss owned from 1978 to 1990. But while he was in Italy overseeing the manufacturing of clothes, he started to notice cool modern objects like lamps and vases integrated into daily life, often in historic buildings.
“It’s an object-oriented culture over there and it was very inspiring,” he said.
He shed fashion, opened his shop when SoHo was more about art than design, and the rest is history, including his recent shuttering because of economics (people treated the shop as if it were a museum, he griped) and the fact that many of the designers he championed went on to compete with him by opening stores nearby. But for a charmingly childlike man so good at reinvention (who also seemed sanguine about his illness and called it “no big deal”), lamenting the past isn’t an option.
Among his things, he is nimble and sprightly. Zipping around the bureau, he wound up a bronze alligator toy by Cathy McClure, placed it on an Alberto Meda table, watched it crawl and laughed at its $6,500 price with maniacal glee. Then he gloated about the six-foot-high metal carousel ($175,000) by the same artist, which occupies one end of the office and rattled like skeleton bones when spinning in a strobe light.
And when he sat down to look at photographs of objects in the upcoming auction, he couldn’t contain his pride, even as his hand shook a little when manipulating his iPad.
On it, 45 e-mails were unanswered. He didn’t care and said so.
“I don’t know how to use this thing,” he said. “But I love changing the screen saver.”
On it was a perfectly arranged tableau of his beloved objects. Of course.
-By BOB MORRIS
