What Happens to Artists’ Studios After They Die?
by M.H. Miller
via New York Times
“MOVE, MOVE, MOVE, as an end in itself, an appetite at any price,” Henry James wrote of Lower Manhattan, his birthplace, after returning to it for the first time in 20 years and finding it almost unrecognizable. This was in 1904. The James family home on West 14th Street now has a Foot Locker on the ground floor.
New York has never been a place known for clinging to its past. And yet an unlikely trend has emerged across the city: Artists’ studios are being meticulously preserved — even when the artist who worked in the space has been dead for many years. One, on a block where a Japanese barbecue chain restaurant has outlasted The Village Voice in the paper’s former office building, is the studio of Tom Wesselmann, an American painter who died in 2004 at the age of 73. Wesselmann, a contemporary of Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, was an early pioneer of incorporating the symbolism of consumer culture — a bottle of Wish-Bone Italian dressing, cans of Café Bustelo — into art, and re-envisioned the female nude with a detached minimalism that spoke to a generation reared on TV dinners and billboard advertising. The Cooper Square studio that he moved into in 1995 was maintained after his death by his widow, Claire Wesselmann. The same small staff that worked there when the artist was alive keeps more or less the same hours as before. “I think it was the most natural thing in order to be able to continue the career,” Jeffrey Sturges, a former assistant who was working for the studio when Wesselmann died, told me during a visit. “We stayed, and Claire wanted us to stay. Like, yes, Tom is gone, but we have work to do.”
Wesselmann’s obituary in The Times labeled him “an extremely adept follower of Pop Art” but, in the 21 years since his death, the value of his work has increased, and his reputation as an important postwar painter has solidified. His studio, inside a building once owned by a liquor distributor, appears as if he just ran out to grab lunch. Visiting it, one feels a palpable closeness to the artist: His name is on the intercom. A series of shelves showcase cardboard maquettes he made during the development of his paintings. Works from various stages of his career hang on the walls. Sturges, who’s now the director of exhibitions for the artist’s estate, pointed out a section of the floor by Wesselmann’s main painting wall that’s covered in drops of color and showed me the blue plastic gloves the artist wore while working (helpfully labeled “TW right” and “TW left”). A wooden box that holds cans with different-size brushes released a faint smell of turpentine when opened. “It’s very alive for us,” Sturges said of the studio.
There’s a long tradition in Europe of keeping the studios of major artists in stasis, from Auguste Rodin’s house outside Paris to the Soviet-era tower-block apartment in Warsaw that belonged to Edward Krasiński, a midcentury avant-garde painter and designer known for his minimalist works featuring blue tape. In 1998, Francis Bacon’s London studio was moved to Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery, where it was reconstructed over a period of three years, down to the last scrap of paper. The difference is that in Europe these spaces are often accessible landmarks. The Wesselmann studio, like many others in New York that have been kept intact, isn’t open to the public. But while it may seem to defy the logic of American urban expansion, there’s an incentive to sit on this kind of real estate even after it has outlived its original use: Maintaining a living archive grounds the artist in the present, making the work feel more vital to those scholars and collectors lucky enough to see it.
There are more examples of these preserved studios than you’d imagine. Along with Wesselmann’s, there’s the cluttered Chelsea townhouse of the painter and sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who died in 2010; the studio in a former Queens carriage house of the painter Jack Whitten, who died in 2018 and just had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art; and the shared home of the conceptual artist Geoffrey Hendricks and the painter Brian Buczak in Hudson Square. The conservation of such spaces is often a labor of love by an artist’s family or friends. Sometimes, as with the Upper West Side apartment and studio of the modernist painter Milton Avery, a space survives intact almost by accident. After Avery’s death in 1965, his wife, Sally Michel Avery, a painter and illustrator who was a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine in the 1940s and ’50s, continued to work for decades on the same table he’d used in the living room. When she died at 100 in 2003, the apartment passed to their daughter, the painter March Avery, who is now 92 and still lives there. Neither she nor her mother ever embarked on any serious renovations. The apartment is full of the work of March’s parents, and much of the furniture is the same as when they were alive. The only aspects of the space that change frequently are the Milton Avery paintings hanging on the walls, which are rotated often. (There will be an Avery exhibition at New York’s Karma gallery in November.) Stepping into the home is like entering a time portal that tells the story not only of a brilliant family legacy but also of a bygone era in Manhattan, one in which it was easier for artists to live and work where they pleased. An intercom system from the 1930s is practically a museum piece itself. Sean Cavanaugh, 56, March’s son, described this not so much as an act of preservation as a kind of pragmatic resignation — the apartment worked for her mother and father, and it works for March, so why fix something that isn’t broken?
