Stuart Pivar: Collector
Shopping With Andy Warhol
Stuart Pivar is best known for shopping with Andy Warhol, but he has also had a richly variegated career. He was born in Brooklyn in 1930, his father was a partner in the Frankenthaler ribbon company – as was the great Ab Ex, Helen Frankenthaler – and his mother collected antiques. “So, I was exposed at an early age,” he says. He studied chemistry at college and put this to use as a young adult, inventing a method of molding plastics into very large shapes. He launched Chemtainer, a company to make such containers, which soon made him rich, but he was already on another road, somewhat in his mother’s footsteps.
Paris Flea Market
“Wherever I was I would go to antique shops,” Pivar says. “In Paris the immense flea market opened my eyes to the possibilities. The French were still reeling from the war and there was an immense outpouring of French furniture and decorative objects which Americans imported. In those days University Place was an enormous wholesale market where containers were unloaded in the street.”
Feeding the Pigeons
By the late 60s and early 70s, Pivar was what he describes as an “absentee director” of his company and spent most of his time buying pictures. It was Todd Brassner, a collector friend, who took him to the Factory to meet Warhol. “The three of us went for a walk,” Pivar says, “And the first thing Andy says to me is ‘Stuart, would you like to direct a film I want to make about Jackson Pollock?’” He told Warhol he had never directed a film. “Oh, that’s great!” Warhol said, and he gave him the book upon which it was to be based. Pivar called the next day, but Warhol said he had been refused permission. “And that was the end of my career as a film director,” he says. It was though, just the beginning of their Sunday shopping jaunts. “The first thing we would do when I would pick him up, we would drive one block to his church, which was right around the corner,” Pivar says. “He would sit quietly in the back pew for fully fifteen minutes.” Pivar might sit in another pew but usually in his car. “He would come out, and he would feed the pigeons.” Pivar describes this as a spiritual pursuit. “But I’m saying that while you are feeding the pigeons people are buying all the good stuff in the flea market. Let’s go!” They might also shop two or three times during a week, Warhol carrying copies of Interview, which he would hand out in galleries or on the street.
Warhol’s Lover: Jed Johnson
What were Pivar’s impressions of Andy Warhol, Shopper? “He was furnishing his house on 67th Street to begin with.” Warhol’s partner, Jed Johnson, was a decorator. “And Jed organized his
amazing house on 67th Street into period rooms. Which at the time was a unique and unheard-of thing.” Warhol’s buying was as compulsive as his own, but his hunger had other origins.
“Andy would buy anything and everything,” he says. “His main motive though, and the reason he picked the flea market, was that he was perpetually terrified of running out of subjects to paint. And in the flea market in a single day, you would see a thousand different things that created inspiration for him. That was his constant preoccupation. What am I going to paint next? He was always looking, as he put it, for categories. He would say, ‘Another category!’” The shopping brought Pivar close to Warhol, who painted his portrait. This was shot in the house of Suzie Frankfurt, the modish interior decorator, who was close to both. “She scrupulously scurried around to Scalamandre to find the proper fabric for the background,” Pivar says.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
It also sometimes brought Pivar close to disturbances in Warhol World. As when Warhol called him one morning to express concern about Jean-Michel Basquiat. He says, “Stewart, come quickly, you’ve got to go to Jean-Michel. He’s very sad, I’m afraid he’s going to kill himself, he’s so miserable.” Pivar picked up Warhol and Paige Powell, associate publisher of Interview, and they arrived at Jean-Michel Basquiat’s studio on Grand. And, yes, he was sobbing. What’s the matter? A dealer was going to sue him, Basquiat said. “He has my paintings in the show and he spent $100,000 on the party and he didn’t sell one painting. And he’s going to sue me and he’s not giving me my paintings back. And what am I going to do? I have no money.”
100 Basquiat’s for $2,000
Pivar talked him down off the existential ledge, saying the lawsuit was an empty threat and that he’d help him get his art back. “At that point Andy says he needs some money; he needs a couple of thousand dollars. Do you see those wrapped-up paintings back there?” Pivar remembered. “’There must be a hundred paintings there. He’ll sell you all those paintings for, say, $2,000. You can get a pick-up truck in the morning. Look how beautiful they are! Go take a look.’ So, I go and take a look. And I say, ‘Andy, these paintings to me are not exactly beautiful.’ That was before he was known. Then Paige comes along, and says, ‘Oh, Stuart, don’t give him two thousand bucks. He’s only going to spend it on drugs.’ And so, I did not buy a hundred Jean-Michel Basquiat pictures for two thousand bucks, but I did sort of save him from misery.”
Warhol’s Death
Not long after this Warhol telephoned again. “He called me up and said, ‘Stuart, I need to go to hospital now,’” Pivar says. “So, my driver and I went and took him to hospital. The next morning at 5 or 6 o’clock I called Page and said, ‘I haven’t heard about Andy.’” She told him Warhol was dead. “That plunged me into a year of depression. He was a very close pal of mine.”
Van Gogh & Rembrandt: Fakes or Real?
Stuart Pivar now, however, owns several artworks that he is convinced are Basquiats, indeed has a sizeable such oil painting spread out on his living-room floor. He also recently acquired a painting he believes to be a Van Gogh, a soberly colored overhead view of a railway station, which is so far from being an iconic Van Gogh that one might think it an unlikely stretch for a faker. But it hasn’t convinced the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. His most recent such find has been what he is sure is the original of Rembrandt’s Self Portrait at 63 and that the version in London’s National Gallery is a copy.
Problems of proof, however, are built into the distinctive way that Pivar has built the collection that crowds his duplex on New York’s East Side. Just how did he accumulate the canvas he is sure is a Basquiat on the floor, for instance? Could he give me a clue?
“In the same way that I got all this other stuff,” Pivar said. “The organized art world,” he says, “Consists of collectors and dealers, auction houses, conservators and so on. But there is at the same time another invisible art world which consists of the exchange of the enormous amount of art which is rejected when it’s brought to an auction house. What do they do with it? When something is rejected for sale, it’s done for, for at least a generation. So maybe twenty, thirty years later somebody brings it to an auction house… they take a look at it. It may get put away again. Most likely it will be sacrificed at a very low price by some local dealer or some cowboy auction house or a flea market. Where the seller has no idea what the art is but just wants to get rid of it”.
Details of provenance are a rarity though. “The art is sold and bought by certain dealers and collectors who particularly buy those kinds of things. And conduct auctions which include them. There are certain dealers who have thousands and thousands of works of art. Which have been rejected one way or another. I have heard of three or four of them, but there are more, because the sheer amount of this art resembles the plastic in the oceans because it accumulates in certain concentrated places. So, there are art collectors who look beyond Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Because that’s not where you find buys. The amount of art that just floats around in this outside market is immense. It is another culture. A counterculture.”
The American MicroCar
Pivar sold Chemtainer a couple of years ago. “With the proceeds I bought the hundreds of pictures you see around,” he said. He is also involved with another adventure in tech: The American MicroCar Company. “It’s twenty years old,” he says. “I started the company at the time of the second Gulf War crisis. We made three or four hundred of these things and closed it down when it was over. Now I’m just repeating it. So here am I ready to make zillions of these things. And make a couple of billion dollars for myself so that I can buy more pictures. And fill in the spaces incidentally of things I have had to sell to keep things going, which is really annoying. I have not gone to any outside capital. So, I turned plastics into canvas. Now I’m turning canvas into electric cars.” therealanthonyhadenguest.com
