Spectacular Museum Show Of One Young Collector’s Masterworks

BY CHARLES RILEY specialsections@antonmediagroup.com

When the 300 or more VIPs at the preview party saw the new exhibition at the Nassau Museum, including curators and auction house experts and rival collectors, they all had the same reaction: “How did we get this world-class collection?” Leading them around gallery after gallery of masterworks and telling the stories of how he managed to acquire them, the 32-yearold Hong Gyu Shin wowed the crowd and demonstrated why the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the art magazines have named him as one of the top art collectors in the world.

So how did the museum land this show, Eye & Mind: The Shin Collection, which includes major works by Whistler, Toulouse-Lautrec, Balthus, Pollock, de Kooning, Matta, Delacroix, Daumier and too many other historical figures to name here? Shin visited Roslyn for the first time about two years ago with his charming mother, also a connoisseur of art. He enjoyed the exhibitions (we have had about ten really important shows in a row) but I could see him sizing up the place both literally and figuratively. He had just been the featured attraction for a standing-room audience at a Hamptons art fair, where a crowd of collectors and hopeful dealers gathered to see the young phenom who had become the talk of the auction world with some major acquisitions. After that first visit, he loaned paintings to our music exhibition and graciously attended the opening. He confided a dream of establishing his own museum one day. When we met to talk in earnest about the ideas behind the current show, he drew to scale from memory every one of our galleries and already had a layout for many of the major works. During a scouting trip in February, he was focused on planning the entire exhibition and making the final selections from the extraordinarily wide-ranging treasures in his collection, which begin in antiquity (a 3,000-year-old Greek vase of extraordinary beauty) and continue to the present moment. Shin began collecting when he was a 13-year-old in Korea, selecting an ukiyo-e print, a premonition of the exceptionally rare Japanese woodblock masterworks in the current show. After high school in Stony Brook, he studied art conservation at the University of Delaware, and was only in his 20s when he began to make his reputation for important Modernist and Contemporary acquisitions, He is widely considered one of the top figures in that elite group of

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Anton Media Group © 2023 jet-setters who follow the auctions and fairs in Venice, London, Paris, Maastricht, Los Angeles, Miami, Berlin and the other ports of call. Every time I see him, he is jetlagged. The key to understanding the show is his intimate re-creation of a room in his apartment complete with sculptures being unwrapped, stacks of auction catalogues, his fair passes on lanyards, invitations to openings, letters from famous artists and a superb chess set made by Man Ray with which he plays art world leaders such as Richard Tuttle.

The exhibition he curated for the museum (on view through July 9) takes its place in a long and distinguished tradition of museum exhibitions of single-owner collections, including the treasures of Morgan, Barnes, Guggenheim and Mellon. It rewrites the conventional narrative of art history by juxtaposing works by canonic figures such as Whistler and Toulouse-Lautrec with important avant-garde figures such as

Richard Hambleton and John Baldessari as well as outsider artists, including one who was a former slave. It also features a stunning triptych of Japanese woodblock prints alongside master drawings by Boucher, Vuillard, Twombly and Pollock.

The exhibition has reminded many art lovers of the Barnes collection in Philadelphia. Shin himself acknowledges the influence, the way Barnes grouped “high art” and decorative or functional objects. His curatorial aesthetic stresses inclusion and the continuum of art history, an idea that impressed recent visitors from a Sotheby’s masters-level class who are studying Shin’s approach. Along those lines, one of the most provocative statements is the juxtaposition of a drawing by Pollock with a painting by Congo, the chimpanzee.

Visit www.nassaumuseum.org for details.

—Charles Riley is the director of Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn.

Welcome to our latest edition of Gold Coast Living. The team members of Anton Media Group are your neighbors, your friends, your colleagues and the journalists of your lives.

In this edition, Joe Scotchie shares the newest business addition to the North Shore, Orwashers Bakery. Charles A. Riley, the director of Nassau County Museum of Art, shares the wonderful details of the museum’s current exhibit, Eye & Mind: The Shin Collection. Julie Prisco chats with Chef Rob Cervoni, winner of a pizza-making episode of the cooking show, Chopped. And if you follow the game show, Jeopardy! you might notice a trend of recent contestants from Long Island, including a Syosset teacher, Daniel Wohl, who appeared on the show in February. Wohl shares his experience. Looking for new ways to refresh your patio this season? Safavieh offers some gorgeous ideas for a fresh makeover. It is never too early to start thinking about your summer attire and bathing suit line-up. Jamie Banks of Port Washington shares some of this season’s hottest trends in swimwear. Ted Bahr of the Bahr Gallery in Oyster Bay has long prided himself on collecting psychedelic rock posters. He chats with Jennifer Corr about his current exhibit. Christy Hinko brings history to the edition with historian and author Richard Panchyk, who recently spoke at Old Westbury Gardens about Hicks Nurseries and its influence on many Gold Coast estates. Prisco shares the long-overdue honor bestowed on Great Neck’s own Andy Kaufman with the recent Hall of Fame induction.

I hope you enjoy this spring issue of Gold Coast Living as much as we enjoyed creating it for you.

Angela Susan Anton Publisher

“Parsa of the best!”