HIDDEN IN PLAIN VIEW THE WILLIAM LOUIS-DREYFUS FOUNDATION

…Mt. Kisco’s

Major Museum!

‘The Crowd’ Raymond Mason (1922-2010) is best known for his polychrome reliefs and monumental sculptures that incorporate landscapes, figures and crowds to convey a wide range of human emotion and experience within individual works. Mason’s work is represented in prestigious public and private collections, including at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

William Louis-Dreyfus was born in France in 1932 and moved to America at the age of eight. He was the scion of the family that founded the Louis Dreyfus Group in 1851 when his great-grandfather Léopold Louis-Dreyfus delivered grain from Alsace in France to the markets in Basel, Switzerland. After attending Duke University and Duke Law School, he practiced law with the white-shoe firm of Dewey Ballantine in Manhattan before joining the family business. As Chief Executive Officer of the diversified Louis Dreyfus Group for 35 years, William built the company into one of the world’s leading commodity merchants with headquarters in New York and Paris.

William was a writer, and maybe more specifically a poet. He taught poetry at schools in Harlem and for many years was President of the Poetry Society of America. Letters Written and Not Sent, a book of his poems, was published in 2019.

.…And he was a voracious art collector!

Until his death at the age of 84 in 2016, William lived in Mt. Kisco, on the spectacular property he acquired in 1972 on Croton Lake Road.

The property has since been renovated and is now owned by Dominique Bluhdorn, and was featured in the 2023 Homes Issue of Bedford & New Canaan Magazineavailable online.

William had three daughters - one of whom is Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Seinfeld and Veep fame. Before his death William allocated the artwork his daughters wanted to his estate, another part of his collection that included a lot of his most valuable and most saleable pieces, including works by Giacometti and Kandinsky, to a trust meant to transfer wealth to his heirs and beneficiaries, and then the remainder of his vast art collection to The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation.

…With a most interesting twist…being that, while the Foundation’s collection was to be housed and displayed in the industrial building on the corner of Kisco Avenue and Hubbels Drive in Mt. Kisco, the Foundation’s ultimate mission and purpose was to eventually sell the entire collection…with all proceeds going to one of William’s favorite charities, Harlem Children’s Zone.

Jeffrey Gilman, who was a banker before joining Louis Dreyfus and becoming William’s right-hand man, now runs both the Family Trust and the Foundation. “William purchased his country home in Mt. Kisco in 1972 and was in love with the area,” Gilman recounts. “He retired as Chairman of the Louis Dreyfus Group in 2006, and bought this building in 2009 in order to centralize the various deposits of art he had displayed, and stored, all over the United States and in Europe.”

“William was larger than life. Truly a renaissance man. He had boundless energy and there was no boundary to his intellectual curiosity or his zest for life,” Gilman observes.

“I worked closely and traveled with him for over 20 years before he retired – when he was still working he would put in a full day and spend nights involved, somehow, in the visual arts. He sponsored a team that played in the Harlem Little League and even umped some games - dressed in white trousers and a blue jacket - and seemed to take great pleasure in doing it.

He liked baseball, and was a Mets fan…because ‘they’re the good guys’. He had a keen sense of justice and civil rights, and used his philanthropy in support of just causes. In 2012, for instance, he took out a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for all millionaires to join the fight against voter suppression. …And the way he set up The William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation to benefit Harlem Children’s Zone is testimony to his hallmark commitment to education and scholarship being the key to equality and ending generational poverty. As Julia Louis-Dreyfus has said, ‘My father was never shy about what he believed in and more than anything he believed in art and justice. That he has found this way to marry those two beliefs is a sweet miracle for him’.”

“The Foundation is open to the public but by appointment only,” Gilman continues. “We encourage anyone interested in seeing the collection to check our website at WLDFoundation.org and schedule a visit. We are eager to share the collection with a wider audience and welcome schools and community groups. We’re especially pleased to host Open Houses often attended by many of the artists in the collection. William donated over 4,000 works to the Foundation, and I’d estimate we’ve thus far sold less than 20 percent of the original grant. While we remain true to the mission of ultimately selling all the works, we are mindful that the carefully managed and orderly sale and distribution of them will yield higher valuesto the benefit of each involved artist or artist’s estate and Harlem Children’s Zone.”

Mary Anne Costello, a long-time executive with the Louis Dreyfus Group and friend of William’s, is Co-Curator of the Foundation’s collection and the resident reference on all things William.

“Trying his own hand at being an artist, William took just one class, with Tara Geer, and had the clearcut feeling that he didn’t have the manual dexterity to be a great painter. But, as a collector, William had a dexterity which came to be known as his ‘generosity of eye’. He was considered to be eclectic, if not contrarian. He was fascinated with how artists made their artwork, and would always ask rhetorically ‘How do they do it?’. He most loved discussing technique when he met with an artist,” Costello recalls.

Costello continues, “One artist who William particularly loved discussing technique with is Stanley Lewis, an American-born painter who got his bachelor’s degree at Wesleyan and a Masters of Fine Arts from Yale, who’s now about 84, and still going strong in Leeds, Massachusetts, where he lives and works. Though classically trained, Lewis utilizes a novel technique - while always painting ‘plein air’ - of ripping and repositioning and relayering the pieces of paper and fabric he’s painting on with a heavy application of paint to give his scene the depth and character he’s witnessing.”

William Louis-Dreyfus wrote about Stanley Lewis:

“Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of a good painting is that it makes you wonder and examine how it got that way. Stanley is very much in that line of work. Discussion with him, whatever the subject, is always inquiring into that question. He doesn’t often examine the excellence of his own work except sometimes to describe the mechanics of his cutting and joining, after which a lawn chair or a white coffee mug somewhat suddenly appears.”

“While William started-out collecting some of the better known modern and contemporary artists, including Kandinsky, Giacometti, Dubu et, and Oldenburg among others, by the time he retired he’d become totally engrossed in finding less-well-known artists.

His single criteria was that he personally found the art interesting. He met with every single artist, almost always visited the artist’s studio, and was usually interested in purchasing as many pieces as the artists would sell him! He selected every piece himself, and he never worked with outside advisors or agents,” Costello details.

“Judith Carlin is a good example of an extremely talented artist - who just happens to live in Westchester,who captured William’s curiosity,” Costello says. “William saw a large mask of a donkey, made of papier-mâché, used by the character Nick Bottom in a summer production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and inquired about the artist.”

AT A RECENT OPEN HOUSE, A

OF

“He wrote me a letter asking if he could come to my studio to see anything else that I’d done,” Judith recalls. “I’d been a painter most of my life, but I’d started experimenting with papier-mâché. I had a few of my characters, done in papier-mâché, all sitting around in my studio like a group of odd strangers put together in a public place. When William came to my studio, he acquired the few characters I had…and encouraged me to make more. …I felt honored to be recognized by him. I felt like I had a patron…and a purpose.” And, over the years following, William visited with Judith about once a year and acquired several more of her works. “I still have a few of my characters hanging out at my studio,” Judith smiles. “They remind me of William. He made me feel like a better me…I think he had that effect on a lot of people. I’m really proud to have my works exhibited at the Foundation …and almost hope, oddly, that my works never sell.”

‘HOTEL DES ROCHES NOIRES’ JEAN-BAPTISTE SÉCHERET. CAPTURING THE LIGHT, TIME OF DAY AND WEATHER IN TROUVILLE, FRANCE, SÉCHERET RECALLS PAINTINGS BY CLAUDE MONET. THIS WORK IS ON LOAN FROM THE FOUNDATION TO THE MUSÉE MARMOTTAN-MONET IN PARIS FOR A SPECIAL EXHIBITION FROM OCTOBER 2025 TO MARCH 2026.

Christina Kee, a graduate of the New York Studio School who worked as Graham Nickson’s Studio Assistant before joining the Foundation in 2014, is Co-Curator at the Foundation, and an expert on the collection, and modern art generally.

Of course I’m partial to our collection of Graham Nickson,” Kee admits.

“He was widely recognized during his lifetime as a truly original figurative painter and master of capturing light and color. But I’ve always found his images to be… simply beautiful. They’re as sensual as they are surreal. His use of color, depicting sunrises and sunsets and human figures in geometric poses, is iconic. We’ve sold a few, but still have more than 50 Nickson watercolors and paintings, and always have several of them out on display.”

Graham Nickson, who moved from the U.K. to New York in 1976, and was the longstanding Dean of the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, died in January 2025. His works are exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, among numerous other prestigious museums and collections.

Elizabeth Marwell, whose family has deep connections in the community, is the Foundation’s Associate Tour Coordinator and is a heartfelt and enthusiastic promoter of the collection.

“What might be the most unique and intriguing aspect of William’s collecting was his fascination with what is now put under the broad category of ‘self-taught’ or ‘untrained’ art,” Marwell explains. “William delved in with an unabashedly singleminded passion to collect artists whose pure talent and authenticity he treasured, from those connected to the tradition of Art Brut in Europe to now prominent figures of American art like Bill Traylor, Thornton Dial and Nellie Mae Rowe.