Salon 94 3 E. 89 Street Highlights

Salon 94 3 East 89th Street Press Highlights

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FROM FAR LEFT: STYLE VARIATION 35, 2020, ACRYLIC PAINT AND GRAPHITE ON DIGITAL INKJET PHOTOGRAPH, ON ARTEX© CANVAS IN CUSTOM FRAME, 96 X 59 3/4 INCHES (243.8 X 151.8 CM); STYLE VARIATION 33, 2020, ACRYLIC PAINT AND GRAPHITE ON DIGITAL INKJET PHOTOGRAPH, ON ARTEX© CANVAS IN CUSTOM FRAME, 96 X 59 3/4 INCHES (243.8 X 151.8 CM), COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK, © DERRICK ADAMS; POLY RAINBOW 60 CHAIRS, 2020, POLYSTYRENE, RUBBER POLYMER, 32 X 13 X 22 INCHES (81 X 33 X 55 CM), COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SALON 94 DESIGN, NEW YORK, © MAX LAMB

MAGICAL THINKING After launching Salon 94 out of her family home, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn hopes to realize grander ambitions in a new Manhattan gallery space.

BY SARAH MEDFORD PHOTOGRAPHY BY VICTORIA HELY-HUTCHINSON

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N THE FALL OF 2018, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn came across an unusual townhouse for sale on New York’s Upper East Side that seemed ready-made for an art gallery— maybe her own. Salon 94, the venture she’d started out of her family’s East 94th Street townhouse in 2003, had seven years later moved its center of operations downtown, and she wasn’t so sure about coming back. She decided to ask her artists. Laurie Simmons showed up outside the limestone entrance of 3 East 89th Street in leather pants and an army coat lined with matted blue fur, ready to tour the unheated building. Along with painter Marilyn Minter, she and Greenberg Rohatyn hiked up the four-story spiral staircase past palatial reception rooms, an oak-paneled library and carved-stone niches awaiting sculpture. Both artists had shown at Salon 94’s white-box gallery on the Bowery for years; as Simmons recalls it, “This was a real fantasy space. I just completely fell in love. And Marilyn was like, ‘No, I don’t think we should move. I like it downtown,’!” Simmons says. “I think it depends how great you think change is. I’m a change junkie.”

Over the past year, New York galleries have struggled and in many instances been forced to shut down, making Greenberg Rohatyn’s pre-pandemic decision to consolidate her exhibition space in a building a few steps off Museum Mile now seem riskier than it did in 2019, when the deal closed. She hasn’t blinked. Instead of furloughing staff and retreating behind Salon 94’s online viewing room, Greenberg Rohatyn has seized on opportunities to sign up several new artists and estates and opened two new divisions (including a

FRESH PAINT Salon 94 founder Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn (right) and partner Alissa Friedman (left) with artist Derrick Adams and paintings from his Style Transformations series in the gallery’s new Manhattan townhouse. Max Lamb’s Poly Rainbow 60 Chairs sit on the 1914 building’s original parquet floors.

new art advisory, Dayan Rohatyn, launching in partnership with dealer Amalia Dayan). “Jeanne is very ambitious, at the level of those death-star, moverand-shaker mega gallerists, good and bad,” says Jerry Saltz, senior art critic of New York magazine. “And yet there’s something very homemade, do-it-yourself about what she does. She always retains her voice.”

In the fall of 2019, while the townhouse was still mired in renovations, Greenberg Rohatyn invited Gaetano Pesce, the design world’s punky elder statesman, then 79, to turn the former ground-floor kitchen into an open studio and production hub for his candycolored resin chairs and objects. This month, to mark the gallery’s official opening, the same room will host a pair of massive ceramic mosaic lions sculpted by the late French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle, their fat paws and magnificent noses an invitation for toddlers to clamber on. “Public sculpture was part of Niki’s practice, and it should be touched,” remarks Greenberg Rohatyn, 53, standing with arms crossed and a faux-leopard coat shrugged over her shoulders as she watches art handlers sweep up hillocks of rubber shavings around the lions. “You should be able to climb on it and fall.”

In the next room, Pesce’s Ballet Table sits on legs shaped like violins and dancers on pointe. The piece will eventually move upstairs to Greenberg Rohatyn’s office, amid some 10,000 square feet of exhibition space, an art library, meeting rooms and quarters for a staff of 25. A year from now, once permits are in place, Greenberg Rohatyn’s friend Duro Olowu, the Londonbased fashion designer, will open a ground-floor shop, and artist Tom Sachs has been invited to design a cafe.

“I think Jeanne’s new gallery is a harbinger of welcome change to the slightly more stuffy Museum Mile notion,” says Sheena Wagstaff, department chairman of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Wagstaff has been tracking an influx of new galleries on the Upper East Side and thinks the area is “changing its essential character.”

With the Guggenheim situated just across 89th Street and a hive of day schools within blocks, Salon 94 is already planning to balance its typically rigorous approach with some broader programming. “We want the gallery to be an institution in the neighborhood,” says Alissa Friedman, one of Greenberg Rohatyn’s two partners (Switzerland-based Fabienne Stephan is the other). In 2022, Friedman is organizing a show of Australian aboriginal art, long delayed for lack of space, that will supplement work by two gallery 87

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UPTOWN FUNK Above: A curling bench

by Thomas Barger in the townhouse’s entryway.

Below: Guardian Lions (2000), by Niki de Saint Phalle, whose estate Salon 94 now represents; the pair of sculptures are listed at $2.5 million.

FROM TOP: JEANNE, 2020, ENAMEL ON METAL, 72 X 48 INCHES (182.9 X 121.9 CM) COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK, © MARILYN MINTER; FROM LEFT: UNTITLED, 2015, PORCELAIN, 35 X 9 1/2 X 10 INCHES (88.9 X 24.1 X 25.4 CM), UNTITLED, 2019, PORCELAIN, GLAZE, PIGMENT, GOLD AND STEEL, 17.72 X 24.41 X 23.82 INCHES (45 X 62 X 60.5 CM), COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK, © TAKURO KUWATA

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HE NEO-RENAISSANCE townhouse at 3 East 89th Street was something of a novelty from its inception. Built in 1914, it was conceived as an L-shaped addition to 1083 Fifth Avenue, the bowfront residence on Central Park that belonged to Archer M. Huntington, stepson of railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington. Archer and his wife, sculptor Anna Hyatt, were childless patrons of the arts, and the wing became their party and exhibition space. Its steel-framed floors and poured-concrete slabs were cutting edge in their day, allowing for rooms that ran the full 40-foot width of the building. But the march to modernity stopped there. The Huntingtons’ architect, Ogden Codman Jr., fetishized French and Italian classicism and had made up for gaps in his professional training with visits to some of the swankiest private palaces in Europe, which he artfully cut and pasted for clients back in the States. “Coddy,” as he was known to friends like Edith Wharton (they wrote an 1897 design treatise, The Decoration of Houses, together), believed in timeless good taste and “suitability,” one of his bywords. After selling the Huntingtons on both, he measured out the parquet de Versailles floors and went to town.

Twenty-five years later, the couple donated both houses to the National Academy of Design and migrated upstate. The arts institution repurposed them as a museum and teaching space until 2016, when they were put on the market. “The wing has this kind of pseudo-dignified character,” says architect Rafael Viñoly, who is handling the gallery conversion. “There are wonderful original places, and some that are a complete piece of crap.” He hasn’t touched the Huntingtons’ former dining room, tiled in checkerboard French and Belgian marbles and lined in the same Caen stone used inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, or the drive-through porte cochere and its brick herringbone floors. But other parts of the interior have been gently improved, he says (only the facade is landmarked). “It’s a mess, but it is a nice mess.”

Viñoly has worked with the Rohatyns since 2001, when he turned a former adoption agency on 94th Street into their family home, with a glass-walled exhibition space extending into the garden. “The

house was full of people,” he recalls. “There were parties. There were shows and parties and people and cooking.” He predicts the new building will offer a similar freedom. “I’m taken with this idea of a destination—you can describe it as an architectural wow.”

Greenberg Rohatyn is a big believer in the experiential wow, which she often instigates in the gallery with face-offs between, say, the primeval-chic antler chairs of fashion designer Rick Owens and the circuslike ceramics of Betty Woodman, or a happening in which artist Nicolas Party prepares a feast for 24 guests, using plates, chairs and a table of his own design.

As an early member of the Frieze London and Frieze New York gallery selection committees, Greenberg Rohatyn advocated for the concept of dealers curating their booth furniture alongside the art. To her, the idea was foundational; she’d grown up in a Tudor revival house just outside St. Louis where her father, the contemporary art dealer Ronald K. Greenberg, had peppered the minimalist interior with works by Judd, Kelly and Warhol, among others.

“I come from the school of thought that art needs a lot of help,” Greenberg Rohatyn says. “And we are responsible as dealers to make it magical, to install it correctly and light it correctly and think about the experience.” Gallery context couldn’t be more critical, she adds. “These are churches, in a sense, temples.”

She makes this declaration while sitting with Friedman at an improvised table in her future thirdfloor office, dressed in black satin Saint Laurent pajamas and a white mask by the artist Stanley Whitney with “Speak truth....to Power” handwritten across its mouth. The two are plotting the opening installation and reliving highlights of a 20-month renovation, during which several of the gallery’s artists were turned loose on the building’s interiors. Max

BELOW: COURTESY OF THE NIKI CHARITABLE ART FOUNDATION, ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY AND SALON 94, NEW YORK. © NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE

artists with significant pieces on loan.

If the building’s pre-renovation $22.3 million price tag was a stretch for Greenberg Rohatyn, she doesn’t let on. She’s dropped an additional $7 million on sprucing it up, which included the restoration of a long-shuttered balcony and the addition of an industrial-size elevator. Her husband, Nicolas Rohatyn, head of a New York investment firm focused on emerging markets, admits the gallery’s opening could have come at a better time, but he takes a long view. “New York has been through worse than what it’s going through now, and worse than what it’s going to go through in the next two, three years,” he says. “I grew up here, so I can promise you that.” (He was an Upper East Side teenager in the mid-’70s when his father, Lazard Frères & Co. managing director Felix Rohatyn, led the effort to save the city from bankruptcy under Governor Hugh Carey.) “It’s a great space, in a great location, in a great borough, in a great city,” Rohatyn says of his wife’s purchase. “Right?”

Lamb designed limestone sconces that riff on the soaring pilasters of the stone room. Thomas Barger’s fluid resin bench commands the entry hall. A prototype pendant light by Philippe Malouin, segmented like Brancusi’s Endless Column, snakes down the length of the spiral stairwell.

“Marilyn Minter always said to me, ‘I just want a white box. I don’t want personality,’!” Greenberg Rohatyn recalls. Minter’s lush, photo-based paintings are mainstays of Salon 94’s schedule. “So Gallery 2, right below us—I thought of that as an extreme, sci-fi version of a white box. It has, like, 15 coats of plaster and very cold light. It is Marilyn’s white box.”

“And ironically, she said she loves the stone room,” Friedman teases, referring to the Huntingtons’ dining salon and its French-pastry décor.

“I wanted to kill her,” Greenberg Rohatyn says.

“But that’s the thing—there is a certain amount of imagination involved here. You want a space where artists can think beyond their own work.”

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HE MET’S Sheena Wagstaff, who has followed Greenberg Rohatyn’s program since its early days, says she’s encountered new artists through the gallery (Japanese ceramicist Takuro Kuwata) and spotted others (Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi) that she collects for the Met but hasn’t seen anywhere else in the city. For her part, Greenberg Rohatyn has been clocking what she considers to be holes in the Met’s contemporary collection and gifting with her husband now and then—including, a few years ago, a gritty 2005 work by Sarah Lucas confronting sexual violence.

Though Salon 94 doesn’t represent Lucas, Greenberg Rohatyn admires her frank engagement with gender politics, a common thread among gallery artists. Laurie Simmons came on board in 2009 and promptly sold out her first show, The Love Doll: Days 1-30, a series of photographs of a life-size Japanese doll designed as a surrogate sex partner and given a peripatetic life in Simmons’s images. Recalling her decision to join the gallery, Simmons says, “I loved the way the program was shaping up because Jeanne had a genuine interest in BIPOC artists. And I thought, I have to do this. I don’t want to be in a gallery where it’s led by white male painters. I’m married to one.”

Derrick Adams, the Brooklyn-based Black artist whose Style Transformations, a series of collage portraits, will open the glacial Gallery 2, moves freely between painting, design, fashion, photography and performance. Last fall, he collaborated with the swimwear label Vilebrequin on some wildly patterned trunks and a bag, exactly the sort of left-field venture he enjoys.

“Most commercial spaces are very, very rigid,” he says of his past gallery adventures. “They let you know what is possible and what is accepted, which is usually what they’re selling.” More interesting, he says, are the belowground issues many dealers avoid discussing with their artists. With Greenberg Rohatyn, “We talk about context, audience and viewership. Who’s out there? And who’s looking at the work? Who’s paying attention?”

Adams had created a performance piece in 2013 at Greenberg Rohatyn’s family townhouse, part of a show

HALL MONITOR From top: Marilyn Minter’s Jeanne (2020), a portrait of Greenberg Rohatyn, in the former dining room, which overlooks the Guggenheim museum; an installation of glazed porcelain works

by Takuro Kuwata.

that may go down in the annals of Rohatyn-hosted gatherings for its eclectic crowd (Fran Lebowitz, Rick Owens, Thelma Golden and Gareth Pugh) as well as the number of white-gloved guards hovering over jewelry by Alexander Calder, the show’s real star.

Adams combined Calder’s iconography with Harlem Renaissance poetry and schoolhouse teaching in a moving historical piece—a classic example of Salon 94’s cross-programming.

Art critic Jerry Saltz says Greenberg Rohatyn and her brainstorms can at times come across as “kooky and independent for their own sake.” She is “a free radical,” he says. “A free radical with style.” But he applauds her vision, which allows her to bypass what he calls “the distorting filter of money”—the gauzy chatter about prices and markets and lifestyles rampant in New York gallery culture—to foster a genuine connection with the work. Critics live for the work, Saltz points out, and he’d like it if the rest of us did too.

And galleries like Salon 94 are “on our side,” he says.

“Even in this very difficult ecosphere of the art world, Jeanne keeps finding ways to succeed. It feels like she always has the artist’s—and the art’s—best interests in mind. Even though some people would put her down as a socialite or somebody with money, to me, she feels like a ‘one of us’ kind of gallery.”

From time to time, it’s felt like a turbulent place to be. In December 2016, Salon 94 hired independent design dealer Paul Johnson to bolster its design program, a component of the gallery’s business since 2010 that became its own division with his arrival. Despite several successful shows and a raft of newly signed artists, Johnson noisily parted ways with Greenberg Rohatyn three years later. “Honestly, their styles couldn’t have been more different,” says Friedman, who affirms that near-constant change has always 89

STRIPPED BARE Clockwise from top left: A piece by Ruby Neri atop Gaetano Pesce’s Ballet Table; work

by César (foreground) and by Lisa Brice; packing boxes for Tom Sachs’s Shop Chair (Pink), 2019. Opposite: The gallerists with Huma Bhabha’s bronze sculpture Receiver (2019).

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“JEANNE’S NEW GALLERY IS A HARBINGER OF WELCOME CHANGE TO A SLIGHTLY MORE STUFFY MUSEUM MILE.” –SHEENA WAGSTAFF

FROM TOP: UNTITLED (EVENING), 2020, CERAMIC WITH GLAZE 22 3/4 X 25 X 15 1/2 INCHES (57.8 X 63.6 X 39.4 CM), COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK, © RUBY NERI; BALLET TABLE, 2020, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SALON 94 DESIGN, NEW YORK, © GAETANO PESCE; SEIN, 1966/2019, BRONZE, 35 3/8 X 76 X 92 7/8 INCHES (89.9 X 193 X 235.9 CM), EDITION OF 8, COURTESY OF FONDATION CÉSAR, ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY AND SALON 94, NEW YORK, © CÉSAR; UNTITLED, 2017–2019, GESSO, FLASHE, WATER CRAYON AND INK ON CANVAS, OVERALL DIMENSIONS: 72 3/8 X 112 X 1 INCHES (183.8 X 284.5 X 2.5 CM), INDIVIDUAL PANEL DIMENSIONS: 72 3/8 X 24 X 1 INCHES (183.8 X 61 X 2.5 CM), COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK, © LISA BRICE. OPPOSITE: RECEIVER, 2019, BRONZE, 98 3/4 X 18 X 25 INCHES (250.8 X 45.7 X 63.5 CM), EDITION OF 4, 2 APS COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND SALON 94, NEW YORK, © HUMA BHABHA

been a part of the gallery’s DNA. “One of the things that’s really fun about working with Jeanne is that it’s never the same. Today, it isn’t anything like it was three years ago, or three years before that. It’s just constant reinvention.”

This fluidity seems hospitable to artists and collectors invested in social revolution. Bob Rennie, a Vancouver-based real estate marketing executive who is president of the Tate Americas Foundation, has worked with Greenberg Rohatyn for over a decade on a public collection that spotlights social injustice and inequality, race and gender. Rennie owns the largest collection of works by Kerry James Marshall in North America and has bought pieces by Salon 94 artists Lyle Ashton Harris, Katy Grannan and Lorna Simpson (Simpson moved on to the Hauser & Wirth gallery in 2017).

“You know, I’m one of those liars who says, ‘I do not have any curators, I do this all by myself.’ And I have a director, a partner and a team. But voices like Jeanne’s are air-traffic control,” says Rennie, who phones the dealer weekly just to see what’s up. Musician and producer Mark Ronson calls Greenberg Rohatyn his “art fairy godmother” and credits her for turning him on to emerging artists. For Jay-Z, Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez, she’s a trusted conduit to one-on-one creative collaborations, like the ex libris bookplate by artist Rob Pruitt she arranged last year for Jay-Z’s private library on Black culture and society.

One of the last rooms in the townhouse to be completed, and Viñoly’s masterwork, is a vast paneled space on the third floor—a former “pastiche,” in his words, and now a futuristic shimmer of diamondpatterned, plum-pudding mahogany studded with tiny metal fittings so that art can be hung anywhere.

This is Greenberg Rohatyn’s office and will be a permeable space, she says, with works by Salon 94 artists and designers on view. Nothing is following her down from 94th Street or up from the Bowery. “Not one piece,” she repeats. “I don’t want to replicate anything I’ve done, actually. And because I work with living artists, they kind of require me to not stay the same.”

She’s ordered up a woven-copper-mesh carpet for the room, about which Viñoly is taking a wait-andsee attitude. “I’m always pushing for what I think is really her essence,” he says. “Every time she wants to become more formal, I say, ‘Well, just don’t forget who you are.’!” •

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THE CANVAS MONTHLY Volume XXVII

THE CANVAS MONTHLY

Volume XXVII

Salon 94’s Hybrid Model is Ready for Its Close-Up

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Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn in The Stone Room at 3 E. 89th Street. Photographed by Laurie Simmons, artwork by Huma Bhabha and Alexander Calder. Courtesy Salon 94, New York.

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ne way or another, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn has always found herself surrounded by art. The daughter of contemporary art dealer Ronald K. Greenberg, her childhood home in St. Louis was filled with works by post-war masters such as Donald Judd and Andy Warhol. In 2003, when she founded her gallery, Salon 94, she chose to operate it out of the East 94th Street townhouse that she and her husband, Nicolas Rohatyn, call home. And unhappy with the utilitarian aesthetic of her gallery’s booth furniture at Frieze one year, she chose – quite controversially at the time –to commission designers to make the tables and chairs that she and her staff would use; ensuring that all elements of the gallery’s presentation would be as equally curated as the art itself. So, when it was announced in the summer of 2019 that she had purchased a significant, landmarked building located at 3 East 89th Street to serve as Salon 94’s new headquarters, it came as no surprise to THE CANVAS MONTHLY

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those who know her best that the powerhouse dealer would place such a high priority on contextualizing the environment to show art.

A 14,000 square foot, six-story townhouse located steps off Fifth Avenue and Central Park and across from the Guggenheim Museum, the building was originally commissioned in 1914 by Archer Milton Huntington to serve as a library, exhibition hall, entertainment space, and studio for his wife, Anna Hyatt Huntington. At a time when few female artists found success – be it critical or commercial – Hyatt Huntington managed to build a following with her life-sized sculptures of animals (which, to this day, can still be found scattered throughout the city), and for ‘Joan of Arc,’ the first public monument created by a woman to be erected in New York City. So, in a way, it’s fitting that Salon 94, a gallery with a well-earned reputation for promoting and elevating female artistic voices, as well as its sister-gallery, Salon 94 Design, will now be housed in a building that once served as the studio for one of the country’s pioneering female artists.

And yet, with galleries in New York largely shuttered for the past year due to the pandemic, the decision to spend $22.3 million to purchase the building, not to mention a further $7 million on renovations, hasn’t come without second thoughts. “Of course there are times when I wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘What am I doing?’” shared Greenberg Rohatyn in response to our question about whether she worries about the overhead. “Of course I doubt myself. But at the end of the day, I’m also a believer. I’m in this for the long haul…”

On a particularly frigid mid-February morning, wearing a mask that had the words “Speak truth to power” written across the front, Greenberg Rohatyn proceeds to take us on a tour of the bustling construction zone. In the midst of an intensive, intricate renovation overseen by Rafael Viñoly, the space is a beehive of activity. It’s an environment in which the indefatigable gallerist seems innately comfortable as she greets each construction worker by name and demonstrates an intimate familiarity with even the most minute design details for what will soon become her gallery’s new home.

Ultimately, the new building is but one facet of this new era for Greenberg Rohatyn. Buzz has been building in certain collecting circles of late about her new advisory firm, Dayan Rohatyn, which she launched with her good friend and former Luxembourg & Dayan co-owner, Amalia Dayan. And going forward, the gallery intends to add a number of exciting, young artists to its roster; beginning with Shawanda Corbett, the 32-year-old, Turner Prize bursary-winning visual and performance artist who was born without legs and with only one arm. Tackling issues of otherness by building a world constructed through ceramics, visual art, dance, and film, the gallery is tentatively slated to premiere a wordless, dance-based, eight-act film by the artist in January 2022. Sitting down with The Canvas in the basement of her gallery’s new home, Greenberg Rohatyn discusses all this and more as she shares what first inspired her to forge a career in the artworld; how and why design became such an integral part of Salon 94’s program; how she has steered the gallery through a turbulent past year; why she felt it was time for the business to grow – both in its physical footprint and in its ambitions; and what it means to be a hybrid gallery in an increasingly pressurized artworld.

Interview begins THE CANVAS MONTHLY

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The Canvas: Thanks again for taking time out of your day to show me around the new space, Jeanne. Before we talk about the building, COVID, and the gallery’s plans for the forthcoming year, I wanted to talk a bit about your childhood. Of course, you grew up around the artworld; your father founded St Louis’s Greenberg Gallery in 1973 and then Greenberg Van Doren in New York City. Do you recall a specific moment when you realized that you, too, wanted a career in the artworld, or was it almost treated as more of a fait accompli?

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: There actually was a very precise moment. When I was 13, my father took me with him to Art Basel in Basel. We were visiting his great friend, Ernst Beyeler, and Ernst had a Cezanne ‘Bathers’ painting from 1900 hanging in his office that I fell madly in love with. It turned me on in so many different ways, both intellectually and emotionally. It depicts a group of abstracted women who were so masculine; and at the time, I appreciated but perhaps did not understand the gender-bending nature of the painting.

I turned to Ernst and said, “How much is this? I want to buy it.” He replied, “It’s not for sale, but you will probably need to be an art dealer if you’re ever going to afford it.” At that moment, it became very clear that I would have a career in the artworld.

The Canvas: That’s so interesting. I’ve read a lot of your past interviews in preparation for our conversation today, and I don’t think I’ve heard that story told anywhere before.

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: Well, no one ever asked me before. So, following that, my father took me to see Matthias Grünewald’s ‘Isenheim Altarpiece.’ And seeing how much my father – a Jewish man who came to appreciate art relatively late in his life – was affected by this work, I too became quite moved by it. That shared experience between the two of us became a bonding moment in our relationship.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I realized that I wanted to leave St. Louis. It wasn’t my destiny to take over my father’s gallery. But it was very clear to me that I wanted to be in New York. So, everything from that moment on became about getting to New York.

The Canvas: From the very beginning, Salon 94’s program included female artists and artists of color. In many ways, the artworld is still only just now beginning to catch up to something you intuitively sensed early in your career. I doubt you originally set out thinking, “I’m going to go around representing female artists solely because of their gender.”

But walk me through how you initially approached putting together your program? What draws you to specific artists?

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: I think it’s important to keep in mind that when I first started Salon 94, I didn’t view myself THE CANVAS MONTHLY

as being in competition with other galleries. I was someone who didn’t grow up in New York, was always involved in the advisory side of the artworld in one capacity or another, and I was simply setting out to showcase alternative voices who moved me in some way.

I grew up in a home surrounded by artists who would eventually become known for forming a central pillar of the art historical canon, but who weren’t yet part of that canon during their lifetimes. Don Judd was not yet “Donald Judd” when he would visit our house as a kid. And throughout my father’s career, I watched him wrestle with balancing that unwavering belief in his artists and their not-yet-accepted stature in art history. That, in turn, became an aspect of being a dealer that I was – and still am – incredibly drawn to.

So, when I started the gallery, it really was about focusing on artists who didn’t yet fit into the art historical canon in one way or another. I was drawn to artists whose voices, and whose work made me uncomfortable. Remember, my comfort zone is sitting in a white room with a Donald Judd box.

So, for me, challenging that comfort level has always been something I’m interested in, and as a professional and connoisseur, if I don’t challenge it, then who will?

“ I was drawn to artists whose voices, and whose work made me uncomfortable.”

The Canvas: And is that still how you approach the gallery’s program today?

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: I’m in a different position than I was 20 years ago. I have a much greater ability now to platform an artist and contextualize their work within and alongside the historical canon, or to take an older artist and help them reemerge and imagine new ideas that previously felt out of reach, than I did when I first started. What interests me today might be taking a seasoned, yet under-regarded artist and making them look fresh, or taking a young artist and making them look totally iconic and classical.

The Canvas: You’re also known for your intense interest in design. In fact, many of the people I spoke with before our conversation today credited you with helping to usher in design’s acceptance as a serious collecting category in the blue-chip artworld. When you first decided to officially launch Salon 94 Design, I imagine that still required a certain leap of faith that

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your clients would follow you into this area. If you don’t mind, walk me through how the design gallery came into existence.

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: It actually began over time in two simultaneous but different ways. First, when Frieze started in London, I was sitting on the fair’s selection committee, and the question of booth furniture was raised in one of the meetings. Most people on the committee felt that the furniture was meant to go unnoticed as it didn’t elevate the art in any way.

But to me, this merely accentuated the fact that art fairs are ephemeral sales tools. So from that year on, I decided to commission designers to make my booth furniture, and then it became a whole discussion on the committee about whether furniture “for sale” was permissible or not.

At the same time, I slowly began to fill my own home with design pieces. And as I brought some of these pieces into my personal space, we began experimenting and doing shows with a few of them. That’s how Carlo Mollino and Rick Owens initially became part of the program.

This conversation around art versus design eventually came to a head when we took on Betty Woodman as an artist. When we first started working together, Betty said to me, “Jeanne, I want to be shown as an artist, not as a craftsperson.” And I said to her, “Betty, I promise you, I will show you as an artist, but I’m also interested in you as a maker of craft who has elevated craft to a higher medium.” I genuinely believe that there is a sense of ceremony to Betty’s work that elevates it beyond craft to art. So, I wanted to have that dialogue at the gallery, but it was a constant back and forth.

At one point, I remember doing a photo shoot with her pots and I put some flowers in them. I sent her the pictures afterward and she was both delighted and horrified at the same time.

In the end, we were able to build a strategy around making sure that she existed within the traditional art canon, while also highlighting her work through the lens of craft. And over time, these parallel interests ballooned, and became more and more focused on breaking down traditional hierarchies.

So we created these two parallel galleries that sometimes bend and move together and sometimes diverge. For instance, Donald Judd had two very distinct practices; his furniture practice and his art practice. They were fabricated in separate buildings and he thought about them in completely different ways. Certain artists require that very strict differentiation and others are more fluid. I like that Salon 94 and Salon 94 Design can help promote and foster that fluidity.

The Canvas: So, clearly you harbor these deep parallel interests in both art and design and have made both of them central elements to how the gallery operates. I have a quote from a past interview here where you said, “I prefer to come at the artworld from as many angles as I can. Repetition isn’t interesting to me.” What does repetition in the artworld mean to you? Do you think you’ll ever get bored of running a traditional gallery?

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: It’s not that I don’t like repetition.

I truly love the ongoing relationships with the artists I work with, and the trust that we build over the years together. I talk to Laurie Simmons once a week, and our topics of conversation – prices, her practice, and the issue of gun control in this country – are often similar to those we might’ve had 10 years ago.

The Canvas: So, what I’m hearing is that you still enjoy that day-to-day management of the gallery…

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: Oh, absolutely. I love that. When I said that repetition isn’t interesting to me, what I meant was that I’m very rigorous about pushing myself to dream of new exhibitions, alongside artists to create new bodies of work, and to keep experimenting.

The Canvas: I think it’s fair to say that over the years, that approach has served the gallery well. You’re known to have some very famous clients. From your perspective, what draws people who are at the top of their individual fields – be it in music or sports for instance – to work with you?

Installation view of work by Betty Woodman and Rick Owens.

Courtesy of Salon 94, New York.

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Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: I believe that building a collection is about building a visual expression of oneself, one’s history, and one’s interests – both challenging who we are, and using the art to help tell our history. So, I try to put myself into my clients’ stories and help them build a collection that’s reflecVolume XXVII

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tive of their lived experiences. I approach it with my knowledge base and a connoisseur’s eye, but I don’t dictate my own personal tastes. I do, however, try to get a Hammons into every collection I have a hand in.

And then, on a practical level, I’m super straightforward. I say this is underpriced, this is overpriced, this is an A-plus work, this is a B-plus work, this is attainable at this price, or this isn’t attainable. I’m very practical about how to build a collection and I don’t like to waste a client’s time. These are people who are incredibly busy, so I share information as quickly and efficiently as possible. Some people say that my emails and texts are like haikus. I think my clients appreciate that.

The Canvas: I want to bring the conversation around to this past year and how the gallery has operated throughout the pandemic. On a purely practical level, what has the past year been like for the gallery’s business?

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: COVID had several different stages.

The first stage was triage and just figuring out how to keep the business going, how to keep our staff working, and how to handle communicating via a computer for which we were not at all set up. Everyone went on either a three- or four-day a week plan, and then we slowly brought the staff back over time. I spent a good month redoing my mortgage for this building. It was hard. You can’t gloss over that.

Now, at the same time, because I’m scrappy, I dug in and focused on the secondary-market side of my business. I thought about works that might be available then that otherwise weren’t available before, and we were able to make some important acquisitions on behalf of our clients. We were selective in terms of what we went after, but really devoted our full resources once we did decide to go after a work. For one particular painting, the staff created a 78-page dossier contextualizing the tremendous importance of that single work of art in order to get the deal done. That way of doing business was very different from how we had traditionally operated in the past when a client and I could speak together in front of a work.

And then in our design business, we came at things from the inverse angle. Max Lamb had been working for quite some time on an idea for an editioned chair, and in March we had hosted a party for Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas Lee who had just opened their collection at The Met. It was the last party I remember before the lockdown. I knew Ann loved Max’s work, so I asked him if he could perhaps make 50 chairs for the 50-person dinner. Ultimately, Max was still refining the design and planning, and we couldn’t make it happen in time.

But because of everything going on with COVID, we instead envisioned their release online. Max, lean and mean, handcut and poly-sprayed the chairs in 3 days. Meanwhile, we

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quickly built a website, releasing the editions at a much lower price point than his unique poly chairs. The project and site is called “Max Lamb: 60 Chairs” and it sold out within 24 hours.

“ I try to put myself into my clients’ stories and help them build a collection that’s reflective of their lived experiences.”

The Canvas: From a broader – and perhaps more interesting – perspective, do you think that this lockdown period will eventually prove to have been a particularly fertile time for art making, and an important moment in art history?

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: No matter what, I think we will look back on this time and see the lasting effect, alongside the mass communal courage of the Black Lives Matter movement. This has contributed to shining a light on artists who have worked in the shadows of others for far too long. Likewise, Instagram has allowed for artists to be much more visible than ever before.

I hope that activist art is going to be taken more seriously going forward. In fact, we’re spending a lot of time at the gallery thinking about this question as we’re about to open our new space with Niki de Saint Phalle, who, in her own way, was very much an activist artist. That part of her career has been whitewashed over the years. But one of her ‘Nanas,’ ‘Peril Jaune,’ from 1968, which translates to “yellow peril,” explored and interrogated the racism against the Asian community during the Vietnam War. So, there’s a very serious thread of art activism that can be found within her work.

Jonathan Horowitz’s show at the Jewish Museum, ‘We Fight to Build a Free World,’ is another good example. It began with Claudia [Gould] asking him to do a show about antisemitism, but it morphed over three years into an exhibition that tackles immigration, racism, and bigotry from a number of different angles. So, I think there’s going to be a reevaluation of activist art and artists who have been engaged in this line of work because it’s an integral element to their overall practices as artists.

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The Canvas: That sounds like a lot to me…

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: Maybe, but I’ve spent a lot time during COVID creating different teams and putting a system in place so that everything is organized. For example, going forward, we’ll now have Salon 94, Salon 94 Design, and Salon 94+ which will be our non-profit space that will exist to help artists when they want to pursue a performative project, a poetry project, a publishing initiative that’s of a non-profit nature, or anything related to their activism. It’ll be a space within our gallery where we’ll be able to concentrate on those types of initiatives and it will have a dedicated team who can focus on that work full time.

The Canvas: It’s interesting to me, though, because for so long, the gallery was so successful operating out of its former space, the upper floors of which you and your family use as a home.

This is such a big, ambitious project. What motivated you to look for a new space in the first place?

Niki de St Phalle’s ‘Peril Jaune’ (1969). Courtesy Salon 94, New York.

The Canvas: Let’s talk about this new gallery space for a bit.

In an interview you gave last September, you said, “This moment is proving the fragility and fatigue of our more orthodox gallery system – the art fairs, biennials, five-week shows, etcetera. We are taking advantage of this moment to explore Salon 94 as a hybrid – which is in its DNA.” I assume that this new space is a central component to the gallery’s hybrid model going forward. But walk me through what a hybrid gallery model means to you…

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: I think of the gallery as a hybrid in a number of ways. We select and show artists prioritizing alternative voices. We’re a hybrid in that we show furniture alongside art. We’re a hybrid gallery in that we don’t always show art in a white cube space.

At the same time, I don’t think it’s any secret that I’m interested in a lot of different aspects of the business. A gallery functions in many different ways, and our responsibilities to artists include more than just hanging art on the walls and selling paintings to individual collectors. We are responsible for talking to our artists about money, career longevity, and estate planning. There’s a whole advisory level to the business that I’m really interested in, as well. So, I think that all plays a part in the gallery’s hybrid identity.

I’m someone who likes different aspects of the artworld, and I’m ready, prepared, and capable of pursuing several of them at once. I’ve literally been trained to do this since I was 13 years old. This, yoga, hiking, and being a mom is all I do.

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Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: It was time for us to grow. Our artists are growing, and they required me to grow with them. If I didn’t grow, then our artists would have been quite right to leave. And just in terms of my own rhythm as an adult, with my children now grown and heading off to college, it was just the right time in my life to make this kind of a shift.

“ If I didn’t grow, then our artists would have been quite right to leave.”

The Canvas: Do you actively feel a sense of pressure that if you don’t grow the gallery’s business – in any number of ways – that you’ll lose ground to the mega-galleries?

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: Absolutely, yes. But the way I look at it is as follows: Regardless of how many square feet we have, there is a place for Salon 94 in this active artworld that can be equally as powerful as a mega-gallery. The physical footprint might be smaller, but the intellectual and programming footprint might be equal. Ultimately, though, great artists require beautiful spaces to show their work. That’s just the bottom line. So, of course I felt the industry pressure.

We had been looking for a building for over a year, and couldn’t find one that best fit who I am. I love going to David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, and Pace; and at the same time, I Volume XXVII

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love going to smaller galleries like JTT and visiting our friends on the Bowery. Each gallery fosters a unique experience for viewing art and offering a different experience in that mix is important to me. This building is allowing me to achieve that vision and bring that fantasy to life.

for the long haul and while the overhead this month might be a lot, we’ll make up the difference over time.

The Canvas: Thank you so much for sharing that refreshingly honest and thoughtful answer. So, with this new space, you’re essentially doubling down on New York. Have you actively considered opening up spaces in other cities? I mean, LA would certainly seem to make sense to me when I think about the gallery’s program…

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: Perhaps LA would make sense if I had the right partner, but I also love collaborating with my colleagues who are based in the city. I love the dialogue we’re able to spark between our artists. So, while I love to visit and fly into and out of LA, it doesn’t make sense for me at this time. I’ve also had conversations with another dealer about collaborating in Paris, because who wouldn’t want to spend a month in Paris every year?

Salon 94’s new 14,000 square-foot gallery at 3 East 89th Street. Courtesy of Salon 94, New York.

The Canvas: At the time it was announced, it was reported that this space cost $22.3 million to buy. Based on the extent of these amazing renovations going on around us today, I imagine that the final price will come out to significantly more.

Especially after a year in which galleries’ physical spaces were pretty much shut down, does the overhead ever keep you up at night?

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: Of course. Being a practical person and not having financial partners, I do think about overhead.

But I also grew up in the artworld and have seen the faucet turn off twice before and have witnessed the damage that can be done by reacting too quickly in an over-dramatic fashion. So, I think that’s perhaps given me a sense of steadiness throughout this past year.

So, in a way, my thinking about opening spaces in other cities comes down to where I would want to spend time. I remember David Hammons once saying that to me when I had invited him to do a show in Berlin. He said, “Well, Jeanne, I’ve never been to Berlin, and I only accept shows now when they take place in a city I want to visit.” One of the great perks of the artworld is that it allows us to immerse ourselves in cities that we otherwise would not necessarily get to see.

For example, I was so curious to see Shanghai, and I finally went for an art fair. Our Director, Maxime, set it up and we had an incredible woman working for us on the ground who shepherded me around. Yao is still working with us today.

The Canvas: But you wouldn’t consider opening up a permanent space in Asia, at some point?

Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn: It’s not in my immediate future, but Asia is on our minds.

Take what happened in the late ‘80s, for instance. I was with my father in New York, and he had just made a deal to buy a Frank Stella painting from Larry Rubin for $300,000. They shook hands, and the next day the market crashed. And I remember saying to my father, “So, what are you going to do now?” And he replied, “I’m going to go ahead and pay him, of course. My handshake is my word.” The impact of that moment, the fear I could see in my father’s eyes, and talking through those financial decisions with him at the time have had a long-lasting effect on me.

So, of course there are times when I wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘What am I doing?’ Of course I doubt myself. But at the end of the day, I’m also a believer. I’m in this THE CANVAS MONTHLY

Ronald K. Greenberg with Andy Warhol in front of Jackie portrait. Courtesy of Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn.

Volume XXVII

The Canvas Monthly March 2021

Airmail 03.20.21

Interior Design 03.22.21

Patch Upper East Side 6.13.19