The Art World Loves to Hate Him. He’s Building an Empire Anyway
Art dealer Stefan Simchowitz has long been treated as persona non grata by the art world’s most important galleries and tastemakers. But you wouldn’t know it while wandering around the 11,000-square-foot Los Angeles warehouses where he stores his collection, one of the biggest private troves in the world. Wrapped paintings and sculptures are wedged, floor-to-ceiling, along aisles that stretch the length of a grocery store.
One wall contains plastic-tile tapestries by Serge Attukwei Clottey, a Ghanaian artist whose works were included in recent high-profile exhibitions in Venice and Saudi Arabia. In a modern-day Medici arrangement for which he’s become known, Simchowitz pays Clottey at least $15,000 a month, which covers supplies and the salaries for the artist’s 23-person staff. “Him, I will never drop," Simchowitz says.
On another wall is Julian Pace’s massive homage to Emanuel Leutze’s famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River. “When I met Julian, he was a bartender trying to paint in his bedroom," says Simchowitz. He currently pays for Pace to paint full-time in one of five airy studios the dealer leases downtown.
Simchowitz has to twist to squeeze through a narrow space created by two wall-size canvases jutting out. “This isn’t even my largest warehouse," he says, grinning. The origin story behind Simchowitz’s 25,000-strong collection is a notorious one.
Instead of collecting from galleries like ordinary buyers, he reaches out to unknown artists directly, offering to buy or finance entire bodies of work, some of which he tends to resell to newcomer collectors. The art world decries this method as crass. Especially distressing to top artists and galleries is the way some of these
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