“MOVE, MOVE, MOVE, as an end in itself, an appetite at any price,” Henry James wrote of Lower Manhattan, his birthplace, after returning to it for the first time in 20 years and finding it almost unrecognizable. This was in 1904. The James family home on West 14th Street now has a Foot Locker on the ground floor.
New York has never been a place known for clinging to its past. And yet an unlikely trend has emerged across the city: Artists’ studios are being meticulously preserved — even when the artist who worked in the space has been dead for many years. One, on a block where a Japanese barbecue chain restaurant has outlasted The Village Voice in the paper’s former office building, is the studio of Tom Wesselmann, an American painter who died in 2004 at the age of 73. Wesselmann, a contemporary of Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, was an early pioneer of incorporating the symbolism of consumer culture — a bottle of Wish-Bone Italian dressing, cans of Café Bustelo — into art, and re-envisioned the female nude with a detached minimalism that spoke to a generation reared on TV dinners and billboard advertising. The Cooper Square studio that he moved into in 1995 was maintained after his death by his widow, Claire Wesselmann. The same small staff that worked there when the artist was alive keeps more or less the same hours as before. “I think it was the most natural thing in order to be able to continue the career,” Jeffrey Sturges, a former assistant who was working for the studio when Wesselmann died, told me during a visit. “We stayed, and Claire wanted us to stay. Like, yes, Tom is gone, but we have work to do.”
Wesselmann’s obituary in The Times labeled him “an extremely adept follower of Pop Art” but, in the 21 years since his death, the value of his work has increased, and his reputation as an important postwar painter has solidified. His studio, inside a building once owned by a liquor distributor, appears as if he just ran out to grab lunch. Visiting it, one feels a palpable closeness to the artist: His name is on the intercom. A series of shelves showcase cardboard maquettes he made during the development of his paintings. Works from various stages of his career hang on the walls. Sturges, who’s now the director of exhibitions for the artist’s estate, pointed out a section of the floor by Wesselmann’s main painting wall that’s covered in drops of color and showed me the blue plastic gloves the artist wore while working (helpfully labeled “TW right” and “TW left”). A wooden box that holds cans with different-size brushes released a faint smell of turpentine when opened. “It’s very alive for us,” Sturges said of the studio.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post What Happens to Artists’ Studios After They Die? appeared first on New York Times.
