EACH SPRING, THE village of Sent, Switzerland, a remote alpine community 40 miles northeast of St. Moritz, all but empties out. The skiers recede with the melting snow and, except for a restaurant or two, most of the local businesses shut down for the season. This past April, in the vast ground-floor gallery of his 11,000-square-foot, three-story home, the art dealer Gian Enzo Sperone glances out a window and sighs contentedly. “I don’t like to see people,” he says as his partner, Tania Pistone, a 56-year-old Sicilian painter and jewelry designer, appears with a plate of cured beef and venison. Now in his 80s, Sperone, who is often credited with bringing American Pop Art to Italy in the 1960s, and who would later boost the careers of such Neo-Expressionist painters as Francesco Clemente and Julian Schnabel at Sperone Westwater, the New York gallery he opened in 1975 with Angela Westwater and Konrad Fischer, doesn’t travel much anymore. (Fischer, who died in 1996, left the gallery in 1982; Westwater now runs the business on her own.) “The way I live, in big houses full of art,” he says, gesturing all around him — at an arrangement of muddy handprints, applied in concentric circles directly onto a wall, by the English land artist Richard Long; a brightly colored abstract painting by the New York-based artist Peter Halley; a set of plaster testicles modeled after the ones on Michelangelo’s David (albeit 33 times bigger) by the Swiss artist Not Vital — but also referring to the time he spends in Monte Carlo, the Roman countryside and Turin, where he was born, “is everything [I want to] talk about. The rest doesn’t interest me.”
About 20 years ago, Sperone was visiting Vital, whom he used to represent, at the artist’s studio in Sent. Vital and his younger brother, the architect Duri Vital, 68, who lives down the road, mentioned that a 16th-century house with a cream-colored stucco facade and gray shutters overlooking the Alps was in danger of being sold and divided into smaller apartments. “It was out of the question that this building, one of the most beautiful and significant in the entire Engadin Valley, should be sacrificed for a thoughtless renovation,” Duri says about the property, which was rebuilt as a manor house in 1709 for the governor of Valtellina, now part of the Lombardy region of Northern Italy. He urged the owners, a family from Liguria, to reconsider and promised to find them the right buyer. Sperone made an offer. But before finalizing the deal, he needed the mayor’s approval. Luckily, he can be quite persuasive: In 2007, for instance, he convinced the English architect Norman Foster that he should design and build Sperone Westwater’s current location, on the Bowery in New York, by telling him that the gallery’s artists voted for him over Renzo Piano. (They hadn’t even been consulted.) “I promised the mayor, who’s a farmer and smart, that I’d have a cultural activity here every year,” he says. “Which I did.” Below the main residence, an old cellar and hayloft have been transformed into a public exhibition space with recent shows by the Brooklyn-based Chinese painter Deng Shiqing and the American artist Tom Sachs. A permanent immersive work, for which the walls and ceiling of a room were lined with beeswax-coated tiles, was created by the German artist Wolfgang Laib.
Although strict approval was required to make any major changes to the landmark structure, Sperone, who wears blue-framed glasses and keeps his white beard short, successfully petitioned to install an elevator, which now connects the main bedroom on the top floor to the rest of the house. The idea to add a lift came to him, he recalls, after a night of heavy drinking with the American writer Gore Vidal. “I was sick for a week,” he says. “And he was already in a wheelchair. I thought to myself, ‘One day, maybe I’ll need one as well.’” For Duri, who oversaw the nearly two-year project, it was important to preserve what he calls the building’s “historical substance” and “aesthetic integrity.” The biggest problem, he says, was the water damage to the eastern side of the house. In addition to digging 20-foot trenches to prevent more flooding, his team reinsulated the walls, replaced the roof, put in a geothermal heating system, updated the plumbing and electricity and built a small guesthouse in the backyard. Despite those challenges, Duri says that he and Sperone never argued: “Not over a single aspect.”
LATER THAT NIGHT, Pistone is setting the table in a small candlelit dining room across the foyer from the kitchen. As her partner of nearly 30 years reminisces about his career in art — the shows he mounted in the 1960s with Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg; all the great discoveries and losses; the swirl of feuds, affairs, plagues, crises and even a kidnapping incident — a row of centuries-old plaster busts cast long shadows across the Swiss pine-paneled walls, which are covered with old and newer works: a 16th-century engraving by the Italian artist Agostino Carracci; a painting by McDermott & McGough, a since-disbanded duo who lived for much of the 1980s and into the ’90s as if they were in the Victorian era. Sperone mentions Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film, “The Exterminating Angel,” one of his favorites, about a group of wealthy guests who find themselves unable to leave a dinner party. “It was a tragedy in the end,” he says. “But in my case, it’s not that bad. Every day, I stay here, walking around, watching the mountain.”
From the gallery on the main floor, where he keeps several other sculptures by Vital — including two rows of silver orbs, each hand-shaped by Tuareg craftspeople in Niger and, if the artist is to be believed, filled with the remains of a camel — he ascends to the second floor. There, in a sitting room around the corner from a library and down the hall from a bedroom with a frescoed floor and a Gothic vault ceiling, hangs a portrait of Sperone, also by Vital, made using only bronze castings of his fingers, ears and nose. In every corner, one finds little reminders of the people who’ve supported him along the way, and the ones he’s helped too: the flyer for his 1965 show of Andy Warhol’s screen prints in Turin; a photograph of Schnabel dedicated by the artist to “G.E.S.”; the funeral program for the American painter and AIDS activist Frank Moore, who died in 2002. “This is what makes me feel alive,” he says. “To understand that we are members of a community — not a national community, a universal one.”
One story up, in what was once the attic, the couple’s bedroom and office occupy a lofted space with hardwood floors and exposed-beam ceilings. Next to their bed, there’s a painting by the Italian-born artist Alessandro Twombly, the son of Cy; a skull sculpture made of playing cards by the Turin-based artist Nicola Bolla; and a grainy photograph of Sperone’s father, a cleaner, and his mother, a homemaker, both of whom died in middle age. Sperone, who has two sons from a previous marriage, neither of whom cares much about art, has been thinking lately about his legacy. He started contributing to a column for Il Manifesto, a left-leaning Italian newspaper, sharing anecdotes about a forgotten New York and all the big personalities he met along the way — from the gallerist Leo Castelli, a hero of his, to the minimalist artist Carl Andre. This past May, on his 86th birthday, he donated 33 works by old masters to the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. “They gave me a room,” he says. “It’s narrow, but it has my name on it.”
After more than a half-century as a collector, Sperone is now more focused on making sure his pieces end up in the right hands. The zeitgeist, he believes, is something only those who are in it can appreciate. “You can’t understand the art of your time when you’re an old man,” he says. “At my age, I want to know more about the past — not the part that doesn’t exist yet.”
Nick Haramis is the editor at large of T Magazine.
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