Art et Industrie was not a typical SoHo gallery, even in its heyday, the raucous 1980s. And its proprietor, Rick Kaufmann, a lanky, underfunded autodidact from Detroit, was not a typical SoHo gallerist.
His wares, inscrutable objects that hinted at utility, confused the press for years. Were they art or were they furniture?
Consider the cerebral chairs made by Howard Meister, one of Mr. Kaufmann’s artists. His austere steel pieces had names like “Learning Her Lie” (a chair with a fracture running through it) and “Juvenile Offender” (one with a back resembling an explosion).
Or the enticing snarls of aluminum made by Forrest Myers, a minimalist sculptor best known for The Wall, the beloved public artwork of green girders bolted to the blue-painted brick facade of a building on the corner of Broadway and Houston Street in Lower Manhattan.
Or Michele Oka Doner’s “Terrible Chair,” a delicately wrought but vicious-looking piece made of cast-bronze thorns that was definitely not designed with ergonomics in mind.
“It is a fetish object, not made for public use” was how Ms. Doner described the chair in the accompanying text in a show at Mr. Kaufmann’s gallery. “I am blurring the line between art and function. I don’t like these lines. Who put them there?”
“We weren’t making furniture,” Mr. Myers told T magazine in 2015. “We were making art objects that became figurative when you sat in them.”
Mr. Kaufmann, an incubator of what might be called the New York chapter of the art furniture movement — that is, furniture made by artists, in single or limited editions, that could sell for tens of thousands of dollars — died on Nov. 2 at a hospice facility in Carbondale, Pa. He was 77. Mr. Myers said the cause was throat cancer.
Furniture made by artists was not a new thing when Mr. Kaufmann opened his first gallery in Lower Manhattan, in the late 1970s.
Early in the decade, John Chamberlain, the sculptor who made festive pieces out of scrap metal and automobile parts, had carved up a hunk of foam to create a languid-looking “sofa,” which he draped with silk parachute fabric. The minimalist sculptor Donald Judd had already begun making furniture for his family (beds, at first); he would later famously complain that it was impossible to go to a store and buy a chair that was esthetically pleasing.
But it was the Italians who inspired Mr. Kaufmann — in particular, the collective known as Studio Alchimia, a group of anti-modernist Milanese designers working in the 1970s. One was Ettore Sottsass, an architect known for his whimsical, colorful pieces, who would go on to found the postmodern architecture and housewares juggernaut called the Memphis Group.
Mr. Kaufmann was perhaps the first to show the work of both groups in the United States, and he wanted to create his own Memphis-like cohort — replicating not the Memphis style but its ethos — to encourage New York artists to explore their ideas about furniture, whatever they might be.
Mr. Myers found the prospect thrilling. “It’s like the old art-school theorem: Explore the possibilities,” he said. “It’s just as hard to come up with a new chair as a hit album. One of the driving forces of art furniture is not only where it can take you artistically — it’s the invention thing. There’s a joy when you invent something no one has ever seen before.”
“Art furniture was playing our song,” said Dorothy Kalins, the founding editor of Metropolitan Home, the upstart design magazine launched in 1981 in opposition to the conservative decorating establishment. “It was radical, and it was disruptive, and some of it was really beautiful.”
The idea of self-expression in furniture “was really exciting,” Ms. Kalins continued. “And Rick was an avatar. He pulled together artists and sculptors and architects and said, ‘Wait a minute, we’re about something.’ It wasn’t just rebellion for its own sake. It had an aesthetic.”
Mr. Kaufmann was not the best businessman, however. The gallery cycled through five locations, and if he couldn’t make the rent, his artists often pitched in. When colleagues suggested that he use part of his gallery to sell multiples, he balked, saying, “Would you rather walk through a temple of design, or a shop selling this and that?”
Early on, when a group of executives from the furniture company Knoll came in to see what the gallery was all about, Mr. Kaufmann invited Marja Samsom, a Dutch performance artist otherwise known as Miss Behave, to make an appearance. She wafted about in a French maid’s uniform, dusting the objects and every now and then exclaiming, “Ooh la la!” Perhaps not surprisingly, Knoll never reached out to Mr. Kaufmann or any of his artists about putting the furniture into production.
“We weren’t necessarily against Knoll,” Mr. Kaufmann said in an essay about the gallery published in a 2015 book. “We just had a different mind-set.”
Indeed. How else to account for Richard Snyder’s critter-like pieces with elaborate back stories, assembled for a 1990 solo show called “Collectibles and Curiosities”? One of those pieces, “Cabinet of the Ancient Squid,” had four white-lacquered orbs resembling eyeballs stacked on top of eight tentacular legs; it was described as “a three-dimensional replica of the insignia used by the very evil Emperor of Cathay” holding “objects too horrible to mention.”
“It wasn’t groupthink,” Mr. Kaufmann told an interviewer in 2020, referring to his stable of artists and their wildly idiosyncratic work. “It was a series of individuals with specific individual ideas who would work together and help each other.”
Mr. Kaufmann wasn’t good with money, but he knew how to throw a party. His openings drew art world figures like Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat; the dancer and choreographer Peter Martins; the French artist and screenwriter Bertrand Castelli, who was an early producer of “Hair”; musicians like David Byrne and members of Run-D.M.C.; the local plumber; and hordes of art groupies.
For an 18-artist show in 1986 called “Ritual Objects,” Mr. Kaufman hired a Haitian voodoo band whose members threw themselves so thoroughly into the spirit of the event that they sacrificed a live chicken before he could intercede.
One object in the show was a kidney-shaped vanity table made from surfboard material lacquered bright red and embellished with mirrored spikes. The artist, Elizabeth Browning Jackson, called it “Heart of Thorns,” because it represented “a hurt heart,” she told The New York Times.
“It’s about being a woman, being vulnerable and trying to have a strong heart,” she said.
Mr. Kaufmann was cagey about his background and not always the most reliable narrator. But here are the broad strokes: He was born Richard Carl Kaufmann on April 28, 1947, in Detroit and grew up there and in Arizona, raised by his mother, Dolores White, and his maternal grandfather.
As a young teenager, he worked in a tool-and-die shop in Detroit. By the late 1960s, he was on a freighter headed to Tangier, where he met and fell in love with Tracy Rust, a painter. They traveled to Paris and then to New York City, running an antiques store on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn before opening their first Art et Industrie showroom on Thompson Street in Lower Manhattan, naming it after an early 20th-century avant-garde French design magazine.
Ms. Rust survives him.
The last Art et Industrie — there were always a few fallow years between venues, while Mr. Kaufmann marshaled his finances — was again in a space on Thompson. It opened in the mid-1990s and was shuttered by the end of the decade.
Mr. Kaufmann then turned to another passion, selling early jazz and blues recordings to collectors. When the business moved online, he dropped out. He was not interested in the internet.
In the last decade, there has been a resurgence of interest in the work Mr. Kaufmann once championed.
Hugues Magen, a regular at Art et Industrie in the 1980s, put on a show of its artists at his own gallery, on East 11th Street, in 2015 and published the Art et Industrie book. Stephen Markos, who opened the New York gallery Superhouse in 2021, was so inspired by Art et Industrie that he now represents many of its artists. And Pandora Castelli, the daughter of Mr. Castelli, the producer, is currently making a documentary about Mr. Kaufmann.
“He was the Anthony Bourdain of the art world,” Mr. Snyder said — curious and catholic in his tastes and boundless in his appetites. Ms. Jackson called him a cowboy.
“He created this character, but the essence was real,” said Loretta Michaelcheck, who was his financial partner for several years starting in the late 1980s. “ I’m glad I had the money to make it happen. The gallery he made was brilliant and sublime.”
“It was so forward thinking,” Mr. Magen said, “to be presenting furniture that people couldn’t sit on.”
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