J. Tomilson Hill, in front of Ed Ruscha’s “17th Century” and other artworks in his Upper East Side home, plans to open a museum drawing on his collection.
WHAT do you do with 14 Christopher Wools?
And what if you want to exhibit them — or your four Bacons, 10 Warhols, four Lichtensteins and three Twomblys — alongside some of your 34 Renaissance and Baroque bronzes?
You open your own museum.
At least, that is what J. Tomilson Hill has decided to do in a two-story space on West 24th Street in Chelsea, which, when it opens in the fall of 2017, will become one of the few private galleries in New York City largely made up of a personal collection.
It sits inside a new condominium building named the Getty, for the former gas station on the site. Peter Marino, who designed the Getty as well as the museum’s 6,400-square-foot interior, has done seven residences for Mr. Hill and his wife, Janine, the director of fellowship affairs at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The couple collect together (although he is the more obsessive of the two) and now have established the Hill Art Foundation, for which the gallery will be named.
“We’ve got so much art in storage,” Mr. Hill, 68, the billionaire vice chairman at the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm, said in an interview at their Upper East Side apartment.
Spending time with Mr. Hill offers a window into the thinking of a major player in the art world: how he approaches collecting and why he’s now decided to share some of his extensive holdings regularly with the public.
The gallery will draw mostly from the Hill collection, valued at more than $800 million, which includes prime examples of Modern and contemporary art, as well as old masters. It may also borrow works from collections “where I have a relationship,” Mr. Hill said.
The Hills’ apartment — like their homes in East Hampton, Paris and Telluride, Colo. — is something of a museum itself.
It’s hard to take it all in: Lucio Fontana’s glazed terra cotta crucifix from the 1950s; Alessandro Algardi’s 17th-century bronze “Corpus Christi.” Mr. Hill casually passes Willem de Kooning’s “Clamdigger” sculpture in the entryway, Picasso’s portrait of Sarah Murphy above the fireplace and Ed Ruscha’s “Hollywood” pastel and graphite on paper in the master bedroom.
Mr. Hill — who, with his slicked-back hair and smooth demeanor, is said to have inspired the look of Gordon Gekko in “Wall Street” (a claim Mr. Hill says is inaccurate) — not only wants to share more of his collection with the public. He also wants his gallery to provide arts education to city students.
“They’re cutting out arts programs in the public schools,” he said.
When the Hills’ bronze collection was featured in an exhibition at the Frick Collection in 2014, for example, students at an East Harlem elementary school studied the labors of Hercules for a week before seeing thebronze depictions of him by artists like Giuseppe Piamontini and Antonio Susini in the show.
“These are kids who wouldn’t even think the Frick was accessible to them,” Mr. Hill said.
The foundation also plans to become a partner in educational efforts with institutions like the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Mr. Hill serves on the board.
In preparing for this venture, Mr. Hill said he considered other private museums, including the financier Glenn Fuhrman’s FLAG Art Foundation in Chelsea; the oil trader Andrew Hall’s art foundation in Germany; and the billionaire industrialist Mitchell P. Rales’s Glenstone museum in Potomac, Md.
Some private museums have been criticized as tax-exempt exhibition spaces that allow collectors to deduct the full market value of the art, cash and stocks they donate.
Mr. Hill acknowledged that the tax benefit was part of his motivation. “I can shelter capital gains,” he said. “It would be the same as if I gave the art to a museum.”
SOURCE The TIMES
