Robert Littman & Sully Bonnelly
Lily, Ava and Vanya survey the art from their bedroom vantage point. On the floor, a crumpled sheet metal sculpture by John Chamberlain in front of a wooden piece by Carl Andre and, leaping out from the wall, a simian figure by Daisy Youngblood. On the opposite wall is an abstract by Cheyney Thompson and on the shelf above the bed one of Charles and Ray Eames’s iconic – and practical – leg splints; on the shelf below is a David Hockney iPad drawing.
Although Robert Littman and Sully Bonnelly’s rectilinear and capacious apartment – perhaps better classified as a loft – is a stone’s throw from the chaotic busyness of Union Square with its farmers’ market, its chess games and musicians, once inside it’s as tranquil and removed as a cloister. (Except for Lily, Ava and Vanya, the tumble of baleful tiny Brussels Griffons with their demonic eyes who seem to think that they are ten feet tall and built to match.)
But it’s a cheerful cloister full of art and it flows in a wraparound circle, rather like a slow-moving river punctuated along the way by art boulders, or the Stations of the Art, as it were, where you stop on the circuit to pay reverence to two Anselm Kiefers, a Sterling Ruby, Khmer stone sculptures, a big Sol LeWitt, pieces by Jenny Holzer, a Woodhenge by Carl Andre, a ramana drum from Thailand, a large Howard Hodgkin, an even larger David Hockney, and a wooden three-dimensional, biomorphic leg splint by Charles and Ray Eames. A new result of the quest of the collector leans against the wall – a huge sensuous piece of hammered copper, part of a fragmentary replica of the Statue of Liberty by Danh Vo. (“I’ve been after it for while,” Robert says, “and I finally got it in Paris.”) Then you duck under Daisy Youngblood’s plaster elephant’s head protruding like a modern gargoyle, note a David Musgrave drawing – one of eight – propped casually against a bookshelf, glance at a John Cage drawing/score annotations and stop at a Shirazeh Houshiary. You salute a Scott Lyall painting and go back past the kitchen with its ceramics by Edmund de Waal, its John Baldessari, are tempted to sit on a Kuramata Lucite stool, fight off visual overkill and presto you’re home again, soothed by the glorious Turneresque circle by Olafur Eliasson above two zigzag Gerrit Rietveld chairs. (Only don’t dare to call it beautiful! – Eliasson didactically pronounced beauty a dangerous word, “because its been standardized into something kitsch.”) Here you can collapse into a sofa beside a stainless steel and black laminate revolving coffee table designed with pizzazz by Willy Rizzo in 1969 and stare ahead at a piece by Richard Long or by Louise Bourgeois and – can that be a glass profile of Mussolini? In a black guest bathroom three Vija Celmins seduce the eye near to a Frank Lloyd Wright balustrade. “Where did you find that?” I inquire. “I’ve had it for ever,” Robert says vaguely. “Maybe I bought it in Chicago.”
There are not many places where a Carl Andre work and a Morandi etching flank a superb view of the Empire State Building. Here, art is a reality to be lived, and although the apartment carries a lot of zeitgeistic heft it is so edited that each work has its own reverberating space. The result is an open sesame of the imagination and an array of priorities and artistic instincts.
Robert swings for the fences when it comes to buying what he likes. “I wanted my museum – it’s just in my blood,” he says, “and so this is like curating a museum but in my house.” And it’s a living museum, since he is deeply prone both to changing things around and to acquiring new work all the time. Once, when I was visiting, two Andrée Putman chairs (channelled from Jean-Michel Frank’s originals) arrived from the Wasserturm Hotel in Cologne to add to the three others she had earlier advised Robert to buy. Sully eyed them critically and allowed equably that he didn’t like them. (Andrée Putnam’s pronouncement about loft living: “It is not about bathing in the living room and cooking in the bedroom but rather about opening spaces to various activities. Why should places be reduced to one function instead of favoring the sensations they bring us?” could well be Robert’s creed.)
Besides the stand-out pieces there are other treasures strewn about – a bustier in plastic made by Issey Miyake for Grace Jones (they think) and another by Thierry Mugler are on points duty and two weather-worn carved wooden stands are intriguing. Robert says, “I was in a taxi in Kyoto passing an old shop and I saw something out of the corner of my eye, and I shouted stop – they were Kyoto temple pillars. Apparently they change the temple columns every ten years or so.” They sit neatly under the Olafur Eliasson and beside the 1969 coffee table and near to two stone balls from the Taíno tribe, the indigenous people of the Dominican Republic who were decimated by Spanish colonists.
Robert was brought up in New York by parents who wanted him to be a lawyer (“I wasn’t interested in school. I was interested in marching against Vietnam”), but who fed his artistic interests by taking him to concerts, shows and museums.
An influential friend of his father’s, after a long talk to the young Robert, said to his father, “I’d let this man do what he wants to do.” He has done just that ever since. He worked at the front desk of MoMA and at the Kornblee Gallery while at postgraduate studies at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, where Noma Copley and Daisy (Margaret – married to Alfred H. Barr, the director of MoMA) were his classmates on a Friday evening seminar on the Bronze Age in the Aegean. He sat between them and would nudge them awake when they dozed off.
A life-changing moment arrived when Noma Copley invited him to her apartment. She had been married to the painter William Copley, who in the 1950s had opened an art gallery in Beverly Hills where he showed works by René Magritte, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, Joseph Cornell and Man Ray. It was not a success there – too far in advance of the dozy film town – and he bought the stuff that did not sell. (His collection was sold at auction in 1979 for $6.7 million, at the time the highest total for a single owner’s collection in the United States.) Robert remembers the shock of his visit: “When she opened the door it was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my life. There were at least three Balthuses, Man Ray’s Lips, Duchamp’s Chess Table – it was just full of astonishing things.” I felt a bit like that when the elevator door opened to Robert’s apartment and I stepped under the glare stare of the marble surveillance camera by Ai Weiwei into a disarranged Carl Andre piece, a splendid resin cast of a London door by Rachel Whiteread and the demonic-looking Griffons in a tumble of rage.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP A marble Jenny Holzer bench sits near the iconic egg chair by Arne Jacobsen; a Rachel Whiteread floor piece rests near a John Chamberlain sculpture with, behind, the geometric forms of a Donald Judd piece on the wall; a large Sterling Ruby collage sits on the chest of drawers next to a Roman urn. A small Rachel Whiteread sculpture above Khmer stone figures and a Giorgio Morandi still life. Above a black marble shelf are two Jenny Holzer pieces – one a plaque, the other a condom – bearing the same message.
His life underwent another upheaval in 1983 when, as director of the Grey Art Gallery NYU, he was in Mexico City researching Frida Kahlo loans for a prospective show. He suggested to a friend, Alberto Raurell, the new young director of the Tamayo Museum (which under his guidance was rapidly becoming a center of international painting, jazz and theater) that the exhibition “Hockney Paints the Stage,” a now famous collaboration between Hockney and Martin Friedman, director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, would be a good show for the Tamayo. Robert made the introductions and, as he recalls, “arrangements proceeded apace.” Tragedy followed. He was in Paris organizing a Jean Cocteau exhibition for the Grey Gallery (which, as it turned out, was to be his final show there) when he got the telephone call with the news that Alberto Raurell had been murdered in a restaurant hold-up. He was asked if he could come to Mexico and help to finish installing the Hockney show. “I went down and never left.” He was for many years the curator of the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection and is now president of the Vergel Foundation, a collection of modern and contemporary Mexican art (including many famous Frida Kahlo paintings) which is based in New York and Cuernavaca and is shown in museums around the world.
The first time Sully and Robert went out together on a date, thirty-three years ago (they married in 2012, soon after it became legally possible), they went to one art show, then many art shows and later the same day Robert bought a chair. Not any old chair. So Sully learned fast what Robert’s life-focus was, and now, Sully says, “We buy together and consult each other.” Sully was born in Santo Domingo, graduated from the Parsons School of Design and worked for fashion houses including Oscar de la Renta, Bill Blass and Isaac Mizrahi. He is now the creative director of his own eponymous business.
In the living room a serene circular piece by Olafur Eliasson looks out over two Gerrit Rietveld chairs, the crumpled metal of a John Chamberlain sculpture and a stainless steel and black laminate coffee table by Willy Rizzo. A Daisy Youngblood elephant head juts out from the wall.
In a passage, David Hockney’s The Arrival of Spring, an iPad drawing printed on four sheets of paper, overlooks a Carl Andre floor piece and two Khmer stone figures ext to a copper fragment by Danh Vo.
They travel all over to look at art, in galleries, exhibitions and museums as well as attending the openings of the Vergel Foundation exhibitions. I ask about the dual watercolor portrait of them together, painted by David Hockney in 2002. Where is it? “In storage,” Robert admits, “– tired of looking at ourselves like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas!”
Sully’s collection is on the other side of that entrance foyer in a set of quiet rooms with an Agnes Martin that pulls at the heartstrings, day beds by Mies van der Rohe, a Fornasetti table and a Plexiglas box sculpture by Robert Graham; here on white shelves are myriad white pottery vases – used by flower shops from the 1930s right up to the 1950s for sending flowers. Their various shapes and cream and white finishes suggest both the vases made by Constance Spry in London and those found in Jean-Michel Frank’s eclectic Paris shop. Basically these are the takeaway disposable containers of the time and the taste of the period comes shining through; now they are much sought-after objects. Sully buys them wherever he sees them. (When he bought the Fornasetti table it was in the happy belief that it was patterned with drawings of croissants. Robert had gently to point out that they were penises and perhaps it would be judicious to choose another pattern. He opted for some architectural designs.)
Robert came by this loft in a sideways sort of way – a posh apartment on the Upper East Side was to be provided as part of his signing agreement on leaving Manhattan to go to Mexico. Didn’t want to live uptown. Not his style. “When I saw this huge, bare loft, part of the Photo Arts Building and in a fearful state – the floor painted black, the windows blacked out and full of photographic equipment – I said, ‘This is where I want to live.’ Union Square was the stationery district of New York at that time, and it was very run-down. Didn’t matter.”
When Picasso installed himself in a new place, he did drawings of the area to map out a kind of cosmology. This is what Robert did. Then an architect helped to make practical sense of his plans for knocking down walls (and he and Sully fought about it all). It took eight months of construction work, freeing up the space, to make what is in effect a gallery within a comfortable home. The result over thirty years later is an open sesame of the imagination, full of peace, appalling barking, and did I mention Art?
In the office, an Agnes Martin painting and a collection of white pottery flower vases provide a cool backdrop to a Piero Fornasetti table, a Jean Prouvé stool, Verner Panton’s iconic chair and (at left)a Larry Bell cube and (right) a Plexiglas box sculpture by Robert Graham.
Also in the office, a painting of a gorilla, Kong, by Walton Ford, below a clay figure by Rebecca Warren. On the wall, a twisting sculpture by John Chamberlain and in the center a piece by Sterling Ruby and a suspended ribbon form by Miroslaw Balka. On a shelf behind sits a green bustier by Issey Miyake.
Works in the raised corner space include a circular piece by Richard Long, a Khmer stone figure and a clear glass Mussolini vase by Karim Rashid. In the foreground, a bronze head by Martin Puryear overlooks a pink glass sculpture by Roni Horn.