CONTRARIAN Steven Mark Klein The Room 21’9″ x 25’8″

Accelerating towards the entrance ramp. On.

Art financier and agent Leo Castelli began his ascent with his first exhibition at 4 East 77th Street, just yards from 5th Avenue. February 1957. This article is not about Leo Castelli. This article is not about the artists he invested in. This article is about the room. The second-floor front room at 4 East 77th Street.
Truth is so malleable – and our minds so conditioned against doubt – that I can write that I stood next to Andy Warhol at his first Castelli exhibition, which was the “Flowers” series. I turned 14 during the exhibition, which ran from November 21st to December 28th, 1964.
I understand that Hedi Slimane has a photo of that meeting, and that it’s permanently affixed to the wall of his design studio. The truth is, I worked for the bookseller George Wittenborn at 1018 Madison Avenue, two blocks from Castelli (not Castelli, but the room). Memory files are deteriorated, so I will say that sometime in 1973 I worked as a book salesman for Mr. Wittenborn.
I specialized in limited edition artist’s books. I sold my copy of Ed Ruscha’s DUTCH DETAILS for a few hundred dollars to take a GREYHOUND bus from New York to San Francisco sometime around 1976. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The room at Castelli is what this file search is about. Okay, I got that out of me.

On Saturday, September 27, 2014, I returned to the second-floor front room at 4 East 77th Street. The brass plaque on the townhouse states that Michael Werner now occupies the premises. The day is warm. The exhibition is titled JÖRG IMMENDORFF “Cafe Deutschland.”
The central image is among the works in the room. 57 years and seven months from the room’s guidance of our shared values about freedom of expression. The resonance created by the room remains clear and intact. The room has two north-facing windows. You can sit on the windowsills. I wish that I could remember the first time I was standing in the room. My
true mind allows me to believe that I was standing in the room on some day in the 1960s.
Possibly circa 1967. Starting around 1966, I would travel from my parent’s apartment in Brighton Beach to The Guggenheim – and somehow get back home in a day.
To be clear, I am focused on the room. Sitting on the windowsill, looking at Jörg Immendorff’s Tarantinoesque slaughter with the warmth of the sunlight on my back, it could be the evening of Warhol’s “Flowers” exhibition opening – the evening when a photo was taken, a photo that now signals paid programming: progressive culture for the enrichment of the societal control moguls.

4 East 77th Street. The south side of 77th Street. The first townhouse heading East from 5th Avenue. Hidden among the pre-war and post-war wealth of The United States is this room, purchased by Leo Castelli’s in-laws. The goal on Saturday, September 27, 2014 was to visit Leo Castelli (now Michael Werner), the current Castelli Gallery at 18 East 77th Street, and go around the corner to 980 Madison Avenue: the 1949 Parke-Bernet Galleries building, which is now owned by real estate mogul and art investor Aby Rosen’s RFR Realty. It is also the corporate seat of the art advisory and investment specialist Larry Gagosian’s conglomerate.
In the most abstract way, I will now explain the connection between Leo Castelli (and the second-floor front room of 4 East 77th Street) to Larry Gagosian, Peter Brant, Aby Rosen, Adam Lindemann, Tony Shafrazi, Jeffrey Deitch, Per Skarstedt, the Mugrabis, and Bill Powers’s independent art investment office at 43 East 78th Street: Half Gallery. Incredibly, this ends or begins according to which side of the millionaire-to-billionaire privet you are experiencing this alleged art world oligopoly narrative from – or with Leo Fitzpatrick’s HOME ALONE 2 gallery at 208 Forsyth Street. On second thought, it is wiser not to explain the interconnection between all of the listed players to the second-floor front room of 4 East 77th Street.

It would be so romantic if I were to relate how Leo Castelli and Leo Fitzpatrick are part of a perfect continuous loop of elevated goals and elevated events. This is not going to happen. Or if I could write how the room where I possibly stood next to Andy Warhol on the evening of his “Flowers” debut (with Leo Castelli guiding Warhol’s promises of societal status and
financial return) and the room that I did stand in – possibly at anything from a Jasper Johns to a Joseph Kosuth exhibition – is the same room where I sat peacefully on Saturday, September 27, 2014, with the warm Indian Summer sunlight on my back, regarding Jörg Immendorff’s Tarantinoesque slaughter. Again, this is not going to happen.
That all of the above players must show their connection to this room for the sake of establishing a sense of aristocratic lineage is, from my personal experience, a falsely constructed proposition. There is truth to the statement that these investors can be regarded as champions of our progressive artistic heritage, and to the historical view that they have helped define our era’s ease with power, glamour, wealth, and fame. But there is just one problem: the room. The room is not paid programming. The room has been and always will be just a room.

In 1991, businessman, art collector, philanthropist, and photographer Jean Pigozzi took a photo of Larry Gagosian, Charles Saatchi and Leo Castelli in Saint Barthélemy. This photo can be claimed by the Gagosian clique (a.k.a. GAGOSIAN SACHS) as proof that they are the rightful financial and societal heirs to Leo Castelli’s heritage of glamour and power. Except there is
that room. That second-floor front room at 4 East 77th Street still exists with the directive of its own truthfulness. It exists for the very purpose of dismantling any and all individuals and organizations (both personal and financial) who claim to be the heirs to Leo Castelli’s title of the source, the genesis, the grail of intellectual truth and power. For some unfathomable reason, that truth and power resides within the walls of the room. Is it psychological influence or strategic power that the room possesses? All I can say is that it can be very dark outside of that room.

I want to explain the room. Its abstract depth. Its ability over 57 years and seven months to interact with numerous products of genius while possessing the generosity of independent thinking and a democratic spirit of all-inclusiveness. On any given day, the room might host a teenager from Brooklyn and the Italian industrialist Gianni Agnelli. Without each other’s knowledge, both might look at these wildly original and expository creations and form a deep, personal relationship with them. Castelli was an art investment coterie, and Gagosian is an art investment coterie. Both have shaped and defined their respective eras of operations. But I have never felt at any of the shows I have ever attended at the various Gagosian galleries that same sense of calm, clarity and connection that I experienced in the room. I can correct that statement. I did experience that level of communication in the fifth-floor front room of the Gagosian gallery at 980 Madison Avenue, where I was privileged to view Cy Twombly’s « The
Last Paintings » November 1-December 22, 2012. For a few moments in that newer room, I was able to connect Leo Castelli and six decades of art, artists and their investors to why the works were created – and why we seek those creations out. It is to experience truth. A truth immune to paid programming. No real or notional link can be established between Leo Castelli
and Leo Fitzpatrick.

I would like to close this diary entry with a final observation. In the 2000 edition of the A.I.A.
Guide to New York City, the authors Norval White and Elliot Willensky referred to 980 Madison Avenue as “an insipid box unrelated to any cultural values.” I recently attended three exhibitions at spaces that, in a contemporary sense, one would like to believe are connected to the room on the second floor of 4 East 77th Street. In truth, there is no connection. These
exhibitions were Lucien Smith’s “Tigris” paintings at SKARSTEDT, Dan Colen’s « Miracle Paintings » at GAGOSIAN, and Richard Prince’s “New Portraits” at the rear of GAGOSIAN’s retail space on the street level of 980 Madison Avenue. Somewhere within the financial network that invests in the creation and sale of these artists, there is the belief that these artists and their works are connected to an earlier group who all held their first, second and many subsequent exhibitions in the room at 4 East 77th Street: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. To be sure, the investment documents that govern this financial network require such a connection. I cannot state that there is any such connection.
While I could easily invent a historical relationship to the room, I do in fact have a long and deeply personal relationship to the room. Although the room obviously required money to operate, I never got a sense that any of the works on view were mere financial instruments.
This was also my recent experience with the Jörg Immendorff paintings. But when I viewed the aforementioned works by Smith, Colen and Prince, I felt like I was viewing the latest merchandise in a place of commerce. Oddly enough, my recent experience at the new VALENTINO megastore on 5th Avenue – a place of commerce designed by architect David Chipperfield – gave me the opposite impression. As I walked through a series of rooms designed to sell fashion merchandise, the disciplined approach to architectural thought and execution brought me to a place of calm and clarity. Will I end this diary entry by making a
connection between the quote that began this paragraph and what I have just described? The answer is no.

Steven Mark Klein
October 3, 2014
Hotel CLASKA
Room 406
Tokyo, Japan