Works From The Collection Of Susan Goodman

Photo courtesy Susan Goodman

Christophe Ruckhaberle, "Blaue Stunde" (2002)

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New York collector Susan Goodman, who owns her own marketing consulting business, says: “I discovered my passion for collecting art just four years ago and since then, my life has completely changed. Being a collector has added to my life a richness of relationships with people and culture; [given] an element of discovery to my life; and most of all, it challenges the way I look at everything. When I am not traveling for my marketing consultant business, I am traveling for my art.”

My First Acquisition:

"The first work I bought when I started collecting in 2002 was a painting by Christophe Ruckhaberle. It cost €3,900—peanuts! It was so peanuts that when I look back, I kick myself [for not acquiring more].

I was excited about him as a painter, and I actually traveled to Berlin with Robert Wilson and some other people from his Watermill Foundation. I arranged in advance to take a train down to Leipzig, and I was met at the train station by Christian Ehrentraut of the LIGA Gallery in Berlin, who is now a really good friend of mine.

He took me to meet some different artists, and one of the artists that I was interested in seeing from doing some Internet searches was Christophe.

His studio was filled with paintings. They were all exciting, but this one I bought, Blaue Stunde, was a beautiful, haunting, mysterious, lovely painting.

In the corner of his studio was an old cardboard box. It looked like a box full of junk, but what it had in it were some canvases that he’d painted when he’d just started school. He reluctantly let me go through that box, and I picked a couple of canvases out that I asked him to sell me, and he was really shy about it.

But I purchased Blaue Stunde and one more painting that day because I loved them, and I thought that if he went on to a rich career it would be very exciting to have work in my new collection that was from his student days."