Chairperson

Robert Wilson—the visionary stage director, playwright and artist—recounts how his fascination with the chair as art object began: “When I was eight years old, I went to visit my uncle in New Mexico. He lived as a recluse, very sparsely, with a mattress on the floor, a few Navajo blankets, American Indian pottery and a small, thin, wooden side chair. I told him, ‘That’s a beautiful chair.’ Two years later he sent it to me as a Christmas present. It was a very special gift because, growing up in Waco, Texas, I was accustomed to presents of red flannel shirts and cowboy boots.” As with many Wilson anecdotes, the tale’s ending has a wry twist. “Then, when I was 17, my cousin wrote our uncle and told him he wanted the chair. And so I had to send it back.”

This account not only reveals the underpinnings of Wilson’s passionate connoisseurship but also foreshadows the loss he would experience decades later when he was forced to leave his Manhattan home. Wilson, 66, moved to New York in his early 20s, spry, thin and filled with radical ideas about performance art, theater and dance. He made his name in 1971, when the Paris production of his play Deafman Glance was hailed by the French poet and novelist Louis Aragon as the future of Surrealist theater, and then cemented his position as America’s foremost avant-garde dramatist with 1976’s Einstein on the Beach—cowritten with the composer Philip Glass and presented at the Festival d’Avignon, in France, and at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House. Between these productions, Wilson settled into his 6,000-square-foot loft on Vestry Street, in Tribeca, in 1973.

Over the next three decades, he filled the space with some 3,000 objects: tribal art, sculpture and textiles; traditional Asian art; and contemporary glassware, drawings and photographs alongside paintings, prints and sculpture by the likes of Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Richard Serra. At the collection’s core were dozens of chairs by such design-world luminaries as Charles Eames, Finn Juhl, Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto and Philippe Starck.

In 2005, the prominent real estate developer (and art collector) Aby Rosen bought Wilson’s apartment building with the intention of turning it into a luxury condominium, forcing Wilson and his fellow tenants to leave. Although devastated, Wilson decided to use the move as an opportunity to pare down his holdings, prompting a 400-lot sale at Philips de Pury & Company in New York this past September. Among the nearly 50 chairs to hit the block were six designed by Wilson himself. His Bessie Smith Breakfast Chair, from the 1988 jazz opera Cosmopolitan Greetings, which he cocreated with the poet Allen Ginsberg and the Swiss composers George Gruntz and Rolf Liebermann, was the sweet surprise of the day: It went for $36,000, more than twice its low estimate of $15,000. Other top sellers included a vibrant, rainbow-hued armchair made in 2000 by the Italian designer Alessandro Mendini, which fetched $12,000 (est. $10–15,000), and a bleached-birch and painted-wood chair from an edition of 15 that Wilson designed for his 1988 theatrical production Parzival, which went for $14,400 (est. $15–20,000).

“To me, chairs have personalities. In ancient times, sculptures were made for the gods—this is my way of sculpting a personality in a chair,” says Wilson, who over his 40-year-long career has designed dozens of chairs, which he typically has produced in limited editions of between 5 and 10. “I’ve created a chair for just about every one of my performances.” He explains that these objects serve to further the narrative or call attention to the performers’ movements. For The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, his 1973 12-hour opera, Wilson draped two chairs in lead sheets, in an allusion to the harshness of the Soviet dictator’s rule. Fabricated in partnership with New York’s Marian Goodman Gallery, the prototype is now in the collection of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, in Wilson’s home state.

Today the bulk of what remains of Wilson’s loft inventory—including chair examples that he bought and ones that he birthed—can be found at his 35,000-square-foot Watermill Center, in Southampton, New York, which, before this migration, already housed some 3,000 pieces, everything from historic totem poles from Papua New Guinea to the contemporary drawings of the late abstract artist Agnes Martin. (Wilson has yet to secure a new Manhattan nest, so many more chairs sit in storage.) He purchased the building, a former Western Union factory, in 1992 and embarked on a 15-year-long renovation (unveiled in its entirety in the summer of 2006) with the help of a starry lineup of architects—François de Menil, Fred Stelle, Richard Gluckman and Frank Michielli among them. The center, which is separated into public and residential areas, with a large wing dedicated to dorms and Wilson’s apartment, plays host to multidisciplinary artists participating in short-term residencies. Monthly open houses allow locals to wander the premises and view its guests’ performances, providing Wilson’s art objects with a decidedly wider audience than they had at his Manhattan abode.