Dealers' Choice

Photo by Jean-François Jaussaud

Dominique Lévy has no fear of decorating in bright hues, such as those in Verner Panton’s Fireball lamp type E, 1970. Behind it are prints, drawings and embroidery by various artists.

Photo by Jean-François Jaussaud

Lévy in her Tribeca loft with Marc Newson’s Fauteuil/Orgone, 1993.

George Condo Donald Baechler Willem de Kooning Ron Arad Hiroshi Sugimoto Julie Mehretu Alfonso Ossorio Betye Saar

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Gallerists of all stripes agree that design is the perfect pairing for modern and contemporary art. 

Ten years ago, the New York contemporary-art dealer Sean Kelly wandered into an unassuming antique-furniture shop in upstate New York and saw a circular brushed stainless-steel PK54 table by the Danish designer Poul Kjaerholm. The 1963 piece is expandable and has a slightly rough, flint-rolled marble top. “Everything about it is extraordinary: its design, technology, the way the surface was used, the interplay of materials,” Kelly says now. Unable to get it out of his mind, he returned a few days later and bought it. “I became fascinated by it as an object,” he says, “and realized it is an artwork.”

With that purchase, Kelly was hooked. He now owns some 100 Kjaerholm creations, which he displays in his SoHo loft and will soon install in the country house he is building just outside the town of Chatham. There he will place one of the designer’s “suspended” sofas—a modular piece bracketed to the wall—next to Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void, 1960, a doctored photograph of what appears to be the artist gracefully plummeting from the window of a Paris apartment.

Kelly is among a growing coterie of modern- and contemporary-art dealers who are bringing design into their homes and, more recently, their personal styles into their galleries. Not only does their appreciation of one-of-a-kind furniture dovetail with their love of fine art, but high design also plays up the paintings and sculptures with which it is displayed. Plus, having a smart collection gives the impression of being in the know, thus burnishing dealers’ images and helping them woo clients. In the clubby and cozy art trade, sales are increasingly taking place in dealers’ homes, or at least starting there, and fashionable furnishings can inspire prospective purchasers. An added benefit: If a client wants a similar table or chair to go with the painting or sculpture he or she just bought, the dealer may be in a position to source it.

The Central Park West apartment of Michael Rosenfeld and Halley Harrisburg, the husband-and-wife team behind Rosenfeld’s eponymous New York gallery, which specializes in 20th-century American art, is a showplace of sorts. “What a lot of people find fascinating when they come to our home is that we live with a lot of sensibilities. It’s fun to make people realize, ‘Oh, no, you can hang four things in that little space,’” Harrisburg says. “We enjoy helping clients do that.” The couple has been able to bring disparate elements together by toning down colors and keying up textures, such as the warm, gnarly wood of George Nakashima, the smooth grains of Gilbert Rohde and the leather of Kjaerholm. The result is a decor that has panache but is also neutral, so that it doesn’t distract from the art: gray, multidimensional wall pieces by Lee Bontecou (“Much of the design of this house was about living with her work,” says Harrisburg), a horse sculpture by Deborah Butterfield, a pastoral family portrait by Fairfield Porter, as well as paintings by artists the gallery represents exclusively, such as Alfonso Ossorio and Betye Saar.

Has the design craze among dealers contributed to the perception of design as art, or is it a by-product of it? The answer probably is a little of both. Some trendsetting dealers have been acquiring this material for decades, while others are just cutting their teeth. Matthias Arndt, founder of the Berlin and Zurich gallery Arndt & Partner, and his wife, Tiffany Wood, the creative director of Phillips, de Pury & Company, began buying design pieces just two years ago for their apartment in the German capital. Arndt’s reason for branching into the category is a practical one. “I’m not supposed to collect my artists, because it keeps the work away from my clients,” says the dealer, who represents a host of German talents in addition to the American Sue de Beer, the French Sophie Calle and the Japanese Hiroshi Sugimoto. “I thought this could be a field where I could try to build a collection that I can live with.” He and his wife favor objects from the 1960s–’80s by the likes of Joe Colombo, Javier Mariscal and Gaetano Pesce, as well as even newer pieces by such young German designers as Vogt & Weizenegger: A prototype of the duo’s plastic Sinterchair No. 0, sits in the couple’s living room on a pedestal, as if it were a sculpture, underneath German painter Thomas Scheibitz’s small 1999 oil of a cropped tree trunk, Plexal.