Displaying items by tag: upper east side

It was the Roaring Twenties. Women bobbed their hair and hiked their skirts, and an estimated 100,000 speakeasies flourished in New York City in the face of Prohibition. Yet there was an oasis of calm: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park. Overlooking the leafy landscape on the Upper East Side, the private homes of the privileged rose with the stock market and multiplied into elegant neighborhoods. In 1926, a small residence hotel with a Beaux-Arts façade opened at 20 East 76th Street and seamlessly blended into the neighborhood. The Surrey was luxurious and discreet; qualities movie actresses Claudette Colbert and Bette Davis and other celebrities appreciated. Later, John F. Kennedy made the popular residence his home in the city.

But by the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Surrey had lost its luster, until new owners launched a $60 million, 14-month-long renovation. Debuted in 2009, the aura of the 17-story, 190-room hotel‘s historic past remains intact, but interior designer Lauren Rottet has added a contemporary flair, helped along by the installation of thirty-one original works by international artists...

Continue reading this article about the Surrey Hotel, which was reinvigorated by the leading interior designer Lauren Rottet, on InCollect.com.

The granddaughter of one of the world’s leading dealers of Modern and Impressionist art, whose collection was looted by the Nazis, is launching her own gallery on New York’s Upper East Side.

Marianne Rosenberg, a long time international finance lawyer, has signed a lease on a space measuring around 1,500 sq. ft in the ground floor of a townhouse on East 66th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenue, in what was formerly the home of the Dickinson Gallery. The gallery, Rosenberg & Co, is scheduled to open on March 7 and will focus on the secondary Modern market, and also work with contemporary artists.

A high-end art dealer was robbed at knifepoint in his Upper East Side pad by a handyman who took off with some cash — but left a showroom full of pricey artwork on the walls, officials said.

Paul Quatrochi, whose stable of wealthy collectors includes Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, Baron Heinrich von Thyssen and Austrian Princess Michaela von Hapsburg, said he had a knife pressed against his throat for nearly 30 minutes while his guest rifled through his pockets and stole $300 in cash.

When Robert Blumenthal decided to open his first gallery, he didn’t consider Chelsea, where most of his local contemporary-art peers operate.

He thought about the Lower East Side, where several younger art dealers have found lower rents, but in February, he opted for a third-floor location with distinctly un-Chelsea crown molding at 1045 Madison Ave., near 79th Street.

“The Upper East Side is so unhip, it’s hip,” said Mr. Blumenthal, 33 years old. “Chelsea is a generation before me.”

Phivos Istavrioglou, a resident of Athens, Greece, has been arrested in connection to the botched theft of a Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) painting from a New York gallery last June. Security cameras captured Istavrioglou as he made off with the watercolor and ink work, which is valued at approximately $150,000. After surveillance images were released to the public, a panicked Istavrioglou mailed the Dalí painting back to the Upper East Side gallery in a cardboard tube.

 Fingerprints left on the returned painting helped officials track down Istavrioglou, 29, and he was arrested on Tuesday, February 19, 2013 at John F. Kennedy airport in a sting that lured him to the United States from Italy. After his arrest, Istavrioglou appeared briefly in a Manhattan court where he pleaded not guilty to grand larceny in the second degree. Istavrioglou’s bail was set at $100,000.

 The stolen painting, Cartel de Don Juan Tenorio (1949), was on view at the Venus Over Manhattan gallery as part of its inaugural exhibition, which opened in May 2012.

Beginning on November 13, Doyle New York will start auctioning select works from the Spanierman Gallery, one of the Upper East Side’s foremost American art galleries. Founded by Ira Spanierman in the 1960s, the Spanierman Gallery has played an important role in the understanding and appreciation of American art from the colonial era through the 20^th century. The gallery has also placed many iconic works in prominent public and private collections across the country.

As the Spanierman Gallery has decided to shift its focus to modern and contemporary American art, they will auction hundreds of works from their early American art collection at a number of select sales that will take place in 2012 and 2013. The November 13 auction will include thirty works including four pieces by John Henry Twachtman, the last fully bound sketchbook of studies by Maurice Prendergast not in a museum collection, and a double-sided work by Alfred Maurer that exemplifies the artist’s Fauvist palette.

Another 36 works from the Spanierman collection will be sold at Doyle’s American furniture, decorations, and 19^th century painting sale on November 19.