Andrew Schoelkopf moved his American art gallery from its longtime home on New York’s Upper East Side to a new space in the heart of the Tribeca neighborhood last fall. It was a big shift that he says “transformed our entire world.”
Schoelkopf, 57, grew up surrounded by the works of great American masters at his father Robert Schoelkopf’s legendary, eponymous gallery at 825 Madison Ave.. Though still respecting that rich history, he says moving downtown was a chance for reinvention and growth. Following the pandemic, he says the neighborhood where he spent most of his life and career changed and it was time his gallery, featuring art from 1875 through today, moved on to a new chapter.
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When Schoelkopf Gallery opened last September at its new location with a show dedicated to the works of modernist painter Arthur Dove, Schoelkopf was excited to present the 4,800-square-foot gallery space designed by Markus Dochantschi and his firm studioMDA.
“We have small, multiple galleries—we have three shows on right now and we could actually have four at a time if we wished,” Schoelkopf says. “That gives us an opportunity to kind of tailor experiences to different groups of people and invite a much bigger audience and the outcome of that is much more fun for us. Our foot traffic has gone up by about 10 times what it was on the Upper East Side. That is a pretty profound change.”
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This has all led to a needed shift in energy, one that also helps dispel preconceived notions of where the market is for his specific niche in the art world, Schoelkopf says.
“We are in a space of the program of the art world that people have the impression is shrinking and when I reassessed the business a handful of years ago, particularly after the pandemic, we started doing a number of things like publishing a magazine, Now Modern, and our experience is that we’ve seen 30% to 40%of the people buying our stuff year over year are new to the gallery and that is a very healthy figure,” he says. “It means we are engaging a totally new audience.”
Penta: When you were discussing bringing that new audience in and how it seems to dovetail with the global and local changes that have taken place in the past four years, what do you think fueled that? Is there a yearning that people have to connect with great works of art?
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Andrew Schoelkopf: Some interesting things that started during the pandemic in a big way and have stayed with us are, one, we have all of these long-standing collectors of American art and fans of American art who spent a lot of time and energy and money during the pandemic learning more about their own collection and engaging more with their own collection. They want to have partners in that research and understanding and that seems to be enduring. It’s really interesting, I’ve never seen a period in my life or career when collectors are as engaged with their collecting as they are today, and I was initially of the view that it would be a temporary thing during the pandemic, but it’s been long standing, and I expect it to endure.
How does the new space reflect that evolution?
This space is really purpose built. It’s built with a programming mindset that we have. One of the challenges in the business of older art—and we do represent Richard Estes, and other living painters—but we represent a lot of artists’ foundations and estates, the leading American modernists, and one of the challenges is doing this gigantic triumphant retrospective of a hundred things is really hard. It’s damn near impossible. So, one of the thrusts of our programming is to do what we call ‘intimate discoveries.’ We can take a small body of an artist’s work and really enhance the scholarship and bring that out into an experience that might only have 12 or 14 pictures in it.
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We have right now an interesting show of four paintings: two Diego Riveras and two Manuel Rodríguez Lozanos that got incredible press and incredible attention even though it’s only four pictures. It has been really fun to have a space that works for that [type of] narrative.
It seems like these intimate discoveries are a novel way to put works of art in dialogue with one another and have people come away from these dialogues with surprising takeaways.
And not just surprising, we’ve been pleasantly affirmed that even for an artist that is super famous. We represent Thomas Hard Benson’s trust, we have a great Andrew Wyeth show coming up, and we represent John Marin and others, but we’ve done shows where we take just a single interaction between an artist and someone else … we did one on Beauford Delaney about a comment that he made in one particular quote that he shared with James Baldwin and doing a group of works around that.
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That storytelling aspect and making works more approachable ultimately involves a younger population—it’s very engaging and inviting.
Andrew, earlier you mentioned the move from the old location and working and living on the Upper East Side for most of our life through your father’s work. What was it like to have that exposure to art?
My father started his gallery in ’57 or early ’58 and I was born in ’66. First, it was basically the gallery in the front room and we lived as a family in the back three rooms. It wasn’t until the mid ’70s that we moved out of the gallery. My parents’ business and the artists they represented and the estates they represented and the clients they had become such dear friends. It was totally just part of our experience when the artists came to town for a show, they tended to stay with us at home for a few weeks. When clients came to town, they sometimes stayed with us. It just made the art business for me very much just part of our family.
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I live in a very different way now, I don’t live here—when clients come see us at the gallery, we want to sit and hang out with them for a while. … Part of this space is having a visiting space, a salon to hang out and talk about art and catch up. My hope is to have people who are happy to come here and spend a lot of time here.
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When you were discussing the new clients who are just discovering your gallery, are there certain trends or types of artists or works you think people are gravitating to now more than in the past?
The cultural changes and the changes in the world generally over the last seven to 10 years they’ve just kind of by necessity and with great wisdom kind of shredded the canon of the ways we used to approach our work. The great benefit of that is it’s been so welcoming and inviting to a totally different population. We’ve seen it writ large in the contemporary world with the growth of interest in certain living artists, but it’s also been true of estates and foundations and trusts who deserved more attention but didn’t get it. Being able to do projects on artists that a lot of people have just forgotten … that has really been a benefit of the last six or so years.
What do you gravitate to for art? What speaks to you or moves you when you’re looking at a great piece?
For me, it’s all about discovery. Research, particularly on the works of the first half of the 20th century, late 19th century, we find that research inspires a lot of good stuff and it’s exciting. I feel we are all as a team learning, we’ve got quite a big team now and three people devoted to scholarship and research, and that’s because it always gives birth to new ideas and new stories that we can help tell. The greatest thing about the art business is that you can constantly be learning, constantly be reassessing, constantly be given the opportunity to look at things from a different way. That’s why I’m in the business.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.