Some time ago, there was quite a wonderful little shop called Old World Antiques on 57th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. It was presided over by my great uncle Fred Spanierman, who left Vienna in 1902. Nearby was the old Savoy Art and Auction Gallery. Founded in 1928 and presided over by my father, Samuel Spanierman, it was located at 5 East 59th Street and later moved to 50th Street across from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.
For more than a half century, Spanierman Gallery, LLC, has been dedicated to dealing in the finest American paintings and sculpture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In September of 1994, the gallery moved from 50 East 78th Street (its home for almost thirty years), to a luxurious new location at 45 East 58th Street, directly across the street from the Four Seasons Hotel. With 12,000 square feet of space, the gallery presents exhibitions of the highest quality, including loans from museums and private collections and works from our own holdings.
In 2004 the gallery opened Spanierman Gallery at East Hampton in the prominent Newcourt Mall. Its exhibitions have focused on postwar and contemporary art of the East End of Long Island, an area that has been the longest running artists’ colony in America, beginning with William Sidney Mount and Thomas Moran in the nineteenth century and continuing in the mid-twentieth century, when Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning, and many others generated ground-breaking icons of the Abstract Expressionist movement at their East End homes and studios. Today artists continue to derive inspiration from eastern Long Island’s shores and countryside.
In 2006 Spanierman Modern opened next door to our existing gallery. Its shows have featured artists from the early twentieth century to the present.
The gallery is distinguished for its scholarship and actively supports research in American art. Below is the list of our extensive exhibitions and publications, which have provided critical contributions to the field. In addition the gallery is undertaking the catalogues raisonné of the art of the American Impressionists, John Henry Twachtman, Theodore Robinson, and Willard Metcalf, on which I am the coauthor along with the notable scholars on each of these artists. These publications will be definitive reference sources. The gallery is also sponsoring the Lloyd Goodrich and Edith Havens Goodrich Record of Works by Winslow Homer. We have completed the first three volumes of this five-volume catalogue raisonné. This has been a monumental accomplishment for which I am proud.
In 2004, the gallery sponsored Winslow Homer: Masterworks from the Adirondacks, held at the New York Historical Association / Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York. In 1989 The Power and the Glory: Pittsburgh Industrial Landscapes by Aaron Henry Gorson traveled to the Henry Clay Frick Museum, University of Pittsburgh. In 2006 John Twachtman: A “Painter’s Painter” traveled to the Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich (Connecticut). In 2007, the gallery organized the exhibition, Fitz Henry Lane and Mary Blood Mellen: Old Mysteries and New Discoveries, in partnership with the Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts. This show was held both in New York and Gloucester. In the following year, three shows organized by the gallery traveled to museums: Over Seven Decades: The Art of Gershon Benjamin was shown at the Cape Ann Museum; Emile A. Gruppé (1896–1978) was shown at the Rockport Art Association; and Coast and Countryside: American Art of the Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth Centuries was held at the Pensacola Museum of Art, Florida.
