Finders Keepers for a Collector on the Prowl

NEW YORK — The storied Chelsea Hotel was filled with artists and beat poets when Michael Rips and his wife, Sheila Berger, an artist, moved in 24 years ago. “This had been Charles James’ apartment and atelier,” Rips, the executive director of the Art Students League, said, referring to the eccentric designer said to be one of the models for the couturier in the film “Phantom Thread.”

“My mother was a big Charles James fan,” Rips said. He grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, where his parents collected modern American ceramics and helped found the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, which started his lifelong obsession with art. In a tribute to the apartment’s pedigree, the bathroom features a Cecil Beaton photograph of a young James fitting a dress on a model. Hung inside a lavishly ornate gold-leaf frame, the photograph swings forward from the right to reveal a cleverly constructed medicine cabinet.

In the hallway is a frame-within-a-frame installation surrounding a Julio Romero de Torres painting. “My affection for frames is not just aesthetic but as totems of a community of people I’ve been involved with since I was a kid, in junk stores, antique shops and flea markets,” Rips said.

Not a weekend goes by when he isn’t hauling home eclectic finds — be it African fetish objects, photographs by African artists including Malick Sidibé or a moody 19th-century coastal landscape painting by Albert Pinkham Ryder. “He lived in this area and would wander the piers of Chelsea late at night,” Rips said.

Rips’ tenure at the league began last December, after a law career often spent representing museums and artists. The apartment has long been filled with works by league teachers or students, including Robert Henri, Will Barnet, James Rosenquist, who was a friend, and Berger, a sculptor who works in metal.

Following are edited excerpts from a conversation with the couple.

MICHAEL RIPS: Typically it’s through private dealers or in the flea markets or auction houses. The more eclectic, the better. I love those shops that used to be all over Chelsea with lamps and 19th-century portraits and a torn tablecloth from the 1950s.

RIPS: I was in the flea market in the garage on 25th Street and noticed on the ground a beautiful etching. It was signed with a hand-drawn butterfly that Whistler used to sign his drawings. It was the image of the daughter of his great patron. He was having an affair with the great patron’s wife.

SHEILA BERGER: Michael’s become a scholar of the obscure or secondary signature.

RIPS: You know, it didn’t occur to me!

BERGER: Michael was his muse for a couple of years in the 1990s. He’s in a lot of paintings with different girlfriends of David’s.

RIPS: Not in any compromising way but just contiguous with them. Sheila and I were in a restaurant. A guy comes over and says, “I’m Don Rubell, I have your image by David Salle hanging over my bed.”

RIPS: This [a painting of a bowl of sugar cubes] is by Walter Robinson, a very close friend. He referred to a girlfriend long ago as “Sugar,” and this is a portrait of her. I bought this in St. Louis and thought nobody was going to bid against me. I was on the phone and then somebody else is seriously bidding. Ultimately, I bought it and paid a lot of money for it, for me. Then I was having dinner with Walter and he goes: “I’m so damn disappointed. I was bidding on one of my pieces at this little auction house in St. Louis.” So the two of us idiots were bidding against each other.