Collector Follows His Nose Through the Modern Maze

NEW YORK — The collection of Sylvio Perlstein is a relic of a recent time that already feels remote. For more than five decades he has bought avant-garde 20th- and 21st-century art, comprising both iconic masterpieces and recondite curiosities. Perlstein’s assemblage of paintings, sculptures and photographs fills every wall, niche and corner of his large house on the outskirts of Paris.

The collector, who is in his 80s, accumulated his art gradually, like a snail extruding a shell. “Money was not interfering,” Perlstein said on a recent visit to New York, where he maintains an apartment on the Upper East Side. “It was not a business. In the ‘80s, everything was almost free. Today it is all about money.”

He was propelled by his instincts and guided by the advice of old-school, deeply knowledgeable dealers as well as by the artists themselves. “It’s not a collection,” he protested. “In Portuguese, the word is ‘esquisito,’ things that are strange and unusual.”

But his modesty is unconvincing. Bernard Blistène, director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Pompidou Center in Paris, has written, “There is absolutely no doubt that Sylvio Perlstein’s collection of contemporary art is one of the finest I have ever come across.”

A selection of 380 pieces from the Perlstein collection will fill all three floors of the Hauser & Wirth Chelsea gallery in New York from April 26 through July 27. (Nothing is for sale.) Unlike the leading collectors of our day, who hire professionals to track the market as assiduously as hedge fund managers, Perlstein follows his nose through the bewildering maze of modern art. He says that he pounces when he sees “something not normal.” His collection includes Dada and Surrealism (Max Ernst, Man Ray, Dora Maar, René Magritte, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle); American minimalism and post-minimalism (Donald Judd, Ad Reinhardt, Brice Marden, Fred Sandback); and land art (Richard Long, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Gordon Matta-Clark).

Here are some of the best-known artists and themes, and how he came to collect them.

Like many collectors of contemporary art, Perlstein prizes his relationships with artists. He met the man whose work arguably forms the core of his collection at a gallery in Vence, in the south of France, in 1969, when he and a friend decided to salvage a rainy day by driving to an exhibition that bore the intriguing title “Les Invendables” (“The Unsellables”).

When they arrived, they saw a man leaning against the door. “What are you doing here?” he asked them. “What do you want?” He had such a strong American accent that Perlstein offered to switch to English, but the mysterious stranger insisted on French.

It was the American expatriate Man Ray, whose drawings, gouaches and watercolors made up the exhibition. Perlstein bought several works. Man Ray invited him to pay a call when he was back in Paris, and so began a friendship that continued until the artist’s death in 1976. Perlstein said, “He wasn’t giving lessons, but when you see somebody every third week, you learn.” Among other things, Man Ray explained the process of making what he called “rayographs,” where he placed objects on photosensitive paper and produced a photographic image without the intervention of a camera. Perlstein acquired many of them. “No one wanted them,” he says. He also acquired a selection of Man Ray’s iconic images, such as a woman’s bare back decorated with the f-holes of a violin, and an arresting portrait of the iconoclastic theater artist Antonin Artaud.

. Perlstein indulges his enthusiasms. For a while, he was enamored of neon and acquired sculptures that incorporate neon light bulbs: pieces by Bruce Nauman, Mario Merz, Dan Flavin, Joseph Kosuth, Keith Sonnier, Martial Raysse and Jason Rhoades. Wordplay delights Perlstein, and many of his works by Nauman (an inveterate punster) toy with lingo: “None Sing Neon Sign” reads the lettering on an early neon sculpture from 1970. A later Nauman collage reads: “White Anger, Red Danger, Yellow Peril, Black Death.”

As befits a devotee of Surrealism, Perlstein often seems to be guided by his subconscious. For example, he has a curiously large number of works that feature women’s hair (or hair look-alikes), by such artists as Tunga, Pierre Boucher, Harry Callahan, Magritte and Maar. Although Maar is best known these days for her relationship with Picasso, she was a highly original artist. Her photograph in the Perlstein collection of a three-sailed ship in a sea of hair, and another one of a tiny chair in a bare sunlit room, are memorably strange.

Perlstein likes to buy early work, before an artist’s fresh impulses have ossified into a reproducible style. He owns Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein and Brice Marden from the mid-60s, and his youthful pieces by downtown New York artist Keith Haring, notably a 1981 Mickey Mouse with a sexually suggestive snout, feel exploratory and vital.

“It’s the point of view of an anarchist, who looks at the 20th century totally from the radical expression of its time,” says the dealer Daniella Luxembourg, a friend who has sold him art. “That makes it a great collection that is not about him. Certain collections are done to glorify their owners. In this collection, he was really interested in the radical gesture — it might be with artists who never made it or with artists who made it a lot.”

Perlstein is the third generation of his family to own a diamond-cutting firm in Antwerp, Belgium. In 1939, when he was a child, his Jewish family fled Belgium in the face of the Nazi menace, finding refuge in Brazil. There, Sylvain became Sylvio and learned Portuguese.

He loved growing up in Rio de Janeiro, spending much time playing soccer on the beach. In a flower store on the way to the ocean, he became smitten at age 15 or 16 with a painting that was “colorful and strange.” The proprietor didn’t want to sell it, but he persisted. It was his first art acquisition.

A few years later, Perlstein reluctantly followed his parents to Antwerp, where he eventually took over the family diamond business. Ronny Van de Velde, a venerable modern art dealer in that city, was an important adviser. His collection contains many Belgian modernists — Magritte, Marcel Broodthaers, Pol Bury, Leo Dohmen. Brazilians also have found their way into his holdings: Ernesto Neto, Vik Muniz, Miguel Rio Branco, Marepe.

But he attributes the growth spurt of his collection to the frequent trips he made to New York in the ‘70s to call on the firm of the jeweler Harry Winston, for whom he cut and polished rough diamonds. Hanging out at Max’s Kansas City, he met many artists, who would invite him to their studios and would give him works or offer to trade.

“The artists were not interested in selling, and you could call and speak to them,” he said. “Today, you have to go through the secretary who gives you another secretary. You speak with 10 people to learn that they’re not in town.”

His pace of acquisition has slowed in recent years. “Lately I find nothing interesting,” he said. “Maybe I’m getting old.” Although he has purchased some recent works — by Rudolf Stingel, Damien Hirst and others — he relinquished his warehouse spaces in Paris, New York and Belgium. He wants to see what he owns. In an oval room in his Paris home, he has 100 black-and-white photographs by Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy on the walls. Elsewhere, on “my Minimalist wall,” he displays drawings from the ‘60s by Douglas Huebler, Mel Bochner, On Kawara and Agnes Martin. The house is a contemporary version of Ali Baba’s cave.

A widower with two adult daughters, Perlstein spends most his time in Paris with his companion, Simone Swaab. He has become enamored of New York and would consider relocating, but the art that surrounds him is confining as well as uplifting. Still, last winter, as he faced the imminent denuding of his walls, he was mournful. Asked how he would feel seeing the crated art exit his home, he said, “I’m going to cry.”