The Art Newspaper

Stalwart uptown gallery joins the exodus to Manhattan's midtown

Hirschl & Adler trades traditional Upper East Side mansion for contemporary space on 57th Street

By Brook S. Mason. Web only
Published online: 11 August 2010

On the block: Hirschl & Adler's uptown mansion is for sale, and the gallery is moving to 57th Street (Photo: flickr user wallyg/Wally Gobetz)

NEW YORK. After 33 years on the same block as the Frick Museum, Hirschl & Adler Galleries is pulling up stakes, vacating a seven-story limestone mansion and opening in the landmark 1921 skyscraper, the Crown building on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street opposite Tiffany & Co in September. Their long-time home on East 70th Street off Fifth Avenue is for sale as is the building of their neighbour Knoedler & Company as well as the former Salander O'Reilly Galleries building—all townhouses from another era—signaling a close of an earlier chapter in collecting history and the end of that single block as a key gallery destination.

“We’re ecstatic about this move to Fifth Avenue, which is now an international art gallery crossroads,” says director Stuart Feld. Their new gallery on the fourth floor of the 25 storey Crown building will be 13,000 square feet and 25% larger than their current premises, though they will be occupying a single floor. “It will be dreamy not to carry a 19th-century sideboard up the stairs,” says Liz Feld, their decorative arts specialist and daughter of Stuart Feld. “This new expansion means we can show art and antiques both in a museum like setting and a domestic like setting with period furniture, silver, porcelain and lighting,” she says.

Hirschl & Adler joins contemporary art dealers Greenberg Van Doren, Nohra Haime, and Gering & López in the Crown building. D. Wigmore Fine Art, showing 19th-century and later American art, is there as well. In October, Forum Gallery will also move in.

At one point the long-time Americana dealers Israel Sack commanded a gallery in the Crown building, until their closure in 2002, so Hirschl & Adler will add a long needed decorative arts component to the gallery hub.

Hirschl & Adler specialize in 19th- and 20th-century American and European art and their modern division focuses on contemporary art. Director Stuart Feld, who celebrates his 75th birthday today, is an alum of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American painting and sculpture department and is completing the catalogue raisonné of Childe Hassam.