San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Gallerist helped sell caricaturist Hirschfeld’s art
NEW YORK — The scene on a recent Friday at a Greenwich Village townhouse was like a cross between an art opening and a rummage sale.
On the sidewalk, a barker urged passersby to take a look. Inside the townhouse, a fivestory mansion on East Ninth Street on the market for nearly $11 million, the wares included signed prints by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld — elegant line drawings of Frank Sinatra, Jerry Seinfeld and dozens of others selling for thousands of dollars — as well as a plastic tub of electrical wiring, a heated massage cushion, a pair of 1998-edition Happy Holidays Barbies, and boxes of worn hats and purses.
Overseeing it all, somewhat reluctantly, was Jeremy Rosen, who for weeks has been trying to dispose of what his mother, who died in April in Manhattan, left behind.
She was Margo Feiden, a gallerist best known for the more than 30 years she spent representing Hirschfeld, the artist famous for his sketches of Broadway luminaries and other stars. Rosen described himself as “proudly estranged” from his mother, but it had fallen to him to sort through the abundant mix of junk and valuable art she left behind at the townhouse, which was both her home and the latest location of the Margo Feiden Galleries, which she founded in 1969. He said he would continue the estate sale for several weeks.
Feiden died on April 2 at age 77. A report by the city health department listed an array of causes, including cardiopulmonary arrest, pneumonia, urinary tract infection and “failure to thrive.” Though her family placed a paid announcement of her death in the New York Times that month, her passing had gone otherwise unnoted until a Times reader called the estate sale to the newspaper’s attention.
Feiden occasionally showed other artists at her gallery, including theater illustrator Don Freeman and writer Kurt Vonnegut, who dabbled in drawing.
Hirschfeld, though, was her main client.
As Feiden told the story to the New York Times in 2000, she met him in 1970, a year after she opened her gallery, when he came in to browse and noticed a photograph of her with an airplane. She told him that she had a pilot’s license and that flying was her hobby. His response, she said, was, “Any woman who can fly an airplane can sell my art.”
Her gallery started out on East 10th Street, later had an Upper East Side location on Madison Avenue and ended up back in the Village, on East Ninth Street. There were always Hirschfelds on the walls, but Feiden also mounted special exhibitions over the years.
For three days in 1991, the Madison Avenue location was declared an official post office in honor of the release of stamps bearing Hirschfeld drawings. Three years later, to mark the 25th anniversary of the gallery, Feiden had a 40foot caricature of Hirschfeld himself painted on the roadway. (Rain came before the sealing topcoat had set, and “he lost about 20 pounds,” she told the Times, though the painters returned to touch up the portrait.)
Margo Feiden was born on Dec. 2, 1944, in Brooklyn and grew up in the Flatbush section. Her father, Joseph, was an electrical contractor. Her mother, Jewel (Eliasberg) Feiden, had early aspirations to be an actress before, her daughter once said, becoming a stockbroker later in life.
Feiden had an early interest in theater. She is said to have produced a production of the musical “Peter Pan” with high school students when she was 16. The next year she staged her own play, “Out Brief Candle.”
Perhaps those early theatrical forays led to a brush with infamy that Feiden said she had in 1968, though she didn’t tell the story publicly until this century. She said that on June 3 of that year, a woman named Valerie Solanas turned up at her apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, insisting that Feiden produce a play she had written.
When Feiden declined, according to an account she gave to the Times in 2009, Solanas told her that she intended to shoot artist Andy Warhol, which would make her so famous that Feiden would certainly
change her mind. Another version of the tale, this one in the New York Post in 2018, presented the exchange somewhat differently: Solanas bluntly told Feiden, in so many words, that if she didn’t agree to stage the play, she would shoot Warhol.
In any case, Feiden said that after displaying a gun, the woman left her apartment; later that day, she did indeed shoot Warhol, who was severely injured. Feiden said she had tried to warn police and others but was not taken seriously.
Feiden opened her gallery the next year. Some of the earliest attention she received was for her skill at restoring damaged works on paper. She had begun collecting lithographs and, seeing that many were showing wear, studied up on how to restore them.
In this period Feiden was also apparently making use of her pilot’s license. She told biographer Patricia Bosworth for her 1984 book about photographer Diane Arbus that she used to take Arbus on joy rides over Manhattan, flying out of an airstrip on Long Island.
“Diane never spoke during these flights,” Feiden said. “She seemed mesmerized by the experience and relieved to be off the ground.”
Feiden’s marriages to David Rosen and Stanley Goldmark ended in divorce. Her third husband, Julius Cohen, died in 1995. She is survived by a daughter, Bambi Goldmark, and Rosen.
Rosen lives in Austin, Texas, and before this year he had not spent much time at his mother’s townhouse. When he came to New York to see his mother in January, he found her home in a state of “squalor,” he said. “By anybody’s definition of ‘hoarder,’ she fit it,” he added.
He was speaking on the street outside his mother’s home. Twice, a garbage truck drove by, and he ran off to hurl a plastic bag of junk into it.
At the same time, Oscar Fuentes, a handyman who acted as Feiden’s caretaker at the end of her life, called out to anyone he saw on the street, trying to sound as inviting as possible.
“Welcome to our estate sale,” he said. “It’s movies and Broadway history.”