ARTIST AND ART DEALER EYE-TO-EYE

Iconic 1985 Hofmann Self-Portrait now for sale

There is a particular intimacy that develops with a painting one has lived beside for decades. At first, one thinks one is looking at it. Over time, the relation becomes less simple. The painting looks back. It becomes a witness, a silent interlocutor. It keeps its own account of the years.

For more than thirty years, I have lived with the work of Richard Hofmann (1954-1994), East Village Neo-expressionist painter and AIDS activist. 

Among all the paintings, drawings, and works on paper he left behind, this self-portrait in oils has remained the one to which I most often return. It is not merely an image of Richard gazing out at the world in challenge, a challenge clearly mixed with a well-earned bit of disdain. It is the place where his true gaze has survived.

After Richard died in 1994, I became the custodian of his work. That word sounds almost administrative, the reality was anything but. I posted about the works, showed them in galleries, published documentaries, placed paintings and prints in collections, stored them, moved them, protected them, and defended them when necessary. What I have done was never simply a matter of possession. I have tried, for three decades, to keep Richard’s vision from disappearing.

THE GAP THAT WAS LEFT OPEN

Richard left a will. It should have been enough. In 1994, it was not.

Our relationship had no legal dignity in the eyes of the state. There was no marriage available to us, no automatic recognition, no presumption that a life shared between two men had standing. New York would not come to legalize same-sex marriage for another seventeen years; Obergefell would not come until four years after that.

That absence had consequences. It created the opening for a probate suit launched against me by Richard’s biological family. The will was valid, but it still had to survive a system that did not quite know how to recognize what our lives had been together.

The case was never only about property. To me, it felt like an attempt to break apart a body of work that belonged to a particular moment in New York’s cultural and LGBTQ history: the East Village of the 1980s, a generation of artists and performers living and making work under the shadow of AIDS, many of them gone before the institutions that now praise such histories learned how to see them.

In the end, the will was upheld. The collection has to this point remained intact. 

However, the experience left a deep mark on me. The long, drawn-out verdict in my favor was delivered at the tail end of the COVID epidemic, by which point I felt it was time to forgo my career as a financial systems architect and devote myself fully to its preservation.

WHAT REMAINS

This self-portrait has been with me through the whole of it: the courtroom, the storage rooms, the gallery walls, the long private years when the artworks were without applause.

It has watched me do whatever I could do. 

I have given Richard’s work my time, money, labor, and stubbornness. I have kept hundreds of paintings, drawings, and works on paper together in my studio in Red Hook, not just because it was sentimental or, looking back, perhaps even sensible. But because these glorious canvases still depict the human condition in its excruciating exactitude, at a certain point in time when New York City was still all about art, and art by gay artists fighting for their lives, the collection must not be lost before it is passed on.

Last October, a building adjacent to the studio burned to the ground. Many artists lost the work of a lifetime. I was among the fortunate, spared of their devastating loss, but only by a matter of a few bricks. 

The fire made vivid what had always been true. Preservation is not just a submission to film festivals or your posting on Substack. It’s a Herculean task which depends upon a great deal of chance, capital, and upon being able to make painful decisions under adverse circumstances.

A NECESSARY TRANSITION

I am now recalling how a brutish ownership demand for this iconic work was the initial salvo leading up to a full scale lawsuit in Probate court. Because it has always sat at the heart of the collection, gazing outward, watching. But now,  for the first time, I am offering this 1985 Hofmann Self-Portrait 20x22” oil on canvas artwork for sale, at $15,000.

I am not offering it because I wish to part with it, nor because its personal meaning has diminished. Quite the opposite. I am offering it because Richard’s estate now requires the resources to be promoted, collected, and preserved for public view.

Please turn here 1985 Self-portrait to view the work. Or contact me directly Director@artabolic.com for purchase.

EYE-TO-EYE

There is a final reciprocity in this act. For decades, I have stood eye-to-eye with the portrait. Now I’m asking it to leave, not as a loss, but as a continuation.

A purchase of this painting will help me continue the promise I made to it more than thirty years ago.

I am asking the next custodian to do the same. To meet its gaze. To understand what it carries. To keep its vision alive.