"It's much better than I thought it would be, and it still stinks," Lawrence Salander says. "I don't understand where it's art." He's at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, scoffing at Damien Hirst's tank-encased shark, on loan from hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen and estimated to be worth more than $50 million. The proprietor of the palatial Salander-O'Reilly Galleries on the Upper East Side of Manhattan has the careless look of an artist when I meet him at the Met's information desk on a March afternoon. Big, bald, and unshaven, he's wearing an untucked T-shirt, hoodie, and paint-splattered corduroys. Three hours earlier he had failed to show. "I am so sorry," he says, claiming never to have stood up anyone before. His wife and lawyer tracked him down and now here we are, two strangers meeting as if set up on a date — only, one of us is in trouble with the law.
This meeting, the first interview Salander has given since his gallery was closed by court order last October, was arranged after a month of talks with his lawyer, John Moscow, a gruff former Manhattan assistant district attorney who is representing the gallerist in a bankruptcy case brought on by an avalanche of accusations. Among them: that he sold artworks he had no right to sell; that he sold the same works to multiple people; and that he never handed over the proceeds. Moscow was wary of Salander being interviewed — there have been many salacious accounts of his client's fall from the pinnacle of the art world to a Poughkeepsie courtroom — but I finally got a phone call. "Hey Kelly, it's Larry Salander, wanna meet at the Met and walk around the galleries and see some art? I'll be the bald guy who looks like a killer," he said, hanging up just as I tried to ask for his phone number.
It is hard not to warm to Salander despite his freestyling, kinetic manner. As I'm led on a tour of the blockbuster Gustave Courbet and Jasper Johns exhibitions, the 58-year-old Long Island native comments, loudly, about the soul-enhancing purpose of art and the soul-killing pursuit of money. Though he says the Courbet show is riddled with second-rate works, he thinks they still put the Johns paintings to shame. He can't understand why the somber pop artist's prices trump those of the mid-19th-century inventor of realism so many times over. Railing against what he sees as blatant market manipulation inflating the prices for contemporary nonsense, Salander suggests that his troubles were brought on because he posed a threat to the heavyweights making money "off of selling the emperor's clothes."
He makes a point of searching out Courbet's Grotto of Sarrazine, circa 1864. It's not the most expensive painting on the walls of the Met that has passed through his hands, but it's important to him. Salander recalls spotting it at Christie's five years ago, which at the time was also selling a Courbet appropriation by contemporary painter Mark Tansey. He was astounded that Tansey's postmodern take was estimated to sell for many times more than Courbet's real thing. Salander paid $100,000 for the Courbet, and flipped it to its current owner, the Getty, for $400,000. He speaks about the rush of experiencing great art and the unexpected boom — he actually pounds his chest — you feel when you see it. I ask how often he comes to the Met and he tells me: "Just about every day. I need the hit."
