NEW YORK, NY.- Lloyd Macklowe and his wife, Barbara, had so little cash when they began furnishing their Manhattan apartment in 1965 that they paid for a $55 ceramic Tiffany vase in $5 weekly installments. But that modest purchase was just the beginning: It inspired a collecting frenzy that transformed the couple into dominant dealers in Art Nouveau decorative arts and antique jewelry through their Macklowe Gallery, which became an East Side mecca for deep-pocketed buyers.
Macklowe, who founded the gallery in 1971 and retired in 2019, died on Sept. 7 at his home in Bridgehampton, New York. He was 90. His son, Benjamin Macklowe, the president of the gallery since 2012, said the cause was complications of cancer.
The Macklowes’ gallery specializes in French Art Nouveau furniture and objects; Tiffany lamps and glass; French cameo glass by Argy-Rousseau, Daum and Gallé; and lithographs by Alphonse Mucha, as well as bronzes, ceramics and antique jewelry.
In 1997, they were invited to exhibit at the Winter Antiques Show, at the Park Avenue Armory. According to Ben Macklowe, it was the first time a gallery specializing in 20th-century objects had been asked to participate.
The gallery became the largest dealer of authenticated lamps from the Louis Comfort Tiffany studio. It placed important objects in, among other showcases, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Australian National Gallery.
The couple’s plunge into collecting antiques was serendipitous.
Lloyd Macklowe was selling print advertising for New York area businesses, including the Universal Folding Box Co., and his wife was teaching at P.S. 158, an elementary school on the Upper East Side, when, shortly after marrying in 1964, they sought to furnish their apartment by perusing offerings for secondhand merchandise advertised in The New York Times.
They went on to buy their first Tiffany vase at an antiques show at Madison Square Garden when Tiffany lamps were selling for about $500.
“We started with turn‐of‐the‐century and fine Art Nouveau collectible items,” Barbara Macklowe told the Times in 1974. “We found that we could sell a few things and make a profit that would pay for our own things.”
They began buying Rockwood pottery, which was selling for as little as $3 apiece; went antiquing on weekends in Connecticut; warehoused their purchases in the storage unit of their apartment building; and sold their finds to dealers in Manhattan and by mail through ads in Hobby magazine
In 1971, after they had started a family and found it difficult to travel, they opened a 420-square-foot store on Madison Avenue and East 82nd Street. There, they expanded into jewelry from the late Victorian era through the 1950s and added furniture, including designs produced at the Wiener Werkstätte, the early-20th-century Vienna workshop.
By 2015, The Wall Street Journal wrote, their Fifth Avenue apartment contained “one of the most important collections of French Art Nouveau furniture.”
The Macklowes also expanded their real estate holdings, owning additional homes in Palm Beach, Florida, and East Hampton, New York, where they had an estate that sold last year for $35 million.
The gallery’s clients have included Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Jobs, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen and Paul Stanley, of the rock band Kiss. As a boy, Stanley was fond of an ice-cream parlor light fixture made of colored glass that his parents had bought secondhand and hung in their dining room.
“One day, as I walked past the Macklowe gallery in my neighborhood, a Tiffany lamp in the window made me stop in my tracks,” Stanley wrote in his autobiography, “Face the Music: A Life Exposed” (2014).
“I still didn’t have any furniture in my place beyond the bed and my vintage guitars hanging in the glass-fronted cases lining the wall of the music room,” he continued. “But I went into the gallery to see the lamp up close. The price tag was $70,000. I bought it on the spot and carried it the two blocks home.”
Lloyd Jay Macklowe was born on June 11, 1934, in Manhattan to Mack Macklowe, a garment industry executive, and Charlotte (Silverman) Macklowe.
After graduating from Blair Academy in Blairstown Township, New Jersey, Lloyd Macklowe attended the University of Miami and Lehigh University.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, who was Barbara Sue Durst when they marred; a daughter, Amanda Atlas; four grandchildren; and his younger brother, Harry B. Macklowe, the real estate developer and art collector.
In 2017, after occupying several locations on Madison Avenue, the Macklowe gallery moved to a 6,000-square-foot space on Park Avenue and East 57th Street. Its inventory ranges from Pickslay & Co. chrysoprase and gold Art Nouveau cuff links ($2,950) to a Tiffany Studios lamp depicting a palette of wisteria blossoms that cascade down the shade ($1.35 million). The most expensive item ever sold by the gallery was a Tiffany “flowering lotus” lamp, for $4 million.
Prices can fluctuate depending on popular taste and other factors.
“As Lloyd Macklowe, the top New York Art Nouveau dealer, would say, ‘Always dance with your clients,’ a phrase that appealed to me, and one that I found to be absolutely true,” British art dealer John Jesse wrote in his autobiography, “A Fridge for a Picasso” (2014). “It was always best to be flexible on prices because, in the end, it was the sale that was important — as well as a happy customer.”
In 1998, Times reporter Julie V. Iovine was leaving the Winter Antiques Show when a small china pitcher caught her eye. It was shaped like a piece of fennel with a bumblebee perched on the stopper. She asked Macklowe the price.
“You don’t want to know,” he replied.
The pitcher, a rare piece of 1900 Paris-Exposition Sèvres, was listed at $12,500, a price that Macklowe sought to place in perspective.
“Think of it as something to work toward,” he said. ”It’s part and parcel of a much larger whole of beauty. If you buy it, it will give you something to look forward to with your next purchase.”
As for the Tiffany vase that he and his wife bought for $55 in 1965, Lloyd Macklowe kept it for the rest of his life. Today, Ben Macklowe said, its market price would be about $25,000.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
