Mike Novogratz Models McQueen as Parties Rage on Cusp of Fall Season

(Bloomberg) -- New Yorkers have exactly one weekend before the fall social season brings opening nights at the opera and symphony, and a slew of parties at the expanded Museum of Modern Art.

Sounds stuffy considering the back-to-school shoulder season that brought Josh Harris to a castle (Belvedere in Central Park), Mike Novogratz to a runway (modeling Alexander McQueen for Laureus U.S.A.), Colin Teicholtz to Red Hook at 2 a.m. for an epic puzzle scavenger hunt, Stephen Scherr and Donald Mullen to underneath a 16-foot-tall bronze bust of a black woman on the High Line Plinth, and Steve Tananbaum to Pace Gallery’s new building to see the Who.

Having sued another gallery didn’t get Tananbaum off the guest list of more than 1,000 names. Those who showed included Maria Sharapova, Alexandra Cohen with art adviser Sandy Heller, Jay Sugarman with son Arno, Alan Patricof, Daniel Brodsky, David Levinson and Ziel Feldman.

None of them could claim as long a history with Pace as Dick Solomon.

“I bought the first thing Arne sold as a dealer," Solomon said of Arne Glimcher, Pace’s founder.

It was 1960, and Solomon, after earning a Harvard MBA, was working as a meat cutter at Stop & Shop, his mother’s family’s business, making $6,500 a year when he saw a sculpture by Mirko Basaldella in the window of a basement gallery on Boston’s Newbury Street.

The sculpture, now at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, was “3-feet high, a copper tube he had fashioned, very abstract,” Solomon said. He paid Glimcher, still in graduate school, $1,500 for it.

“Believe me, he saved us,” said Milly Glimcher, Arne’s wife. "If he hadn’t bought that, we were going to have to close.”

Later, Arne Glimcher asked him to invest in a new printmaking business, and when Solomon asked who was going to sell the material, “Arne said, ‘You are.’” He still is, as president of Pace Editions.

Arne Glimcher has graduated to the title of chairman of Pace Gallery, with his son Marc Glimcher the chief executive. While the younger Glimcher drove the new building project, which includes a 10,000-book library, it builds on the legacy created by his father.

“It’s never been, ‘Are we going to sell a few paintings,’" Arne Glimcher said. "It’s always been, ‘What can we do that’s part of the community.’ I’m not embarrassed to say we invented the gallery museum show -- we did it in the late ’60s. I consider myself as much a curator as I am an art dealer."

This approach helps to cultivate collectors interested in aesthetic values more than status, both father and son claimed.

"My first collectors, they always were interested in learning and visiting the artists and finding out where do these works fit in the artist’s career," Arne Glimcher said. "We’re starting to see that now, from people in finance and Silicon Valley. Because they’re not interested in what this is going to be worth 10 years later. They have all the money in the world! They’re interested in what it’s going to do for their lives."

Meanwhile, Marc Glimcher explained the more superficial matter of booking the Who. “We were at Alexander Gilkes’s birthday party in London, and there’s Darren Strowger, who’s on the board of the Who’s foundation" for teenage cancer, he said. “And we said, we need a music act, something that was cool in the ’60s and that’s cool now. And he said, ‘I’ll get you the Who.’ And God smiled on us, as well as Roger Daltry and Pete Townshend."

The second miracle of the party was getting all of Pace’s artists together on the seventh floor for a photograph. The third one was getting to sip martinis while viewing the art. And the fourth was not getting one’s stiletto heel stuck in between the beautiful wood tiles on the terrace.

"We’re going to fix it," Milly Glimcher said. "That’s the only thing that wasn’t as it should have been."

To contact the reporter on this story: Amanda Gordon in New York at agordon01@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net, Steven Crabill, Peter Eichenbaum

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