Of all the things a couple might disagree about, art doesn’t seem like the most contentious. But to hear the advisors who help collectors amass and arrange their collections tell it, finding a way to reconcile one partner’s Basquiats and another’s Bacons has become an integral part of the job.
“Many of my clients have called me their marriage counselor, and I’ve saved their relationships,” says Daniel Schnur, a New York-based specialist who, in addition to installing art in homes and offices, designs museum exhibitions. We tend to feel attached to and sensitive about our art, he explains, and these hang-ups can prevent us from seeing possible compromises. He recalls one husband and wife who had received a piece from the man’s mother, which the woman disliked. “We ended up hanging it upside-down in the bathroom, and it made her laugh. It was healing for them,” he says. “And it looked good upside-down.”
Schnur has hung art in thousands of homes, and he pays close attention to the dynamics between couples; his stories and strategies would sound familiar to anyone who has watched Couples Therapy. He recalls one man, now a long-term client, who initially made a joke of criticizing every arrangement his wife liked. “It was hurtful to her, because she spent a long time trying to get things right,” Schnur says. The second day he worked with the couple, the man returned home while the two of them were wrapping up, and the woman showed him what they’d hung. “I stopped him, and I said to him, ‘Okay, the correct answer is, Honey, it looks great. Thank you very much.’ And he smiled in a sheepish sort of way and said, ‘I think it looks great.’”
Think art and marital woes aren’t related? Think again. After a bitter divorce, the 2022 auction of the collection of Linda and Harry Macklowe brought in a reported $922 million.
The 2020 divorce of Libbie and David Mugrabi—whose family is said to own nearly 1,000 works by Andy Warhol—came with a reported $100M settlement request.
Sometimes, Schnur adds, the tension around hanging art arises from the immensity of the task. “They get into delaying it, and then the weekend comes and they haven’t done it. And then they’re arguing,” he says. “Combining styles is hard, and you really can’t do it yourself. I can’t do it for myself.” Unless a shared aesthetic is among your top dating criteria, you likely have different taste in art than your partner. Particularly now that more Americans are getting married or otherwise blending households when they’re older—once they have moved past the “framed Klimt poster” phase into a realm where their preferences are better-defined and where they may have made sizeable investments, both fiscal and emotional—blending different aesthetics can be a charged process. But it doesn’t have to be.
In February I visited a friend’s townhouse in Washington, D.C. Her boyfriend had recently moved in, and I was surprised by how their respective art collections had merged. A massive Rothko-like painting (hers) hung over the mantle in their living room, flanked by two framed Western posters from galleries (his) whose strong lines and colors enhanced the starkness of the larger piece. A cowboy in one of the posters played nicely with an antique painting of a horse (hers) further along the wall. The room shouldn’t have been as comfortable and cohesive as it was. “We had an art therapist,” my friend joked when I complimented the space. She had asked a specialist who had hung the work in her employer’s offices if he would consult on her home, and he had spent an afternoon arranging their respective collections to his (and their, and my) satisfaction. The consultation was expensive, but so is couple’s therapy.
Los Angeles art advisor John Wolf, who mainly assists couples in buying art, says combining collections often requires creative compromises. He mentions a client, a Lakers player, who balked at the cost of a piece his wife wanted to purchase, but relented when she said he could buy a Maybach. Family heirlooms, Wolf says, are a common point of tension, as is the scenario in which “the husband, when he was single, just had bad street art.” Wolf tries to diplomatically encourage the rapid sale of these bachelor collections.
Like Schnur, Wolf closely observes how couples communicate. “Let’s say you’re sitting down and in a conversation, and someone’s body language gets squirmy, and they start looking to the left and right more than normal,” he says. This might signal to Wolf that the squirmer is uncomfortable with the experience of buying art, whether because they have doubts about thie taste or, as is common, doubts about the investment relevance of art. “I need to speak to that discomfort, so I might chime in with something that is going to ameliorate their unease about price range, and make a comment about looking at this as an investment in their legacy, an asset that gets handed down to generations.”
Sometimes, admits Richard Stein, who moved into art installation in Los Angeles after working at a museum in Berkeley, the work is exasperating. “You spend hours doing some really complex thing”—crafting a layout where every shape and color is accounted for—“and then they’re like, ‘Oh, but these are the pictures of the Egypt trip, and we want these over there.’”
But Stein says he loves working with families over time, counting among his clients newlyweds and couples who, having grown old together, have moved into smaller homes, then condos, then assisted living; after that he sometimes works with their children.
Occasionally, of course, he also works with couples going through divorces. (“It’s like, well, gosh, I wonder who got the Ellsworth Kelly.”) Unfortunately, not even a perfect art installation can halt the inevitable.
This story appears in the September 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
Lauren Larson is a writer based in Austin, Texas, formerly an editor at GQ magazine and Texas Monthly magazine.
