In 1990, Marc and Livia Straus spent several days with Anselm Kiefer in the Black Forest in southwestern Germany, where the artist maintained a studio. One work, titled Sefirot (1990), stopped the Strauses cold. The artist apparently liked it too—he was planning to keep it for himself.
Livia, a theologian, slipped into an intense back-and-forth with Kiefer about the Kabbalistic ladder embedded in the painting. Marc remembered thinking, “I just have to have this piece.” Moved by the interaction, Kiefer decided to part with the work. That towering piece now lives in the Strauses’ house in Chappaqua, New York, which they built in 1978. The episode is emblematic of how the Strauses collect: by instinct and by sustained engagement with living artists.
Today, Marc and Livia are among New York’s most respected champions of contemporary art. They’ve shaped their collection via decades of conversations in studios around the world. The couple lives between Manhattan and their Chappaqua home, filling their walls with mementos of these intimate experiences. Livia’s fascination with color and spirituality shaped their early taste. Marc is a retired oncologist and poet who gravitates toward difficult work he feels compelled to live with. In 2011, he founded the New York gallery Marc Straus. Together, the pair built Hudson Valley MOCA in Peekskill, New York, in 2004. Many of the works in their deeply personal collection wouldn’t exist without their patronage.
The story of the Strauses’ partnership began long before the Kiefer. Marc and Livia met on the first day of ninth grade in Long Island. They were friends before they started to date in their senior year. “I just knew I was going to marry this girl,” Marc recently told me. I was visiting their Chappaqua home, and he was sitting across the table from Livia. The pair wed in 1964 in their very early twenties. Marc entered medical school, and the pair moved into student housing in Brooklyn. There was barely enough room for the two of them, let alone an art collection.
The Strauses’ first acquisition was Kenneth Noland’s color-field painting Shift (1966), which now hangs in their son’s house. Their taste developed as they lived closely with every piece they bought, especially while they were surviving on modest salaries. Buying just one artwork a year taught them patience and precision. “One piece a year would be a lot for us,” Marc said. “It created a lot of discipline.” He still advocates a slow, thoughtful, and immersive approach to collecting.
While the couple made significant early purchases, they trace the true beginning of their collecting life to 1972. That year, they saw Ellsworth Kelly’s “Chatham” series, which features 14 paintings composed of two panels of solid color joined in upside-down “L” shapes. At the time, they were living in a small apartment in Maryland with two kids and a dog. They spent three months choosing the right “Chatham” work, then another six trying to secure a loan. Their ultimate purchase, Chatham VIII (1971), cost an entire year of Marc’s fellowship salary and took three years to pay off. That thrilling leap, Marc said, solidified their appetite for art.
The Kelly now lives in Marc’s office to the left of his desk. Another wall features Antonio Santín’s Trampolín (2025), a photorealistic painting of a crumpled, intricately patterned carpet. On the opposing wall is Susan Rothenberg’s Accident #3 (1993), part of the artist’s horse crash series. The second iteration of the series lives in the dining area downstairs. Nearly every artwork in the Strauses’ home has a personal anecdote attached. Marc recalls “many thousands” of studio visits around the world and a simple rule: “We never bought something we didn’t install,” he tells me. Living with the work was essential; it was how they learned from it.
Even contentious artist-collector relationships have proven fruitful. Soon after the Strauses moved to Chappaqua, they invited sculptor Richard Serra to make an indoor sculpture for the large gallery room. Serra instead walked the home’s perimeter, came back inside, and announced he knew exactly what he wanted to do: install a massive steel wall that would block their view of the lake. Marc told him he wasn’t legally allowed to build that close to the water. “Then you can’t get a piece,” Serra replied, and left it at that for two years. Eventually, he relented and created a much smaller steel work that sits next to the Kiefer in the main room.
Other acquisitions were more spontaneous. In 2012, Livia brought Marc to visit Jeffrey Gibson’s Brooklyn studio. “If Livia had told me we were going to visit an artist who makes punching bags, I might have skipped it,” Marc jokes. Instead, he walked in, saw a beaded Everlast bag and was dazzled by Gibson’s craftsmanship. According to Marc, Gibson didn’t have the means to complete the work, but they bought Deep Blue Day (2014) as it was. It hangs from the ceiling of their house, only half covered in beads, recalling a moment of collectorly love at first sight.
The Strauses’ passion for emerging art extends internationally as well. On a 2008 research trip through Eastern Europe—one of more than 200 studio visits that year alone—they met Adrian Ghenie, a young Romanian painter who was unknown in the U.S. Marc found himself trying to convince fellow collectors to buy one of the painter’s 8-foot canvases for $10,000. Few did. Today, Ghenie is represented by Pace Gallery and Thaddaeus Ropac.
The deeper the Strauses went into artists’ studios, the more urgent it became to create spaces for the work beyond their own walls. By 2000, their collection was large enough that they needed storage. As Marc recalled, “Livia said, ‘We can’t just put it away. We have to use the art to teach.’” They decided to open Hudson Valley MOCA, a space where their art collection helps engage the community.
Similarly, Marc felt driven to open his gallery after retiring from oncology. His program champions living artists and features unconventional, sometimes bizarre solo shows that include pieces ranging from salvaged-material sculptures to a 43-foot painting. “You’ve always loved helping artists develop their careers,” Livia said to her husband. “It makes perfect sense that…you want to start with young, emerging talents.” For example, Straus has supported Yael Medrez Pier and Anne Samat, who just staged a major installation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025.
Back in their Chappaqua home, the Strauses continue to learn from the art and artists they’ve supported over the years. Marie Watt’s Skywalker/Skyscraper (Portrait of Livia) (2021), in their basement gallery space, exemplifies how embedded their lives are with this work. It uses 15 of the Strauses’s family blankets to create a tower of textiles atop 21 cedar blocks. “I can now track my family history through Marie’s steel-pierced pillar of neatly folded blankets, that steel for me representing the strength of generational ties,” Livia said. “I had worried about what would happen to these memories of my past. Surely my children would have disposed of them. And what better way than to partner with an artist like Marie whose works entwine memory of word, of song, of security, of blanket-ness.”
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/2BbidtE
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