MESSAGE
| DATE | 2025-12-25 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Jewish and the Arts today
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artsy.net
How One of New York’s Favorite Art Couples Built Their Exceptional
Collection
Maxwell Rabb
8–10 minutes
Art Market
Dec 23, 2025 2:00PM
Portrait of Marc and Livia Straus in their Chappaqua home, with works by
Anish Kapoor, Daniel Buren, and Jeffrey Gibson, 2025. Courtesy of Marc
and Livia Straus. Courtesy of Marc and Livia Straus.
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.
Installation view of Marc and Livia Straus’s home in Chappaqua, New
York, with works by Jeffrey Gibson, Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra, Georg
Baselitz, among others. Courtesy of Marc and Livia Straus.
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.
Installation view of Marc and Livia Straus’s home in Chappaqua, New
York, with works by Susan Rothenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Bruce Nauman, and
Antonio Santin. Courtesy of Marc and Livia Straus.
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.
Installation view of Marc and Livia Straus’s home in Chappaqua, New
York, with works by Anish Kapoor, Daniel Buren, and Jeffrey Gibson,
among others. Courtesy of Marc and Livia Straus.
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.
Installation view of Marc and Livia Straus’s home in Chappaqua, New
York, with works by Marie Watt and Louise Bourgeois, among others.
Courtesy of Marc and Livia Straus.
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.
Portrait of Marc and Livia Straus in their Chappaqua home, with works by
Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra, and Georg Baselitz. Courtesy of Marc and
Livia Straus.
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.”
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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