subject: Joseph Nahmad Nahmad Empire Expands Into Contemporary Art By Rachel Corbett [print this page] Joseph Nahmad bought his first painting two years ago -- when he was 19 years old. I saw this amazing Lucio Fontana at Sothebys in London, and I called my father, he said recently over chamomile tea at Caf Carlyle. But I couldnt reach him, so I bought it on a whim. It was one of the artists sliced Concetto Spaziale canvases, hammered down at 1.8 million. When I told my father about it, he was not very pleased. He had sold the very same painting 40 years earlier for about $2,000.
The impromptu Fontana purchase may have been an expensive gamble, but it's not so surprising if your father is billionaire collector David Nahmad, your older brother is Manhattan dealer Helly Nahmad, and your family has amassed, over 60-plus years, quite possibly the largest private collection of Impressionist and modern art in the world. The Nahmads, who now live in London, Monaco and New York, are notorious for treating the art market like the stock market. They protect the prices of the artists they own, for instance, by bidding on their works at auction. "It's called defending your inventory," said Helly Nahmad in a 2007 Forbes interview.
Joseph Nahmad skipped college -- Ive been going to auctions since I was five, he reasoned -- and instead has been working for the past two years at Helly Nahmad Gallery in New York (Josephs cousin is also named Helly and has a gallery of the same name in London). Now he is going out on his own, rejecting the familys longstanding formula of buying nothing made after 1965 (his father famously once called the contemporary art market almost a fraud), and launching Joseph Nahmad Contemporary this week. The inaugural show, Blind, Nov. 17-26, 2011, is a solo presentation by painter, sculptor and interior designer Roy Nachum at the 5,000-square-foot Openhouse pop-up gallery at 201 Mulberry Street.
At first I went without telling my father. Hes very hard-headed; he likes to stick to his bread and butter and he thinks contemporary art is all about marketing and hype, said Joseph, who has a beard, un-slicked brown hair and a youthful, casual carriage. Gradually he will be convinced that they have to expand.
For one thing, the recent Impressionist and modern sales in New York kind of struggled, Joseph said, while the contemporary market was fireworks. Joseph has already sold about 40 percent of Nachums works, priced between $5,000 for small sculptures of gorilla heads and up to $100,000 for his paintings that incorporate Braille along the surfaces. Nachum, who consulted with Lighthouse International for this show, approaches questions of sense perception -- visual and tactile -- from several vantage points. For one series, he invited 12 blind people to his Manhattan studio and covered their hands in charcoal so they could create brushstrokes across canvases. Nahmad expects about 1,000 guests at the opening.
Next up at Joseph Nahmad Contemporary is a Street Art exhibition in May that features Jean-Michel Basquiat and his contemporaries. Joseph has enlisted the curatorial help of filmmaker and graffiti artist Nemo Librizzi, and though he hasnt nailed down the location or details, he said he wouldnt be surprised if he also includes influential examples from his familys collection, perhaps by modern masters like Jean Dubuffet and Pablo Picasso.
