The art that Ben Heller amassed and later sold would be worth about a billion dollars today
Ben Heller bought Jackson Pollock’s One, Number 31, 1950, when he lived in an apartment with lower ceilings. When he and Pollock installed the painting, it was too tall for the room; Pollock shrugged and stapled the top few inches of the canvas to the ceiling. Mark Rothko’s Four Darks in Red, from 1958, is at the Whitney. Pollock’s Echo went to MoMA in 1969. Heller’s small, fine collection of pre-Columbian American, African, and ancient sculpture complemented the paintings.
How did a young textile executive have such an incredible eye? In 1949, 24 and newly married, Heller was living at Riverside Drive and 100th Street. Intent on owning a major work, he bought a Georges Braque still life, and then other safe bets by artists he had seen at MoMA and the Met. But he was scared to buy the more experimental American work he was emotionally drawn to. “The eye is a rare thing,” he says, “but it came on my own with careful study, like a yeshiva boy.
After meeting Mark Rothko, Heller bought a painting called Yellow Greens at the Betty Parsons Gallery for $1,350, and a friendship grew there, too. In 1955, Heller offered to buy four paintings a year from Rothko so the artist could stop teaching. It was Rothko who nicknamed that first Riverside Drive apartment “the Frick of the West Side,” and the label stuck when the couple moved to this place on Central Park West.
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