Acquavella Galleries

Acquavella Galleries is a family-owned art gallery situated at 18 East 79th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. Founded in 1921 by Nicholas Acquavella, an Italian immigrant from Naples, the gallery has operated continuously under the Acquavella family for more than a century. It occupies a distinctive position in the New York art world as a dealership that has evolved from specializing in Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings to handling major works of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, Pop Art, and Abstract Expressionism.

Nicholas Acquavella established the gallery in 1921 at 598 Madison Avenue, two years after arriving in the United States from Naples. He began as a private dealer in Italian paintings, and the gallery quickly became a conduit through which leading American museums and collectors encountered Italian Renaissance and Baroque art. The business remained in family hands as it grew in reputation and scope.

In 1960, William Acquavella joined his father, marking a pivotal expansion in the gallery's focus. William broadened the program to encompass 19th- and 20th-century European masters, including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, and Cubism. His early landmark acquisition came in 1965, when he purchased 22 paintings from the estate of Pierre Bonnard and sold 17 of them by mail before even mounting an exhibition. William cultivated an international clientele that included Henry Ford II, Paul Mellon, and Walter H. Annenberg. In 1956, the gallery had acquired part of the collection of actor Edward G. Robinson in conjunction with Armand Hammer.

A significant corporate development occurred in 1990, when Acquavella Galleries formed a partnership with Sotheby's auction house to create Acquavella Modern Art, a subsidiary of Sotheby's Holding Company. This venture paid $143 million for the contents of the Pierre Matisse Gallery in Manhattan, comprising approximately 2,300 works by artists such as Joan Miró, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, and Marc Chagall. William Acquavella served as managing director, leveraging his expertise to market these works internationally through both auction and private sales.

The gallery has also figured in notable market episodes. In 2006, it brokered the proposed $139 million sale of Pablo Picasso's Le Rêve (1932) from Steve Wynn to hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen; the deal was cancelled after Wynn accidentally damaged the canvas in the gallery's premises. In 2012, another Picasso in the gallery's care, Femme Assise Dans un Fauteuil (1941), was damaged prior to a planned Sotheby's auction, prompting litigation by the insurer of owner Ted Forstmann.

In recent years, William Acquavella has been joined by his daughter Eleanor Dejoux and sons Nicholas and Alexander, ensuring the gallery's continuation as a family enterprise.

The gallery's holdings and representation have shifted markedly over its history. Under Nicholas Acquavella, the focus was exclusively on Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting. After 1960, William Acquavella steered the gallery toward major works of the 19th and 20th centuries. The program today encompasses Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, Pop Art, and Abstract Expressionism.

The gallery has mounted exhibitions featuring a wide range of artists, including Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Pierre Bonnard, Yves Tanguy, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse, Robert Rauschenberg, Alfred Sisley, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Lyonel Feininger, Alberto Giacometti, and Joan Miró. The gallery also maintains artist representation relationships. Until his death in 2011, Acquavella Galleries served as the international agent for British painter Lucian Freud. Current represented artists include Wayne Thiebaud, Miquel Barceló, Jacob El Hanani, and Damian Loeb.

While the gallery functions primarily as a dealership rather than a permanent collection, several transactions and acquisitions stand out as significant. The 1965 purchase of 22 Bonnard paintings from the artist's estate represented an early coup for William Acquavella. The 1990 acquisition of the Pierre Matisse Gallery inventory for $143 million was one of the largest art market transactions of its era, bringing approximately 2,300 works of Classical Modernism under the gallery's purview.

The proposed 2006 sale of Picasso's Le Rêve for $139 million, though ultimately aborted due to damage, underscored the gallery's role in brokering blue-chip transactions at the highest level of the market.

Since 1967, Acquavella Galleries has occupied its present location at 18 East 79th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues. The building is an elegant five-story French neo-classical townhouse that previously served as the New York outpost of the London art firm founded by Joseph Duveen. This Upper East Side address places the gallery within Manhattan's traditional gallery district, proximate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other major cultural institutions.

Acquavella Galleries remains a private, family-owned business under the ownership of Nicholas Acquavella's descendants. The gallery continues to operate from its townhouse at 18 East 79th Street in Manhattan, serving as both exhibition space and venue for private art transactions. Its website provides further information about current programming and access. The gallery's present role combines primary market representation for living artists with secondary market dealing in historically significant works of modern and contemporary art.