Picasso Biographer John Richardson’s New York Manse Is Available for $7.2 M.: Look Inside -ARTnews

A painting by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer serves as the centerpiece for the large living room in the apartment.

JOEL PITRA/DDREPS/COMPASS

In one room, a monumental landscape by Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer presides over vibrantly upholstered furnishings. A studio with turquoise-painted walls houses a sculpture by Alex Hoda, as well as Chinese vases, shells, and other curiosities. Two gold urns flank a decorative fireplace in an intimate dining area.

These, according to the New York Times, are just a few of the spaces in the former home of the late art historian and famed Picasso biographer John Richardson, who died earlier this year at age 95. His 5,400-square-foot loft at 73 Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan, where works of art by Andy Warhol, Ugo Rondinone, and Picasso abound, is now on the market for $7.2 million, with the real estate company Compass managing the listing.

While the apartment won’t come with artworks included—Richardson’s vast collection will be auctioned off next year—it does boast a few novel features. Grand mahogany doors, neoclassical architectural details, large windows, oak floors, and adjustable room dividers span the apartment, which was a dance studio before Richardson purchased it in 1995.

These days, editors working on the final volume of Richardson’s epic biography, A Life of Picasso, which was written with Michael Cary and is expected to be published next fall, occupy the apartment’s reception room and library. Among the countless art books that fill that atmospheric study, photographs show Richardson with Picasso and Warhol with Pope John Paul II.

“He had such a brilliant eye for interiors and mixing serious and playful things,” Shelley Wanger, an executor of Richardson’s estate, said of the apartment in an interview with the Times.

Take a tour around the apartment in the slideshow below.