Art & Object Fall Fair 2024

How I Got Started ROWLAND WEINSTEIN KEEPING IT SURREAL

HOMETOWN/RESIDENCE: Born in Woodmere, NY, grew up in Los Angeles and San Francisco. OCCUPATION: Art dealer. MAIN AREAS YOU COLLECT: Abstract art and Surrealism, with an emphasis on the under-known artists. MOST RECENT WORK YOU BOUGHT: An extraordinary reverse painting on glass by Kurt Seligmann, the best in private hands. It’s quintes sential Seligmann—such a com plex work with surreal characters in conversation with each other. THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY: A beautiful Ruth Asawa wire piece that came up at auction and went for around $30,000. I felt sick that I didn’t get it. Now look what’s hap pened with Asawa; it would be multi-millions today. A real heart breaker. FAVORITE PIECE IN YOUR COLLECTION: At this moment, my favorite is a Leonor Fini painting called Donna del Lago . She painted this theme twice. YOUR ADVICE FOR NEW COLLECTORS: Follow your passion, follow your heart, don’t listen to anyone other than yourself. Whatever your bud get is, buy something unique and original that you love. A longtime presence on the San Francisco art scene, Rowland Weinstein founded Weinstein Gallery in 1992. The gallery, which specializes in non-objective and Surrealist art from the pre-World War II period in Europe through Abstract Expressionism and the New York School, is dedicated to the rediscovery of marginalized art ists and to the idea that art should be accessible to everyone.

( shown here ) Remedios Varo, Nacer de nuevo (To Be Reborn), 1960.

COURTESY OF ROWLAND WEINSTEIN

I came from an exceedingly modest background. I was a student at San Fran cisco State and teaching preschool, making $5.50 an hour. My parents worked in an art gallery, a commercial one on Fisherman’s Wharf. There was a Dalí print there called Persistence of Memory ; it was the first time I had seriously fallen in love with a thing. I really wanted to own it. It was $1,900, and I said to myself, I can’t buy that, there’s just no way. But I talked to the owner and said, what if I gave it to you in six monthly payments? You know how dealers are with someone vulnerable … the owner said okay. Heart pounding, I asked myself, what did I just do? I did pay it off, though. It was the first work of art I bought. My passion for Surrealism, which started with the Dalí, never ended. Even tually, I started my own gallery, and I hired two people who suggested I should do a show on the Argentine-Italian surrealist Leonor Fini. I did some research and ended up falling in love with her and with the other women surrealists, like Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington. This is where I started becoming a seri ous collector. I figured I can’t afford a painting by Dalí or Magritte, but I can afford a Fini. You could call it a passion or an addiction, but every time I made money, I bought a Fini for myself. I’ve been able to get a few Carringtons, too, and a Frida Kahlo self-portrait. Women have been wronged in so many fields, and I only have a collection because that’s true—it’s the irony of my life. If they’d been treated right in the first place, they’d have been beyond my ability to collect. For the same reason, I also bought under-recognized male Surrealists like Kurt Seligmann, Enrico Donati, and Wolfgang Paalen. I was always thinking, how could I be part of the story of discovering less-known artists? A

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Art&Object | Fall 2024