William Rubin (1927-2006), the head of the Museum of Modern Art’s prestigious painting and sculpture department in the 1970s and 1980s, is largely credited with transforming the institution’s collection from a treasure into a powerhouse.
By the mid 1990s, he’d become the department’s director emeritus and was busy working on what would be his last major show, Picasso and Portraiture, which opened in April 1996 with more than 220 artworks.
Rubin was based in New York but spent much of the year prior to the show working out of his condominium in Florida, a period that coincided with a particularly unpleasant El Niño. “He decided that there was more sunshine in New York than Florida,” says his wife, the curator and art adviser Phyllis Hattis. “So we started to look for a place nearer to the city.”
Soon after, they discovered a house in Pound Ridge, N.Y., that had been designed by Vuko Tashkovich, an architect who’d started out in the office of I.M. Pei. “He wasn’t a wealthy architect,” Hattis says of Tashkovich, “and what he’d do is squat in each house that he would build—and then when he’d sold it, he’d buy another property and build on that.”
When they bought the house for what Hattis says was “above $4 million,” it wasn’t quite finished, which left the couple free to do the interiors and landscaping as they saw fit. “Aesthetically, on the interior, it wasn’t as articulated as we wanted, and how we wanted it,” Hattis says.
After some light renovation, the couple moved in and used it as a vacation home until 2006, when Rubin died at the age of 78. Hattis continued to use the house for the next decade, but now she’s putting it on the market for $6.5 million, listing it with Neumann Real Estate, an affiliate of Christie’s International Real Estate.
The House and the Art
The home, which has five bedrooms and six baths spread across 9,358 square feet, sits on a 3.5-acre property overlooking Mallard Lake, about a 50-minute drive north from New York.
After purchasing the house, the first thing the couple did was adjust the walls “and certainly changed around the lighting,” says Hattis, in order to “adapt the spaces, so that we could put art in them.”
Rubin, who was known for his own art collection, and Hattis began to fill the house with what she says was a combination of tribal and modern art.
Massive paintings by Frank Stella still hang on the walls; at one point, says Hattis, the house had works by Hans Arp, Alexander Calder, and Donald Sultan.