ARTS
Bill and Rebecca Rau
Bill Rau
Art Dealer Comes to Hamptons Fine Art Fair BY B E N N E T T M A R C U S
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he Hamptons Fine Art Fair is back this July, and nobody is happier about it than Bill Rau, proprietor of legendary New Orleans emporium M.S. Rau that will mark its debut in-person presence at the prestigious fair with a selection of extraordinary pieces.
One of North America’s most respected fine art, antiques and jewelry galleries, M.S. Rau joined the fair two years ago, virtually, thanks to the pandemic. But Bill Rau finds that meeting clients in person is much more exciting. “We like being there, we like speaking with people, and we’d like to think we have very impressive objects, and they’re just so much better when you can see them in person,” says Rau, the third generation to run the family-owned French Quarter gallery, which celebrates its 110thanniversary this year. Among the treasures Rau will present at the Fair are works by Picasso, Rembrandt, Childe Hassam, Dali and Renoir, as well as a rare Warhol “Last Supper,” to be shown for the first time, an $8.9 million early Claude Monet,
The Tower of Katoubia Mosque by Winston Churchill
and several paintings by Frank Sinatra, which are highly prized Warhol’s “Last Supper” Warhol’s “Last Supper” is exceedingly rare; as it’s his last piece, there was only one set made before he passed away in 1987. It was Warhol’s final show, in Milan, across the street from Da Vinci’s original “Last Supper” mural, and drew 30,000 visitors, including the Pope. A California client commissioned specially sized copies of the five-piece series to fit a chapel at his home. Soon after completing them, Warhol died following gallbladder surgery. “Unequivocally, Warhol would’ve made dozens if not hundreds of them, but he didn’t because he died,” says Rau. “I can’t think of any other examples where he didn’t make multiples of pieces.” If he made one, he made many, including about 800 Marilyn Monroe’s and 1,000 Campbell Soup Cans. “They weren’t all the same, there were minor differences, but he would take the same motif and just do it over.” So, these were unique, and were authenticated by the Warhol Foundation just before the organization stopped offering
authentication service. After 25 years in the collector’s home, the works were loaned to the Reagan Library, which held a show and produced a book on them, after which Rau was able to acquire them. This is the last one of those five large originals, about six feet tall. Claude Monet landscape The oil by Claude Monet, a depiction of cliffs, is from the impressionist’s first series of landscapes done en plein air, for which he is renowned. It was one of two Monets in the collection of a museum in Minnesota, which sold it to M.S. Rau in order to finance the purchase of another work. “It’s fresh from a museum and it’s just beautiful,” says Rau, considered one of the foremost experts on 18th- and 19th-century European and American antiques and fine art. Frank Sinatra paintings At the Hamptons Fair M.S. Rau is offering three oil paintings by Frank Sinatra, whose work is highly sought after by collectors of American pop culture memorabilia. “Sinatra didn’t sell his works,” Rau says of the
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