Inside Lucas Samaras’s New York Apartment

IN 1988, THE artist Lucas Samaras moved into the 62nd floor of what was then a new white-glove condo building on West 56th Street, an 814-foot-tall concrete high-rise that real estate agents have since named CitySpire. The block, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, is another fairly nondescript corporate street in Midtown Manhattan; perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that Samaras, who died last year at the age of 87, lived here at all.

One of the most elusive and difficult-to-categorize artists of the past century, who had, in the words of the curator Dianne Perry Vanderlip, an “impenetrable mystique,” Samaras created art in nearly every conceivable medium — sculpture, photography, jewelry, furniture, painting, writing, Photoshop collage — though his subject was almost always himself. Many of his works are self-portraits, which he began making as a teenager and continued until his death. He rendered himself in paint, Polaroids, 16-millimeter film and pastels; he did so while wearing makeup and wigs, bearded or cleanly shaven, fully nude or in a double-breasted overcoat with a fur collar. These works cover the 3,200-square-foot apartment’s walls. During a visit last fall, a representative from Pace Gallery, Samaras’s longtime dealer, pulled a black binder from a shelf, one among dozens lined up in an orderly row, to reveal hundreds more self-portraits, intricately etched in pencil.

In every portrait, he’s alone, with a look somewhere between bewilderment and relief, giving the impression that he didn’t come by this solitude easily and that he protected it at all costs. Samaras never married or had children. He spent nearly all of his waking hours working, but he never employed an assistant. He didn’t learn to drive a car, but he liked to walk — especially around Central Park. (“The outdoors is a luxury and a drug,” he said in 1971 while explaining his fondness for staying in.) Arne Glimcher, 86, who founded Pace with his wife, Milly, and began working with Samaras in 1965, refers to the artist as one of his closest friends. In six decades, he never knew Samaras to so much as go on a date with another person. He was a self-described onanist.

Samaras once called his art “the formal exposure of my psyche” (a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2003 was titled “Unrepentant Ego”) and said that his work was about “discovering unknown territories of my surface self.” It’s hard not to view the apartment as a kind of Freudian live-work space: This home was his world. His world was his art. His art was himself. Over time, those things became indistinguishable. He’d previously occupied a basement apartment on West 71st Street with no windows, so he was drawn right away to this tower, from which it was possible to see the whole city. His living room, at the end of a long entrance hallway, also faces New Jersey, where he spent his adolescence. The apartment is actually two: a one-bedroom and two-bedroom combined. He used one of the bedrooms to sleep in, another as an office and the third as a studio. But he didn’t do much to connect the spaces besides knocking a hole in a wall. (One of two kitchens sat unused.) What does unify the apartment is a series of cabinets and shelving, designed by Samaras and covered in gray laminate, that he used to display his work — every night before closing his eyes he’d see shelves with terra-cotta sculptures cast in bronze that faced his bed — and, in his bedroom, to store shoes. Though the apartment is crammed with works dating back to when Samaras was in high school, it still feels uncluttered, like a carefully curated private museum. Most of the furnishings — his bed frame, his dining table, his desk — are also covered in laminate, a minimalist through line that contrasts with the bright colors of his art. In his work, Samaras was fond of cheap materials — glitter, pins, fabric — and certain elements of the décor are almost like functional sculptures, especially the benches and chairs with cushions of colorful bunches of yarn wrapped in transparent vinyl, and the silver lamé curtains throughout the apartment that he stitched himself. Brilliant sunlight came in unless Samaras obscured it, and his preference was often for darkness.

SAMARAS SPENT HIS childhood surrounded by people. He was the firstborn, and often the only boy in the house, living with his mother, younger sister, paternal grandmother and two aunts. His youth in Kastoria, a town in the Macedonian region of northern Greece, which Samaras once described as “a small town where people of a certain age leave to make a better life in another country,” was marked by cataclysmic events: first World War II — the Germans invaded in 1941 — then the Greek Civil War. One of the paintings hanging in his foyer shows a starkly white naked body, arms extended upward against a black background. It’s based on his memory of the corpses he saw strung up around his neighborhood following the Nazis’ arrival. His father wasn’t around then — he had been living in New Jersey, working as a furrier in New York City and sending money home — and they never developed much of a relationship. According to the art critic Thomas McEvilley, Samaras’s early years were full of violence: Artillery fire injured his aunt and killed his grandmother during the Greek Civil War, and he’d sometimes have to shelter in a hillside cave. “To this day, when I’m not paying attention to myself,” he said in a rare 1976 interview with Art News magazine, “I can spook myself with the thought that airplanes are coming to drop bombs. I have only to hear a plane at night to experience this fear. There’s no way of eliminating that.” Yet he also described his childhood as “wonderful because of the war. … There’s a certain exhilaration in escaping catastrophe.”

When Samaras was 11, the family joined his father in New Jersey, and Samaras worked for him, learning to sew. He spoke no English when he arrived, and attended a public school, where, at age 12, he experienced the humiliation of being placed in third grade. He prospered regardless, and went on to attend Rutgers, where he majored in art and also excelled at sharpshooting. There he befriended artists like Allan Kaprow, the chief architect of Happenings, a kind of avant-garde live performance that emerged in New York in the late 1950s, and which Samaras helped shaped as a performer. (Samaras studied acting with Stella Adler, who would tell him, according to Glimcher, “You’re much too smart to be an actor.”) But he lived with his parents into his 20s, even after he’d had some success as a visual artist, including showing in the 1961 Museum of Modern Art exhibit “The Art of Assemblage.” In 1964, his parents sold their house and returned to Greece, after which Samaras completed one of his most beloved early works, for which he dismantled his bedroom and faithfully reinstalled it inside the Green Gallery. Though much smaller, that recreated space seems quite similar to the high-rise apartment he would later occupy: In images of it, the blinds are drawn and, as on West 56th Street, there are no luxuries, just a small bed, a desk and a lamp — and the only adornments on the walls are Samaras’s own creations. At the Midtown apartment, only one work by another artist was ever hung, a print by Chuck Close. It depicts Samaras.

IN THE LAST 20 years of his life, Samaras’s already small world grew noticeably smaller. Always thin, he mostly subsisted on soup. Glimcher was his most reliable link to the outside world, but many of their conversations ended in disagreement. Samaras believed people often failed to credit him. He exhibited geometric cellophane sculptures that influenced Donald Judd, who soon became much more famous than Samaras for making this kind of work. He beat his friend Andy Warhol to adopting a Polaroid camera, but it was Warhol prints that could be found in museum gift shops. He was painting and drawing with colorful crosshatchings long before Jasper Johns incorporated such markings into his own work, and it angered him that Johns got so much more attention. “And I would say,” Glimcher recalled, “ ‘It’s irrelevant. That’s part of the vocabulary of art. It doesn’t matter if you made them first.’ That would provoke a big argument. But then he was so sweet at the same time. You could never really get mad at him.”

At the end, Samaras struggled to speak. He knew what he wanted to say, but he couldn’t always get the words to come out right, Glimcher said. He also struggled to use his computer, which in his final years was his chief artistic outlet, especially Photoshop. He told Glimcher that if he couldn’t use his computer, he didn’t want to continue living. One day, he stopped speaking altogether. Then he stopped eating. “He decided to die,” Glimcher said. “It was very clear to me that his death was self-inflicted. If he couldn’t work, there was no reason for him to live.”

Samaras died in a hospital bed in the same room where he had worked. A show of his pastels and bronzes is currently on view at 125 Newbury, a TriBeCa gallery helmed by Glimcher, and Samaras’s sculptural installation “Cubes and Trapezoids” (1994-95), which was inspired by the shelves in his apartment, is now at Dia Beacon, the museum in upstate New York. Pace is planning a retrospective that will include works from the apartment, though the gallery is still cataloging everything in it. When that process is finished, a peculiar New York era will end. The apartment will be sold, and someone else’s life will enter it. It will be the first time that anyone other than Samaras has lived in the space.

Photo assistant: Ryan Rusiecki. All artworks © Lucas Samaras, courtesy of Pace Gallery, New York