The NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale highlights the world-class photography collection of Martin Margulies.
Martin Margulies at NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale. Behind him is a photo series called Untitled (Overpass) by Nathan Harger, 2007.
Martin Margulies has a simple criterion for adding a fresh purchase to his ever-growing body of photography—an archive approaching 4,000 works in size, stretching from Depression-era masters of the form such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to today’s acclaimed tyros such as Barbara Probst and Alec Soth. “It’s got to hit me!” Margulies explains.
A fiscally conservative approach may be the style he’s brought to his successful career as a Miami developer, building an array of condo towers and shopping complexes across South Florida while carefully avoiding the boom-bust cycle that has rattled so many other real estate players. When it comes to art, however, Margulies says he needs a visceral visual shock, one that stops him in his tracks. Only then does the intellectualizing begin. “If I think the idea is good, then I look at the impact it would have on the wall, which is where composition comes in,” he says. “On the other hand, if it’s strictly retina-based”—mere eye candy—“and I don’t relate to it, it might be as beautiful as a Monet painting, and I can respect it. But it really doesn’t fit into the collection.”
One hundred and seventy-five photos that made Margulies’s aesthetic cut are currently on display as “American Scene Photography: Martin Z. Margulies Collection” at the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale. The museum’s director and chief curator, Bonnie Clearwater, hand-picked each photo (“It killed me to get it down to that amount from 300,” she says of her efforts to fit her choices into the museum’s space), honing an exhibition that tells the tale of not only the evolution of American photography, straddling both documentary and artistic aspects, but also the sweep of American history itself. Not least, it shows the development of Margulies’s own collecting eye.
Walking through the exhibit, Margulies recalls the first photo he ever bought, at the 1992 Chicago Art Fair. He was floored by a nearly seven-foot-tall photographic portrait of a young woman taken by Germany’s Thomas Ruff. After 16 years of exclusively collecting paintings and sculptures, he instantly decided to diversify. “She was staring back at you like a driver’s license,” he chuckles of the Ruff piece. “She was looking at me and I was looking at her…. You don’t analyze it. You just think, That’s someone I’d like to get to know better.”
The installation of the “American Scene Photography” exhibit, showcasing Margulies’s collection.
Intrigued by the medium, as well as his own response to it, Margulies moved from Ruff and his German contemporaries to the titans of American pre-war photography. From there, he advanced chronologically through the street scenes of Helen Levitt and the noir-steeped crime tableaus of Weegee into the post-war prosperity (and those it left behind) as captured by Bruce Davidson and Robert Frank, as well as intriguing urban vistas shot by Miami’s own William Maguire and Peggy Nolan.
“The more I learned, the more I became interested,” Margulies says. The depressed state of the mid-’90s art market actually aided this kind of collecting education. “There was no money in photos then. People were doing it for the love of the game. And they had intricate knowledge of not just photos, but the inner technical workings of cameras.” In contrast, he continues, “The other dealers focusing on sculpture and paintings didn’t really delve into it all too deeply. Their job was just to sell. They knew about their products, they knew about the movements behind those products. But they looked at photos as their poor brother.”
Those days of bargain shopping are certainly over in our present post-Art Basel period. Yet while prices may have soared drastically, Margulies insists his own approach to the art of seeing remains unchanged. The advent of digital technology and the rise of the JPEG may nudge academics into spouting paroxysms of art world theory—but not Margulies. “It doesn’t really do much for me. Like Wade Guyton using a printer and getting $2 million for an inkjet painting…,” he trails off with a shrug. “I look at everything I can, without worrying about the derivation of where it came from. I’m not interested in methodology. A lot of the works you see here are vintage, but some are printed later. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m not doing this for investment. It’s all about the image.”
Two 1977 photos by Jim Dow: Brooks County Courthouse, Quitman, Georgia (LEFT) and Monroe County Courthouse, Rochester, New York.
He stops to correct himself: “In many cases, it’s not what the picture is, but what the picture is about. That’s an important distinction to make.” Best of all, he adds with a growing smile, there are no wrong interpretations. “You use your own imagination so every picture tells you a story, and that’s the fun of it!” “American Scene Photography: Martin Z. Margulies Collection” is on exhibit through March 22 at the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale, 954-525-5500