Sooner or later, someone in the precincts of fine art is bound to mention the Acquavellas. The name sounds like a high-wire act, and to a global network of prominent collectors that is what it represents: a family of dealers who cater to connoisseurs paying the very pretty penny it costs to acquire the museum-worthy artworks that the Acquavella Galleries consistently offer in New York and, since COVID, Palm Beach. Indeed, many of their most frequent customers are museums—the Getty, the Kimbell, the Norton Simon, and so forth, as well as museums in Europe and Asia.
To date, three generations of Acquavellas have presented beguiling exhibitions focused on European and American masterworks from the 19th century to the 21st, sourcing and selling them with a combination of cunning and the folksy charm of a Norman Rockwell painting, minus the corn. This family is in business for the money.
On that, and just about every other point, the four principals wholeheartedly agree. There isn’t a rebellious streak in any of them, and they claim to never squabble about anything. “We wouldn’t know how,” admits Eleanor, 52, the eldest of three Acquavella offspring who have joined their hale, 88-year-old father, William, in the gallery founded in 1921 by his father, Nicholas, as an emporium for Old Masters.
Eleanor Acquavella
It’s not that they finish each other’s sentences, but during a visit to the sumptuous neoclassical mansion that is their flagship on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, it was clear that they function with an equanimity so pronounced it’s as if siblings and sire have signed noncompete contracts to ward off conflict, which they each say they do not feel.
I’ve come to interview Eleanor about the gallery’s thriving outpost in Palm Beach, which she oversees, but her three partners stop by to supplement the narrative. Alex, 45, the younger of her two half-brothers, credits their father for their frictionless relationships. “Our dad has never put one of us in front of the other,” he explains, citing their equal stakes in the business as another stabilizer. “We don’t work on commission. It’s not any more beneficial for me to do a deal than it is for El.”
It’s a sweet one. Nick Acquavella, who is 48, can’t help but agree. Though each is the point person for specific artists, he says, “We cover for each other.” Yet, for all the perks of a life in art—working with objects of beauty and enjoying the company of “super interesting people”—keeping the business in the family has its drawbacks. “You can never turn off the art world,” he reflects, to Eleanor and Alex’s nodding assent. “It’s hard to balance the business with our own families and personal interests when you’re driven by the bottom line, but what I think we’re most proud of is the balance we’ve created to still be all in on this.”
Nick Acquavella
Nonetheless, William Acquavella, known to the trade as Bill, did not raise his kids to walk in his indisputably large footsteps, nor was it a given that they would partner with their father rather than, say, open their own galleries or set their sights on other professions altogether. Surrounding his children with a knockout personal collection anchored by Picasso, Miró, and Matisse certainly didn’t discourage them, nor did his precedent-setting career as a swashbuckling dealer that began in 1960, when he turned down a job with Lehman Brothers to manage the gallery while his father was sidelined by surgery.
Because the Old Master business was a bit snoozy for young Bill, he ventured into newer territory, in 1965, with a highly successful show of paintings by Pierre Bonnard, some bought outright and some consigned by the artist’s heirs. He also published an exhibition catalogue in color, an innovation at the time, and an ongoing practice now supplemented by the Acquavellas’ fully kitted-out website. (Visitors to the physical gallery are greeted with an array of their handsome and scholarly catalogues. They don’t include Acquavella: The First Ninety Years, a lavishly illustrated tome of an exhibition history given to friends and longtime clients.)
Alex Acquavella
In the years since Bonnard, Bill has partnered with Sotheby’s, a thorny competitor for most galleries, on multiple occasions: In 1990, they teamed up to buy out the entire inventory of 2,300 European postwar and modern artworks from the defunct Pierre Matisse Gallery. Then, in 2020, he collaborated with the Pace and Gagosian galleries to undermine both Sotheby’s and Christie’s for the private sale of 300 Modern, postwar, and contemporary works from the estate of Donald Marron. Even more famously, Bill changed the life and career of Lucian Freud by helping the artist to pay off his considerable gambling debts, then hosting a show of his massive new nudes in 1996, when Freud was on no one’s radar in New York. Soon he was a big box office draw at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the most expensive living artist at auction.
If this redoubtable legacy makes it hard for his children to measure up, it doesn’t show. According to Eleanor, “We each found our way pretty organically, but this would never work as well as it does if we were just our father’s children. We had to prove ourselves. There’s a lot to learn in this business, and it took me a really, really long time.”
After her parents’ divorce, when she was a teen, Eleanor went to Westminster boarding school in Simsbury, Connecticut (Bill’s alma mater), was an art history major at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and spent a summer interning at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Back in New York, in the mid-1990s, she floated through different departments at Sotheby’s, winding up as an executive assistant. “It was lively and exciting,” she recalls. “Working at the auction houses provides a great introduction to the art world. After a couple of years there, my father and I decided that it was time for me to start my career at the gallery.”
In the gallery, a wall of photographs of Pablo Picasso, an artist whom Bill Acquavella collects in depth; part of the gallery’s extensive art reference library.
Today, Palm Beach feels like a natural evolution. She was there with her father and mother as a teen, running around The Breakers with her other younger brother and hanging out at Bradley’s when it was still on the island. After both of her parents remarried and had more children, they each kept going. “Palm Beach was fun,” she recalls, “but it was very insular. It’s very different now.”
Unlike galleries with similar reserves of blue-chip art that keep opening branches around the world, the Acquavellas have chosen to keep their footprint small and focus on the resale of works from eminent private collections and estates. “I’m more interested in having a better inventory than a lot of spaces,” Bill says. “If you’ve got the paintings, people come to see you.”
When the pandemic shut down New York, the family opened an 1,100-square-foot space at The Royal Poinciana Plaza, where Sotheby’s and Pace were also establishing a local base. It was obvious which Acquavella should take the lead. Alex and Nick had small children in New York schools, while Eleanor’s children, Hope and William, were adults. (Her 23-year-old daughter works in the jewelry department at Christie’s; William, 20, is a student at The American University of Paris.)
It was less disruptive for Eleanor to migrate. She owns a house on the island with her husband Morgan Dejoux, a former investment banker who caught the family bug and bought Granger, an online archive of historical images. When not traveling to art fairs and auctions or visiting her son in Paris, she now splits her time between New York and Palm Beach, where she stays for the high season and otherwise goes back and forth, summering in East Hampton, and making an annual sojourn to Maine, where she chairs the board of trustees at the summertime Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
This is an excerpt from PALMER Vol. 10. To read the full story, click here to purchase the issue.
