Susan Rush: an Unusual Art Advisor

On a dark and stormy winter’s night on York Avenue in Manhattan a bidder’s paddle rises from the back row of Sotheby’s auction hall. On the other end of the paddle is a striking, dark-haired woman with a particularly determined expression. Going…gone. Sold. Another acquisition for a client and an artist’s prices rise another notch.

A fine spring afternoon at an international art dealers show under the vaulted glass roof of the Grande Palais in Paris. This same determined woman has arrived with a picnic hamper, fresh from the Rue Buci, as a surprise entertainment for a gallery owner from Chicago who has encouraged and supported some of the most fragile artists imaginable.

On a cool fall evening in a studio in the high country of New Mexico the same woman is going through the recent work of a sculptor, determined to get his best piece for an important commission.

This is the work of a most unusual art advisor, for whom pleasing clients and supporting artists has equal importance.

Over the past thirty-plus years Susan Rush has become a modest force in the world of fine art. Because she, herself, is an artist her passion for the work of the artist and her understanding of the marketplace has made her an effective champion of both the creators and the consumers of art.

Susan grew up outside of the gritty steel city of Youngstown, Ohio, where her father built some of the big rolling mills along the Mahoning River. Youngstown’s Butler Institute of American Art was a magnet and her family encouraged an early interest in drawing and painting. As she was growing up, listening to her father and his business friends gave her a good opportunity to observe, up close, how the business world worked.

After college Susan spent a year studying art at the Pope Pius XII Institute at the Villa Schifanoia, a renaissance villa in the hills above Florence. She stayed with an elderly Marchesa in a setting straight out of a story by Henry James and soaked up the rich culture, the Vespas and the Papagalos of Florence.

Returning to New York and determined to find work as an artist, after working briefly for a woman who re-touched 35MM slides with a two-hair brush, she was hired by Bonwitt Teller to work on fashion illustration for their newspaper ads. Realizing, after frustrating months of trying, that she would never be as good as her ideal, the illustrator Rene Bouchee, she struck out for California, arriving just in time for the 1967 “Summer of Love”.  It was a special time when everyone seemed to be an artist or a poet or a musician or even all three simultaneously. People hung out at the City Lights Bookstore for Allen Ginsburg’s poetry readings, the Tosca with only opera on its jukebox or Vesuvio’s or the sidewalk cafe at Enrico’s on the Barbary Coast. The visionary artists, fueled by mysterious substances and led by Norman Steigelmeyer, thrived at the Art Institute and in North Beach there was a “happening” almost every night. In the midst of it all, on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, she began to set up outdoor art shows in the alley next to her apartment, showing paintings and drawings by the talented young artists now flocking to the city. One of the visitors to her shows was Margo Grant, a young architect from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. They became good friends and Margo became Susan’s mentor and provided entree into the new field of corporate

art advising during a time when the city required all new buildings to spend 1% of the construction budget on fine art.

Susan’s first corporate project working with Margo was the Bank of America World Headquarters building in San Francisco, designed by Gordon Bunshaft (sp?), along with one of the first big “back office” computer service centers. The computer center space filled 22 floors and the first ten floors covered two acres each. The total art budget for the 20 acres+ was $40,000. The solution was to commission an artist to design silk-screened fabric to put on stretchers and also to install very large sepia-toned photo blow-ups of archival pictures of old San Francisco. Although commonplace today, large scale photographic prints then presented some considerable technical challenges, ably met by Irwin Welcher, a superb technician and the only person Ansel Adams ever trusted to print his negatives.

In 1976 the United States Navy decided to commemorate the bicentennial if the Navy and the Marine Corps with a huge mural on Treasure Island, the naval base in the middle of San Francisco Bay and the site of the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition. One of the Exposition buildings, formerly an early air terminal for the famous Pan Am China Clippers which were huge seaplanes that landed in the bay for the duration of the fair, was selected as the location. Susan commissioned the Photo-Realist painter, Lowell Nesbitt to design a work that depicted the past, present and future of the Navy and the Marine Corps. At 240 feet long and 40 feet high this mural was to be listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest indoor mural anywhere.

Twenty Bay Area artists were recruited to actually paint it under the direction of Ralph Morocco, an artist who painted outdoor advertising  billboards in the days before computer-generated graphics. Ralph enlarged Lowell’s scaled painting to make actual size perforated cartoons to pounce the design directly onto the wall in the manner of the fresco painters of the Renaissance.

Upon completion the Navy rolled out the Marine Band and a many-gun salute.

Phillip Johnson’s landmark 1974 Pennzoil building in Houston, Texas was to also be the headquarters of United Gas Pipeline (another client), and the first home of David Novros’ first major fresco painting. David was a bit nervous about working in this ancient medium that was new to him, accordingly a wall was built in front of the work-in-progress to thwart curious spectators. When the client asked to watch, his curiosity was satisfied when a small peep-hole was cut in the temporary wall so that one person at a time could watch as Peter anxiously applied his pigments to the professional plasterer’s freshly laid ground.

The pipeline company disappeared in a progression of corporate mergers in the 1980’s and eventually its successors gave the Novros fresco to a local hospital. When they found that it wouldn’t fit a replica was made and the original put into storage.

A major project in the early 90’s was the art collection for Pacific Enterprises, a company planning to move into I. M. Pei’s spectacular new First Interstate Tower, the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Susan decided on a collection of California artists and an overall theme celebrating the unique quality of the light along the West Coast that has been such a central influence on California painting and sculpture for well over 100 years.

Much of the work in the collection was commissioned and major pieces ranged from Ed Ruscha’s two large paintings using the word “light”, to Richard Artschwagger’s “lincoln log” reception desk to Duane Valentine’s nine-ton sculptured glass wall to Laddie Dill’s two-story work in concrete and glass. The artists that contributed to the collection were celebrated in Ron Coopers series of large vases, each based on the profile of one of the artists.

An original work was made for each corner of each of the ten floors, Dale Chilhuly made his first big glass wall piece  and the internal stairway was lined with murals by David Ireland.

Shortly after the completed collection was installed the company’s management changed and the new chairman sent the remaining copies of the 200-page color catalog to the paper shredder and sold virtually everything at Sotheby’s for a modest profit. Such is corporate life, sometimes.

Last summer Susan completed a collection for the world headquartes of Duke Energy in Charlotte, North Carolina. For the entrance to the building Berkeley artist Michael Bradley was commissioned to do five large paintings depicting the elements of earth, water, fire and air, the last a combination of all four elements.

Susan’s international partner, Catherine Vaughn Williams, is assisting with the London office of Duke Energy, selecting work from emerging British and Irish artists to add to the collection. Finding new and innovative artists, and searching for just the right piece for both corporate and private clients is an on-going process. Curating gallery and museum exhibits is another facet of her business.

Honest judgement and unflagging support for the artists has earned Susan an envied reputation among both artists and dealers not to mention a great many clients, from Fortune 500 corporations to private collectors.

Oh, yes. About the itenerate David Novros fresco. A few months ago Susan was lunching at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts with Bud Luther, one of the architects on the pipeline company project, and they both suddenly realized that the very same David Novros fresco was on the wall above their table – it is now a treasured part of the museum’s permanent collection.