03/20/2025
Disgraced Art Advisor Lisa Schiff Sentenced To Prison
Lisa Schiff, the Manhattan art advisor who admitted to stealing money from her clients, has just been sentenced to time in prison.
Rehs Contemporary Galleries, Inc.
- Home
- United States
- New York, NY
- Rehs Contemporary Galleries, Inc.
A premier New York City art gallery specializing in contemporary realism and representational art.
Address
20 West 55th Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY
10019
Telephone
Website
Alerts
Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Rehs Contemporary Galleries, Inc. posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Contact The Museum
Send a message to Rehs Contemporary Galleries, Inc.:
Videos
Shortcuts
Share
Category
Four Generations at Rehs Galleries
The story of Rehs Galleries begins in the late 1930s with M. Edwin Schillay, a young accountant, who decided to expand his business in an unexpected way. When one of his clients, an antique dealer based in Greenwich Village, suggested that he consider the art and antiques trade as a supplement to his accounting work, Schillay gave it serious thought. With a little guidance from his client, he traveled to London to investigate the art market and soon began purchasing paintings in bulk, packing 400-500 canvases into 7 x 7 x 10 foot containers called âlift vansâ and shipping them back to New York. From his space at the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, Schillay sold them to a variety of department stores that then featured the paintings in their art galleries. Although galleries within department stores disappeared in the 1970s, they were a standard element in these stores from their inception in Paris and New York in the 1850s. [i]
Throughout the 1940s, Schillay maintained his art business as an adjunct to his accounting firm. The war years naturally interrupted the normal flow of the art market, but he astutely continued to expand his network of contacts in the London art world as well as in the US. He purchased primarily nineteenth century British paintings, pioneering the introduction of Victorian paintings to the American market through his bulk sales to department stores. After the war ended, Schillay gradually expanded his inventory to include artwork from other European countries.
In the mid-1950s, Schillayâs wife, Ruth, decided to take a more active role in the business, and opened a retail outlet at 303 Park Avenue South, redefining the business model to include sales to private individuals, and thus establishing the early roots of the art gallery as an independent enterprise. The scope of Schillayâs sources also expanded to include auctions and estate sales, reportedly acquiring as many as 60 paintings at one sale. [ii] During these years, the department store market was also booming. Advertisements from across the US reveal Schillayâs influence on the post-war American art market. For Stewartâs Department Store, The Baltimore Sun proclaimed: âStewartâs presents a fabulous old collection by Great Masters and Artists from England, France, German and Italy. ... Only Stewartâs brings you this magnificent art. TOMORROW. . . MEET MR. EDWIN SCHILLAY.â [iii] And from the Detroit Free Press comes the announcement that âSpecially Priced 19th Century Oil Paintings from Old English estatesâ will be available at Hudsonâs downtown department store only, where art lovers can view âdramatic 19th century oil paintings that bespeak of charm, ease and grace with each stroke.â [iv] From New York to Dayton, Ohio, Schillayâs inventory of British paintings was a singular feature of department store galleries; he often traveled to personally assist in presenting the art work to the public, no doubt introducing many customers to fine art for the first time. [v]
The selection of paintings that Schillay made available through the department stores focused primarily on nineteenth-century British artists who had originally painted for a clientele very similar to the twentieth-century American art buyer. Although many of the artistsâ names were unfamiliar, they were nonetheless often well respected painters in their own time. Edgar Bundy, for example, studied with the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, and then went on to exhibit his historical genre canvases at the Paris Salon as well as the Royal Academy in London. Likewise, Arthur Wardle was a successful painter of animals with over 100 works shown at the Royal Academy. Schillayâs promotion of these Victorian artists laid the groundwork for a reappraisal of mainstream British painting some twenty years later.
