Collector Walls: A Tale of Love Requited
How a breakthrough Roy Lichtenstein painting ended up in the home of a woman who admired it in her youth.
O ne autumn afternoon in 1961, Ivan Karp, a director at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery, met with Roy Lichtenstein to see four new works the artist had created. These canvases, known as the “comic book paintings,” featured scenes and images that Lichtenstein pulled from comic strips and advertisements and blew up on a grand scale. The largest of the four shown to Karp was “The Engagement Ring.”
In the context of abstract expressionism’s dominance, these paintings must have seemed shockingly new when Karp first laid eyes on them. The encounter left a lasting impression: soon after, Lichtenstein began exhibiting with Castelli, which set him on the path to becoming one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century.
The following year, in 1962, Lichtenstein had his first solo exhibition with Castelli. The entire show sold out before it had even opened to the public, with all the paintings placed with Castelli’s top collectors. The buyer of “The Engagement Ring” was Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo from Milan. In fact, Panza had bought a total of seven Lichtensteins from Castelli, each for just $600. They were swiftly shipped over to Italy. However, problems arose when Giuseppe Panza’s wife caught sight of them. “My wife does not like Lichtenstein,” he would confess in a 1985 interview. Panza traded “The Engagement Ring,” along with two other Lichtensteins, with an Italian art dealer, getting three paintings by James Rosenquist in return. “Every time I think back to this mistake, I feel bad,” Panza recalled.
The painting headed back to the United States and came under the ownership of another of Castelli’s top clients, the real estate developer Robert Rowan. Again, this was fleeting, and by 1971, the painting had oscillated back to Italy, now purchased by Ernst Wilhelm Sachs, brother to Gunter Sachs, both heirs to a German industrial fortune.
Ernst lived in the Palazzo Chigi-Odescachi in Rome, a grand Baroque palace that was transformed in the late 1960s by Giorgio Pes and Roberto Federici. Spurred by Gunter’s enthusiasm for art, Ernst began building his own collection.
He hung “The Engagement Ring” in his grand living room, above the fireplace and a plush sunken seating area. The room was an ode to American pop art: major works by Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann—an “Orange Car Crash” painting and a “Great American Nude”—hung on the adjacent walls. Soon after the apartment was completed, Warhol visited Sachs for dinner. Clearly smitten by the placement of his painting, he snapped a few Polaroids of Ernst’s then-girlfriend, Marie Laure Zoppas Gardoni, in front of it.
Unfortunately, Ernst’s striking bachelor pad was short lived. In 1977, Ernst was tragically caught in a heli-skiing avalanche accident and died at the age of 47. His apartment in Rome was cleared and the art collection dispersed.
Years earlier in New York, another admirer had fallen under the painting’s spell. A young woman by the name of Ronnie Feuerstein arrived in 1969 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see curator Henry Geldzahler’s latest show—a major retrospective on the New York School. There, she encountered “The Engagement Ring.” Transfixed by its beauty, she rushed to buy the paperback catalog, which featured the work inside. (She still owns the catalog to this day.)
Two decades later, Ronnie and her husband, Samuel Heyman, had a remarkable opportunity to buy the work, in a sale brokered by Gagosian. Not long after, Castelli organized for the Heymans to dine with Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein at Chanterelle in New York. At the dinner, Roy told the Heymans the story behind the painting. “The woman is a nurse, and he is a doctor. She’s in love with him, but he has a girlfriend, and he just told her on the page before that he bought his girlfriend a gift,” recalled Ronnie, who is president emerita of MoMA’s board of trustees. “All she wanted to know was that it wasn’t an engagement ring, because then her hopes would be dashed.”
What struck me most in that very moment, talking to Ronnie as she stood next to the painting in the foyer of her Palm Beach, Florida, residence, was her own resemblance to the woman in it. “I love her lips, her pearls,” she said softly, “and the little tear in her eye.”
