Bruce Newman, leading man of antiquities, dies at 94

Bruce Newman, a New York antiques dealer who was once known as the Cecil B. DeMille of his profession because of his outrageous personality and extravagant wares, died on February 9 at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was 94 years old.

According to his daughter, Emily Greenspan, the cause was congestive heart failure.

Mr. Newman, a dashing figure in impeccably tailored black suits and scarlet pocket squares, was the owner of the family business Newel Galleries, which was founded in the 1930s as a prop house for theater and film productions and was out of business for a while. a small store beneath the Second Avenue El in Manhattan.

During his reign, Newel was in its full, overwhelming boom in the 1980s, housed in a five-story building on East 53rd Street, near the East River, each floor teeming with two centuries of treasures, most of them costing more than five figures . Company was a glittering antique shopping center for set designers, party planners, decorators, society lions and Hollywood royalty.

Vintage carousel horses? Bill. Ruhlmann desks? Yes! Benches from the Parisian metro? Naturally. French Victorian dining room chairs with bronze upholstery? You don’t have to ask. Mr. Newman wore it all and in staggering quantities: Victorian wickerwork. French salon furniture. Art deco. Art Nouveau. Gothic revival. Biedermeier. Directory. English arts and crafts. Renaissance and medieval pieces, and the “quality camp” or “fantasy furniture” he favored – strange and whimsical pieces decorated with mythical creatures; chairs with sprouting antlers, torches topped with gargoyles, dressers atop griffin legs.

Paul Rudnick, the playwright, screenwriter and author, called the store “a wonderful cross between Hogwarts and the warehouse at the end of Citizen Kane.”

Mr. Newman was like a Hollywood agent, said Stephen Drucker, the design editor.

“He was always selling, always exaggerating a little – which you both knew,” he added. “He really loved the hunt and the planning that went into getting stuff.” (It was Mr. Drucker who, in a House & Garden article, described Mr. Newman as the DeMille of his profession, a nickname Mr. Newman liked, and so it stuck.)

When Queen Elizabeth II visited Manhattan in the mid-1970s, the royal retainer called Mr. Newman requesting a throne for her to sit on for a dinner in her honor at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. Mr. Newman had just what he needed: a Louis XV throne, which he reupholstered in blue silk and added a cushion to make her feel more comfortable.

The royal anecdote is one of many from Mr. Newman’s 2006 memoir, “Don’t Come Back Until You Find It: Tales from an Antiques Dealer,” a dish of wealthy celebrities.

Jackie Kennedy was a polite and thorough shopper; A year into her husband’s presidency, she toured Newel to fill their weekend home in Virginia. Michael Eisner liked Black Forest furniture and asked for a discount; Mr. Newman never gave discounts. Michael J. Fox, he said, was quick and decisive. Once, when Mr. Fox selected a dented silver candlestick, Mr. Newman pointed out its imperfection. “Yes,” the actor replied. “That’s why it’s so beautiful.”

In the early 1980s, when Claus Von Bulow was between trials for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny Von Bulow, he sold Mr. Newman two 18th-century Venetian lacquer chests of drawers, which, Mr. Newman wrote, were from the couple’s Newport. RI, estate. He believed the sale was to raise money for Mr Von Bulow’s legal bills. Years later, when Mel Bourne, the production designer for “Reversal of Fortune,” the 1990 film about the trials, was shopping at Newel for props, he bought them.

On Barbra Streisand’s first visit to Newel, Mr. Newman gave her a chicken sandwich. “You have a nice place here, Bruce,” she told him. “I like it.”

She knew her trade, Mr. Newman wrote: the difference between Art Deco and the French 1940s, as well as the names of the great furniture designers of the 1930s and 1940s: Jean-Michel Frank, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann and Jules Leleu. But later, during a visit to her Central Park West apartment, Ms. Streisand proudly showed him a kitschy pink and blue porcelain mirror, its frame covered in cupids, flowers and ribbons.

What was he thinking? Mr. Newman remembered her asking that. He remarked delicately that it was not the prettiest object.

“I know,” she told him. “I bought this mirror with the first dollar I ever earned singing. I keep it here to remind myself of the time when I had no money.”

Bruce Murray Newman was born on January 27, 1930 in Brooklyn. His father, Meyer Newman, owned a company that supplied props and furniture to theater companies that rented to the silent film industry, which had production facilities in Queens and the Bronx. His mother, Evelyn (Kantor) Newman, was her husband’s bookkeeper.

Meyer Newman went bankrupt in the years after the stock market crash of 1929 and later started his own theater rental business, initially selling the family’s own furniture and other furnishings from a storefront on Second Avenue and delivering them from his Nash coupe with rumble- seats. Bruce recalled being traumatized when the family home emptied out.

To build his inventory, Meyer Newman sent an employee, Sam Goldberg, to traverse Park and Fifth Avenue in a horse-drawn wagon. When tenants of the beautiful apartment complexes redecorated their homes in the early 1940s, they generally did not call auction houses to remove and sell their old belongings; they just threw it away. So building supers had to come up with a way to get rid of the ‘waste’. Then in comes Mr. Goldberg, who they paid a few dollars to tow it all away.

Meyer named his new company Newel Galleries, and Bruce joined when he was 15. He studied interior design at Pratt, graduating in 1953 and then went to work for his father full-time.

In 1965, he married Judith Brandus, then an assistant personnel director at the Hertz Corporation. She later wrote the copy for Newel’s striking advertisements, which were designed as portraits of celebrities: for example, an Art Nouveau armchair appeared under the headline “For the price of a small house you can own this extraordinary chair.” (Mr. Newman took pride in his extravagant prices.)

Meyer Newman died in 1972 and Bruce took over the company three years later.

He moved to California in 2016. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren and a sister, Marilyn Laundau. Judith Newman died in 2023.

In 2001, Mr. Newman sold Newel to a cousin, Lewis Baer, ​​whose son Jake Baer is now the company’s CEO. Thanks to the number of productions now shooting in New York City, the bulk of the business is rentals again – lucrative, to be sure, but the clients may not be as exciting as the characters Newel once served.

In Mr. Newman’s day, even rental properties could cause a stir in Manhattan social circles. In 1988, Newel supplied the gilded palm trees that formed the chuppa at the wedding of Laura Steinberg and Jonathan Tisch, as well as $250,000 worth of Louis XV bronze centerpieces and candelabras as accessories for the reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

All treasures were rented from Newel and returned. But in the New York Times’ coverage of the event (under the headline “Candlelight Wedding Joins Two Billionaire Families”), reporter Georgia Dullea noted that the antiques came from the Steinbergs’ own collection.

Mr. Newman was outraged by this claim and demanded a correction, as Manhattan Inc. magazine said. later reported. Mrs. Dullea refused because Gayfryd Steinberg, the bride’s stepmother, declared the antiques to be hers. But when The Times reached out again to write a follow-up article about how Ms. Steinberg pretended to own things that weren’t hers, Mr. Newman declined to participate and dropped his request for correction.

His pride was hurt, but not enough to slander a good customer.