Martin Margulies: A Collector’s Perspective
on Living with Art

This story comes from a March 4, 2025, interview between Mr. Margulies and Jared Quinton, the Emily Hall Tremaine Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Like many of history’s greatest patrons, Martin Z. “Marty” Margulies has always acquired art based on a combination of instinct and trusted relationships. As a young collector in the 1970s, still on the outside of the art world’s most elite circles, Margulies recalls an early experience bidding on a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi at Sotheby’s in New York. He lost, but following the auction, Shaindy Fenton approached him on the street and said, “I can get you that sculpture.” An influential Fort Worth-based gallerist who played a large role in building Patsy and Raymond Nasher’s world-renowned sculpture collection, Fenton had seen Margulies bidding and knew where another edition of the Noguchi was available. She sent him the information and a few days later Margulies bought it.

Fenton would go on to introduce Margulies to many of the major dealers of the time, including Leo Castelli, André Emmerich, Xavier Fourcade, and Arne Glimcher. As Margulies notes, there weren’t nearly so many galleries when he was starting out, so with these few introductions he had the keys to the upper echelon of the booming, glamorous art market of the late 1970s and early ’80s. These relationships were even more important to Margulies because he was based full time in south Florida, where he was overseeing an expanding and thriving real estate development business. He poured a huge percentage of his profits into acquiring 20^th-century American and, later, European art. In one of his most exclusive real estate developments, on Grove Isle, Margulies created a sculpture garden that was freely accessible to the public, where many of his acquisitions would go on view.

New York dealers would call Margulies with special offers, often works their other elite clients were looking to sell. In 1982, Glimcher invited Margulies up to see a particularly special painting that had recently arrived at Pace: Roy Lichtenstein’s Femme au chapeau(Woman with a hat) from 1962, a Pop reinterpretation of Pablo Picasso’s iconic 1935 work of the same title held in the Centre Pompidou collection. Glimcher had received the work in exchange for two Brice Marden paintings from some of his best clients at the time: Emily Hall and Burton G. Tremaine.

Hearing the names impressed and excited Margulies, who was familiar with the Tremaines’ reputation as visionary patrons whose support of emerging art movements had shaped postwar art history, as well as the art market, in a major way. He felt lucky to be given exclusive access to a work from their collection and vividly recalls his viewing with Glimcher as if it were a scene from a movie.

After adding a part of the Tremaine legacy to his own collection, Margulies recalls attending the opening of Larry Gagosian’s major exhibition of Pop art from the Tremaine collection, which inaugurated the mega-dealer’s 23rd Street gallery in 1985. At the crowded party, Margulies wasn’t able to wrangle an introduction to the couple, but he did spot an unassuming, humbly dressed man sitting at Gagosian’s desk in the back office, whom his wife later told him was Si Newhouse. At the time, Newhouse was in an active period of buying Tremaine works through Gagosian, which culminated in his acquisition of Piet Mondrian’s Victory Boogie-Woogie(1944) for $11 million.

Apart from a few times it went out on loan, Margulies has kept his treasured Lichtenstein in his private residence in Key Biscayne ever since. Like the Tremaines, Margulies believes in the importance of living with the art he owns and loves.

As the new millennium approached, Margulies expanded his collecting horizons to include younger artists, with an emphasis on large-scale sculptures and commissions, as well as photography. He hired the curator Katherine Hinds to oversee his collection with him, and together they founded The Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, a 55,000-square-foot space in Miami’s Wynwood district, a neighborhood known for its artsy vibes and murals and graffiti. He describes the Warehouse as “more democratic” and “serious fun” and has earned it a reputation as one of the go-to destinations for art-minded visitors to Miami, particularly during the week of Art Basel Miami Beach. Recent exhibitions have highlighted the collection’s holdings of Arte Povera and minimalist sculpture, as well as social documentary photographs by Danny Lyon and Helen Leavitt.

Now in his 80s, Margulies has spent recent years thinking about the future of his collection, whose value has been rumored at upwards of $1 billion. In 2024 he auctioned off some 450 photographs to raise funds for the Martin Z. Margulies Foundation, which supports the Lotus House Shelter for Homeless Women and Children and other organizations that aid South Florida’s poor, homeless, and veteran populations. He has also begun preliminary discussions with the Museum Exchange to help place some of his larger-scale works in museum collections. But, like all great collectors, Margulies appetite for discovery is insatiable, and he continues to actively acquire works by emerging artists for the Warehouse and his private collection.