Inside Lucas Samaras’s New York Apartment

IN 1988, THE artist Lucas Samaras moved into the 62nd floor of what was then a new white-glove condo building on West 56th Street, an 814-foot-tall concrete high-rise that real estate agents have since named CitySpire. The block, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, is another fairly nondescript corporate street in Midtown Manhattan; perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that Samaras, who died last year at the age of 87, lived here at all.

One of the most elusive and difficult-to-categorize artists of the past century, who had, in the words of the curator Dianne Perry Vanderlip, an “impenetrable mystique,” Samaras created art in nearly every conceivable medium — sculpture, photography, jewelry, furniture, painting, writing, Photoshop collage — though his subject was almost always himself. Many of his works are self-portraits, which he began making as a teenager and continued until his death. He rendered himself in paint, Polaroids, 16-millimeter film and pastels; he did so while wearing makeup and wigs, bearded or cleanly shaven, fully nude or in a double-breasted overcoat with a fur collar. These works cover the 3,200-square-foot apartment’s walls. During a visit last fall, a representative from Pace Gallery, Samaras’s longtime dealer, pulled a black binder from a shelf, one among dozens lined up in an orderly row, to reveal hundreds more self-portraits, intricately etched in pencil.

In every portrait, he’s alone, with a look somewhere between bewilderment and relief, giving the impression that he didn’t come by this solitude easily and that he protected it at all costs. Samaras never married or had children. He spent nearly all of his waking hours working, but he never employed an assistant. He didn’t learn to drive a car, but he liked to walk — especially around Central Park. (“The outdoors is a luxury and a drug,” he said in 1971 while explaining his fondness for staying in.) Arne Glimcher, 86, who founded Pace with his wife, Milly, and began working with Samaras in 1965, refers to the artist as one of his closest friends. In six decades, he never knew Samaras to so much as go on a date with another person. He was a self-described onanist.