At 3 a.m. on Oct. 9, 2013,the 24-year-old conceptual artist Amalia Ulman woke up in a hospital in rural Pennsylvania with a bone sticking out of her leg. She had been in an accident: The Greyhound bus that was taking her from New York to Chicago to curate a show had smashed into a garbage rig, killing one passenger and wounding dozens of others. She needed surgery. She also needed a lawyer. Ulman knew that her parents, who lived in northern Spain, would be of no help. “Who do I know in the States who’s not a kid on heroin?” she asked herself. After a moment’s thought, Ulman instructed her nurses to contact a man she had met only once: Stefan Simchowitz, the controversial 44-year-old movie producer, Internet entrepreneur and industrial scion who over the last seven years has pursued a manic quest to assemble the world’s most lucrative collection of emerging contemporary art.
When Ulman’s bus crashed, she was traveling alone and without insurance, which might explain why, following surgery, the hospital talked about moving her to a hotel. But Simchowitz enlisted a Texas lawyer specializing in bus crashes, who insisted that Ulman undergo a second operation at the hospital and then arranged that she be transferred by ambulance to a recovery facility in New York City. He later filed suit against Greyhound for all of Ulman’s medical bills, which, after a month in the hospital and an additional month in rehab, totaled nearly half a million dollars. “Stefan was very supportive,” Ulman recalled. “He put all those ‘adult things’ together.”
More than supportive, Simchowitz had stepped out of a fairy tale — a godfather whose emissary swooped down from the heavens to rescue Ulman from catastrophe. Ulman had not yet heard all the stories about Simchowitz’s generosity and its fatal attraction for young, penniless artists whom he lured into Faustian bargains. He would provide them with “all those adult things” they needed and so often lacked: room, board, materials. In exchange for extraordinary support, Simchowitz asked not for his artists’ souls but for their art, a deal that many of his protégés lived to regret. In any event, lying alone in a hospital bed, broken and delirious, Ulman did not have the luxury of worrying about a far-off day of reckoning.
Ulman met Simchowitz earlier that year after an email introduction from the editor of Sex Magazine, an online arts publication, and was unaware of his reputation for aggressive accumulation. She agreed to sell him two giant paintings covered in blue eyes, but she was surprised by his brutal plans for them. Like a land developer subdividing a great estate, Simchowitz planned to chop up Ulman’s paintings into roughly a dozen smaller units. “He wanted me to cut the eyes into pieces so he could sell more paintings!” she said. Ulman, who put herself through art school by working as a librarian, was taken aback by the proposed dismemberment, but she wasn’t in a strong position to negotiate. “I was very desperate,” she said. “I didn’t have anything to eat.” She ended up selling Simchowitz the smaller units for less than $150 apiece, adding that he could “wipe his ass with them” if he really wanted to.
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