Leonard Riggio, Barnes & Noble Founder and Artwork Collector, Dies at 83

Leonard Riggio, the businessman behind Barnes & Noble who made important forays into the artwork world, shopping for key works of Minimalist artwork and giving tens of millions of {dollars} to the Dia Artwork Basis, has died at 83. He had been battling Alzheimer’s illness, in response to an announcement by his household.

Riggio was within the uncommon class of collectors who might declare they’d each pioneered a whole trade and reworked not less than one high-profile museum.

His artwork accumulating, although maybe much less extensively recognized to the world writ giant than his management of the bookselling chain Barnes & Noble, was well-regarded and intently watched—he and his spouse Louise had appeared on ARTnews’s High 200 Collectors record every year since 1999. And had been it not for the couple, the Dia Artwork Basis, a New York group that has been credited with constructing a canon of Minimalist artwork, wouldn’t have been capable of undertake a variety of tasks which have allowed it to increase enormously up to now 20 years.

Dia honored Riggio on Tuesday by posting a quote from him to its social media: “Then and now, Dia stays rooted in a single thought: to the best extent doable every artist ought to conceive the structure, setting, and context by which his or her works are seen.”

The quote was paired with a picture of Richard Serra’s “Torqued Ellipses,” a grouping of monumental metal sculptures that guests to Dia:Beacon can stroll into. They’re among the many best sights at Dia:Beacon, the group’s Upstate New York museum, they usually had been obtained by the inspiration by means of a $30 million reward from Riggio that supported the acquisition of artworks.

Riggio, who was for a lot of yr’s Dia’s greatest patron, served as the inspiration’s chairman from 1998 to 2006, serving to lead it in the course of the interval when Dia:Beacon opened to the general public in a former Nabisco manufacturing facility. By the point he departed amid a chaotic interval for the inspiration, he had described his place as one thing like a “full-time job.” It barely appeared to register for him that he was nonetheless government chairman of Barnes & Noble, so vital was his devotion to that artwork basis.

Leonard Riggio was born in 1941 in New York. For a lot of his childhood, he was raised in Brooklyn. After he graduated highschool, he took evening lessons at New York College. However slightly than spending an excessive amount of time on lecturers, he opted as a substitute for a profession within the faculty’s bookstore, working first as a inventory boy.

He finally dropped out of college, and in 1965, he based the Pupil E-book Change, which he positioned as a competitor to NYU’s bookstore. Riggio’s retailer was demarcated by its youthful spirit: he allowed college students to print antiwar leaflets there. Steadily, his retailer grew a following, and he expanded it to incorporate a number of places.

Then, in 1971, he purchased Barnes & Noble’s solely retailer in Manhattan and reworked that store right into a bona fide empire. Riggio continued to stay on the helm of Barnes & Noble till 2019, the yr that the hedge fund Elliott Advisors acquired the corporate for $638 million.

All of the whereas, Riggio constructed up a major artwork assortment together with his spouse Louise, whom he married within the Eighties. Having purchased posters and prints, the couple devoted themselves extra totally to accumulating beginning in 1994, the yr they purchased a portray by Alberto Giacometti. They quickly branched out to different modernists, from Pablo Picasso to Piet Mondrian.

Every thing modified in 1997, when Riggio visited Dia’s Chelsea area and was astonished by the Serra works he noticed there. The couple would set up Serra’s Sidewinder (1999), a 300-ton metal sculpture of their garden; the work is so giant that it might, at one level, be seen by way of Google Earth.

Alongside grand sculptures by Isamu Noguchi, Willem de Kooning, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Mark di Suvero, their assortment additionally included high-quality works by Arte Povera artists, from Mario Merz to Pier Paolo Calzolari.

A lot of this artwork was extremely conceptual; little of it might be hung in a single’s lounge and admired by company. However Riggio appeared prepared to take a danger on artwork like this.

“I like to purchase artwork by really feel greater than by sight, and these artists really feel a sure technique to me,” Riggio informed ARTnews in 2016. “They relate lots to different artists solely as a result of we’re the identical collectors. If it seems that they knew one another, it occurs by chance. We don’t attempt to make a narrative, the story is the artwork itself.”