Two years later, at New York’s Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren Fine Art, the blue chip 57th Street gallery where she joined her father and Lawrence Rubin as a partner, Greenberg Rohatyn was charged with spicing things up. She did just that with her 1999 breakout show, “Another Girl, Another Planet,” one of the most renowned photography exhibitions of that period, which she co-curated with the artist Gregory Crewdson. (“The ‘it’ show this spring,” Artforum wrote at the time.) Blurring boundaries between documentary and fiction, “Another Girl” introduced staged narrative images of adolescent girls and women by up-and-coming, mainly female, photographers, including Katy Grannan and Justine Kurland, both recent students of Crewdson’s at Yale. “Big 57th Street galleries rarely do shows of emerging artists, especially those dedicated to young women, so that was important,” recalls critic Vince Aletti, who reviewed it for the Village Voice. “But the work itself was thoughtful and smart. What Jeanne established was a level of taste that was really strong and clearly coming from a personal point of view.” He points to Grannan—who photographed Greenberg Rohatyn naked when she was pregnant and who takes pictures of her kids every year for the family’s holiday card—as the one who now stands out as the most interesting of the pack. “Her last show with Jeanne was really powerful,” Aletti says of the “Boulevard” portrait series she showed at Salon 94 in 2011. “It was at the level of Diane Arbus, but in a completely different way.”
These days, it’s by juggling her roles as gallerist, art adviser, collector, curator, and—not least—wife and mother of three that Greenberg Rohatyn has created her own quirky niche. The double-width Rafael Viñoly–designed townhouse on the Upper East Side, where she has lived since 2002 with her family also serves as her salon and gallery—an arrangement that allows her to work at home, even if it means opening her doors to the public by appointment. Her time-management skills are impressive: All of her artists, she points out, live in or near the city or are a relatively easy flight away (which is why there are no Chinese artists on her roster). Her two additional galleries—Salon 94 Freemans on the Lower East Side and Salon 94 Bowery, next to the New Museum—are just a taxi ride away.
The distinctive spaces allow her to produce unconventional one-off shows, as well as create varied environments for her artists, including Grannan, Laurie Simmons, Marilyn Minter, Lorna Simpson, Huma Bhabha, Jules de Balincourt, and young buck Takeshi Murata, whom she snapped up when the dealer Jeffrey Deitch decamped to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Salon 94 Bowery is presenting Murata’s latest digital works and video through October 20, and Balincourt’s new paintings will go on view beginning October 25.
