However shy of publicity not of his possess building, he was generally in the information, asserting a undertaking or a person of his 200 lawsuits from rivals, tenants, financial institutions or even good friends, often in dropping leads to. Like it or not, he was a New York genuine estate mogul, alongside with Donald J. Trump, the Fisher brothers, Lewis Rudin, Leonard Litwin, the Milstein household, Bernard H. Mendik, Larry Silverstein and Harry B. Helmsley.
When he dropped out of New York College in the 1950s, Mr. Solow, who was self-taught in fantastic artwork appreciation, amassed 1 of the city’s notable personal collections of Renaissance and present day artwork, with functions by van Gogh, Joan Miró, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Balthus, Picasso, Matisse, Botticelli, Giacometti, Morris Louis and Mark Rothko, as effectively as Egyptian antiquities and African artwork.
He bought most of his artwork from sellers. But in 1973, he picked up a telephone in New York, known as Sotheby’s auction dwelling in London and waged a trans-Atlantic bidding war that gained him Picasso’s 1909 Cubist “Femme Assise” (Seated Girl) for $800,000, a file cost then for a Picasso. In 2016, Mr. Solow offered the portray, in a Sotheby’s auction, for $63.7 million.
Philippe de Montebello, the previous director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, identified as Mr. Solow’s selection eclectic and distinguished. Its astronomical price was tricky to compute. Like a lot of factors of his lifetime, his artwork produced controversy. Crain’s New York Company documented in 2018 that his artwork was held by a nonprofit museum that received federal tax breaks regardless of not becoming open up to the community.
From time to time his publicity was fairly optimistic. In 1984, Mr. Solow constructed a row of 11 related 5-tale single-loved ones townhouses on East 67th Street in Manhattan, involving Second and 3rd Avenues. They all had elevators and shared a personal typical backyard garden in the back again. It was a generation that experienced not often been seen in Manhattan due to the fact the 19th century.