From the 1940s through the ’70s Riccardo’s restaurant, at the corner of Rush and Hubbard, was one of the liveliest joints in town–it was once called the “Montmartre of the midwest.” On any given day the Italian eatery, tavern, and exhibition gallery hosted an eclectic group of regulars–celebrities, artists, and writers, from the raffish to the respectable–who sipped drinks in the sidewalk cafe, were served lasagna inside by singing waiters, and convened in the “Padded Cell,” a private room where journalists talked shop.
The 80-year-old Persky, who’s said to have the most extensive collection of Chicago-related architectural fragments in the country, wound up paying $665,000 for all seven works. The Albright alone–one of only a few major works by this important postwar American painter that isn’t in a public collection–cost Persky “an ugly penny. I can’t say it was a pretty one, because money is never beautiful. But when you want something, like art, you just pay it. Everybody made money but me.”
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The paintings, only two of which needed to be restored, will be unveiled September 20 at the Union League Club’s Rendezvous bar, at 65 W. Jackson, where they’ll remain for up to a year. But not just anyone will be able to walk into the club and look at them. Arrangements are still being worked out for public viewings.
In the 1940s Ivan–known for his dark, idiosyncratic, baroquely detailed pictures–was the closest thing Chicago had to an art star. As Alson Smith wrote in 1953, “Ivan thinks nothing of asking $100,000 for a painting now on the grounds that the old masters bring that price and that he’s as good as any old master.” Smith also described how, after spending time in Hollywood, where they were paid $75,000 to paint portraits for the 1945 movie The Picture of Dorian Gray, the twins “came back to Rush Street to argue with Ric about the proper proportion of gin to vermouth in the dry martini.” Robert Cozzolino, a curator at Elvehjem Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an Ivan Albright scholar, says no one has found any record that Ivan was paid for Drama (Mephistopheles) and adds that the artist might have waived his usual fee. “It’s one of the few commissions Albright ever did,” says Cozzolino, “and it’s possible that because he did it for a bar he may not have thought that highly of it. But in terms of scale and how strange a painting it is, it’s his own follow-up to The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
Albright died in 1983, and three years later Persky turned the painting over to a local auction house. According to Cozzolino, it was sold to Richard Feigen Gallery. Persky, who made a handsome profit, then lost sight of it.
“Barton introduced me to people in Connecticut who had the one by Bohrod,” Persky says. “I called them and struck a bargain. And that was that.” He paid $215,000 for it. Sid Deutsch, of Sid Deutsch Gallery in New York, had had the Albright since 1997, and Persky wound up paying $350,000 for it.
“He was a very persistent man,” says Vicky, who used to wait tables at Riccardo’s in the summer and is now marketing director for an investment management firm. “For five or six months he didn’t let up. He just wanted the paintings, period–whatever it would take.” She finally called Persky this spring and said her father and uncle would take the money.
