The cause was a stroke, his son-in-law Peter Adler said.
Heller’s sale of Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles” to the National Gallery of Australia, then under construction in Canberra, the nation’s capital, was announced in September 1973. The news caused an uproar in the New York art world; in Australia it nearly brought down the Labor government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who had to sign off on the $2 million deal.
In New York, Heller was criticized for letting the painting leave the country and for blurring the lines between collector and dealer. Most startling of all was the astronomically high “Rembrandt class” price, so called because the amount paid was more typical of old master paintings. It was the largest sum offered for a U.S. painting — a record that held for 10 years — and it made the investment potential of modern and contemporary art starkly clear.
Heller said he wanted the painting to leave the country so it could be seen by an international audience and have a larger impact. It very much did.
In Australia, the purchase was controversial because “Blue Poles” was American rather than Australian, abstract rather than figurative and very, very expensive. But, with time, it would be embraced as a national treasure and a turning point in the country’s coming-of-age as a nation separate from Britain. Today it is a regular stop for Australian schoolchildren.
James Mollison, the young director of the National Gallery and the initiator of the purchase, went on to build one of the best collections of abstract expressionist paintings outside the United States.
In an email, Ann Temkin, chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art’s department of painting and sculpture, called Heller “an essential figure in the history of abstract expressionism” and said he had “fearlessly championed the art he loved even as others found it incomprehensible.”
Andrew Fabricant, chief executive of the Gagosian galleries, said in a telephone interview: “You’re not going to see anyone like him again. He recognized something colossal in American culture. He started the whole thing.”
Heller was prominent at a time when the New York art world was extremely small, especially compared with its current size. Collectors and art dealers were scarce, and the same group of people, mostly artists, showed up at all the openings.
He was wealthy, well educated, curious and highly opinionated, and he grew up loving music and literature. A gifted writer, tough businessman, superb athlete and impressive raconteur, he was also a quick study.
Starting in the early 1950s, Heller and his first wife, Judith Ann Goldhill Heller, plunged into the nascent New York art world and its latest innovations to build what was arguably the best private collection of abstract expressionist painting that ever existed. It was especially notable for its rigorous concentration on major, often large works.
Their Central Park West apartment — which painter Mark Rothko called “the Frick of the West Side” — became a place of pilgrimage for art collectors and museum directors from around the world.
By 1961, the collection was so singular that the Museum of Modern Art curated a traveling exhibition, “The Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller,” for presentation at seven major museums across the country. Its more than 30 paintings and drawings included seven canvases by Rothko and four by Barnett Newman (among them his most important canvas, the 18-foot-across, flaming-red “Vir Heroicus Sublimis,” purchased just months earlier) and three works each by Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Pollock.
The Pollocks included “Blue Poles” and “One: Number 31, 1950,” a mural-size classic drip painting that Heller bought in about 1956 for $8,000. It made Pollock himself so happy that he threw in “Echo: Number 25, 1951,” one of his quasi-figurative black enamel paintings.
There were also pieces by Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt, as well as Arshile Gorky’s 1947 “Summation,” in oil and pastel on paper measuring about 6 1/2 by 8 1/2 feet. It is now in MoMA’s collection.
(The thought of all these sizable pieces making their way in and out of crates to and from seven museums would give today’s conservators and insurers nightmares. When “Blue Poles” was removed from Heller’s 10th-floor apartment by riggers, it was on the evening news.)
Heller was much more than a collector. He was a friend and counselor to most of the artists he collected, and an adviser to other major collectors, including Robert and Ethel Scull and Frederick and Marcia Weisman, as well as museums.
He was also a fluid writer of catalog essays and magazine articles, including an early consideration of Jasper Johns (he would eventually own eight of his works) in “School of New York: Some Younger Artists” (1959), edited by B.H. Friedman, and the lead essay in the catalog for “Toward a New Abstraction” at the Jewish Museum in 1963.
In 1990, Heller wrote an article in Art in America that helped draw attention to the derelict condition of the estate left by Still (he died in 1980) and start the drive to create a museum of that artist’s work, now in Denver.
And he was for a time deeply devoted to MoMA, socializing and sometimes brainstorming with its curators and serving on its international council, although he was never on its board of trustees. (In an oral history conducted with Avis Berman for the museum in 2001, he remarked that he was “neither WASPy enough or wealthy enough” to be part of its inner circle.)
Benjamin Theodore Heller, the youngest of three children, was born in New York on Oct. 16, 1925, to William and Rose (Landa) Heller. His mother was a schoolteacher. His father, who started out selling razors on the street, founded Heller Jersey, a small but successful textile manufacturing company.
In 1953, Heller succeeded his father as president and expanded the company into a major firm; it was one of the first to produce double-knit jersey and synthetic polyester-cotton blends. He sold it to Uniroyal in 1970 and thereafter concentrated on real estate.
The family was well off, with a farm in Connecticut, where Heller rode horses on weekends. He attended the Ethical Culture School in New York and then its high school, Fieldston, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Painter Paul Brach, who introduced him to Pollock in summer 1953, was a fellow student.
Heller played football and lettered in track and basketball at Fieldston. He would later be a nationally ranked squash and tennis player, a scratch golfer and a founder of the Artists and Writers Charity Softball Game in East Hampton, New York.
He graduated from Fieldston in 1943, attended Yale for a semester and then enlisted in the Army, serving as a Morse code radio operator and sharpshooter. He was injured and earned two Bronze Stars. Upon discharge, he enrolled in Bard College and graduated in 1948 with a degree in philosophy.
He married a year later, and he and his wife began going to exhibitions and thinking about collecting during their honeymoon in Paris. Back in New York, they bought a 1918 cubist still life by Braque and a Congo fetish figure, establishing their collection’s dual concentration on modern and non-Western art. They also acquired works by Soutine, Dubuffet, de Stael, Soulages and Miró, but later sold their European works when they decided to concentrate on new American painting.
Judith Heller died in a car accident in 1970. The next year Heller married Patricia Rosenwald Sedgwick, a psychotherapist. He is survived by his wife; his daughters, Patti Adler, a retired professor of sociology, and Deedy Mishler, a web designer; his son, Woody, a Manhattan Realtor; his sister, Naomi Heller Rosenbloom; his stepchildren, Nico Sedgwick, a painter, and actors Rob Sedgwick and Kyra Sedgwick; 11 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. He had homes in Sharon and Manhattan.
By the late 1960s, Heller had begun to feel burdened by both his collection and the number of people who wanted to see it, and he began to sell paintings, often upsetting his family. He sold Pollock’s “One” and “Echo” and the big Gorky to MoMA.
He also offered to sell “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” to the museum. But when it became clear that the board would not approve the purchase, Heller simply gave the painting to the museum. It was as if he could not imagine it anywhere else except at the Museum of Modern Art.