On the one hand, there’s an incredibly obvious reason to open a gallery on the Upper East Side, whether it’s the 2020s or the 1920s, regardless of your age.
“I always felt like it was exciting to be just around the corner from the most exciting museums in the world,” Rödder says, citing The Met and MoMA and the Guggenheim, but also the Jewish Museum and El Museo del Barrio.
“I like the pace of the Upper East Side, I like that you obviously get nowhere near the foot traffic that you would get in Chelsea or maybe on a good day in Tribeca, but the type of people that come, they actually are there to learn something,” he says. “They’re there to really engage with the work, engage with us. They come with time, if that makes sense.”
Squint on Madison and you can see London—Rödder mentioned the neighborhood St. James’s as an inspiration for how he views the gallery network. It’s a place where cutting-edge contemporary dealers exist cheek by jowl with Old Masters dealers and, say, guys selling really cool old maps. And like that part of town across the pond, with great restaurants like Wiltons existing in the shadow of the old Ritz London, the Upper East Side is shedding, somewhat, its food-desert rep, even if at times it reminds Rödder of—gasp—the West Village.
Like everyone, he’s a regular fixture at Maxime’s, Robin Birley’s Mayfair private-club bolthole marvelously reimagined for parkside Gotham, a place that’s become a bit of an industry canteen—like I said, squint and it’s London. I was there a few days ago with another dealer, The Journal Gallery cofounder Michael Nevin, and ran into Rödder, as well as a half-dozen collectors, many in from out of town, but who maintain memberships.
“It certainly has gotten a lot more interesting and hip, I’d say, in the last year, with interesting restaurants opening, certain clubs opening,” Rödder says. “I’ve been hearing things about more interesting restaurants coming. So, yeah, I think there’s a liveliness on the Upper East Side that probably is new and probably is part of that new wave of younger people wanting to settle there and live there.”
On a recent Thursday, Rödder invited the artist Jon Kessler and curator Melinda Lang, the director of the International Studio & Curatorial Program, to give a talk about his current show—the cultish phenomenon that is the late artist James Castle. A crowd swelled into the jewel-box space, “Kinda of a…big crew here,” Kessler said, a little surprised.
The space will, soon, get larger. In May, his neighbor Barbara Mathes will be ceding her space on the floor to Rödder, allowing him to take the entire floor.
Immediately below Rödder is Robert B. Simon, the Old Masters savant who discovered a painting at a New Orleans estate sale that happens to be the $450 million Salvator Mundi. Not a bad neighbor. In early February he had on view some pretty insane Renaissance drawings, many of them anonymous.
