Vance Jordan, 60, a Dealer In Turn-of-the-Century Art
Hyfler/Rosner
BYLINE: By CAROL VOGEL NY Times
Vance Jordan, a leading dealer in American art and a pioneer in promoting
the American Arts and Crafts Movement, died yesterday at Mount Sinai
Hospital in Manhattan. He was 60 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause of death was cancer, his sister, Jill Spangler, said.
In the late 1970's Mr. Jordan and his cousin Tod Volpe ran the Jordan-Volpe
Gallery on West Broadway in SoHo. It specialized in American Arts and Crafts
furniture and pottery along with paintings by American expatriate artists
like Edwin Lord Weeks, H. Siddons Mowbray, Julius LeBlanc Stewart and
Charles Caryl Coleman. At a time when many of these objects were considered
little more than flea-market finds, the gallery's exhibitions and catalogs
help educate the collecting public, elevating work by furniture makers like
Gustav Stickley and objects by the Arts and Crafts ceramist William H.
Fulper 2nd to hot collectibles that over the years ended up adorning homes
from Hollywood to Manhattan and the permanent collections of museums across
the country.
Born on Feb. 14, 1943, Mr. Jordan grew up in Yonkers, the son of Lillian and
Joseph Jordan. He graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1964
with a degree in engineering. Instead of pursuing his studies, however, Mr.
Jordan first became a squash pro at the New York Athletic Club. In the late
1960's and in the 1970's, he ran the Joe Jordan Talent Agency, a children's
talent agency founded by his father in 1966.
But his first love was art. After more than a decade in SoHo, in 1987 he
moved his gallery to Madison Avenue and changed its name to Vance Jordan
Fine Art. It was then that he began concentrating on important American
paintings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, holding exhibitions on
subjects ranging from Stewart to paintings and watercolors by Childe Hassam
and another devoted to the still lives of John La Farge.
In 1996 Mr. Jordan financed an exhibition at his gallery consisting of 25
American paintings from the permanent collection of the Brooklyn Museum of
Art. He held an opening that was a benefit, raising about $160,000 to
finance a catalog of the museum's historic American oil paintings.
Mr. Jordan was himself a tireless collector whose tastes ran from the
whimsical to the serious. Not wanting to compete with his clients, he chose
far different areas on which to focus. His Manhattan apartment was filled
with an astonishing array of unexpected collections ranging from Swatch
watches and antique clown shoes to Italian crib figures and 19th-century
Italian painting.
Mr. Jordan served on the board of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
in Philadelphia.
Besides his sister, he is survived by two nephews, Ian and Noel Spangler of
Manhattan.