Remembering Dash Snow

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Courtesy of Pere Projects, Berlin Los Angeles Dash Snow, who rebelled against his privileged and legendary art collecting family, but became a bona fide art star, overdosed this week at 27. Anthony Haden-Guest on his meteoric rise and fall.

Plus: Read Ryan McGinley, Terence Koh and Dash Snow’s inner circle on his life and death with never-before-seen photos.

Dash Snow, the New York artist, who overdosed on heroin at the age of 27 in the Lafayette House, a hotel on East 4th Street, on July 13, was one of the most intensely watched figures in Manhattan’s hyperactive Downtown art world. So his death has had the same convulsive impact as that of Jean-Michel Basquiat who died one year older in 1988. “Things are in uproar,” said Sarah Braman, an artist partner in Canada, the Chrystie Street gallery, when I called to get a number for Terence Koh’s gallery, Asia Song Society, where I last saw Snow. “People are upset. Everybody’s in shock.”

Click to View Our Gallery of Dash Snow's Art

Snow and his coterie, primarily Dan Colen and Ryan McGinley, were usually described as art world’s comers—the so-called “The Bowery School.” Snow was the dominant presence, if by no means their best-regarded art-maker. Short, dirty-blond, with the hair of a boho Botticelli angel, a hobo brushbeard, and tattoos (including one of Saddam Hussein), Snow was at once bratty and engaging. And he had been the object of much attention ever since the publication of “Chasing Dash Snow,” a 2007 article by Ariel Levy in New York magazine that asked: At 25 he is a growing downtown legend, a graffiti writer turned artist with a beautiful face and a De Menil pedigree, elusive even to the two friends who created his myth. What happens if he’s caught?

Caught?

Well, Snow had a record. He went into juvenile detention at the age of 13, then lived on the streets for a while, and has been more or less cut off from his family ever since, not only the de Menils but his mother’s family. And the streets became part of what he was, a part of his growing myth.

The other part of the myth, of course, was what New York called Snow’s “de Menil legacy.” The significance of this was not that the de Menils were rich, which they were—Snow’s great-grandmother being Domique Schlumberger, heiress to a Houston oil fortune, which like the Hughes fortune wasn’t based on drilling but upon technology. What lent the Dash Snow story its special dimension, a dark resonance, is that Dominique and her husband were world class art collectors. They were purists, true believers in the spiritual function of art.

The de Menils housed their collection in a Renzo Piano building which they opened in 1987. They had three daughters and a son, all of whom have lived art-penetrated lives. One of the daughters, Philippa, and her husband Heiner Friedrich funded the Dia Foundation, which opened in 1974, and which itself funds such Sacred Spaces of post-war art as Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field in Albuquerque and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jerry on the shore of the Great Salt Lake. And it was another daughter, Christophe, a designer and greatly liked presence in the art world, who made the official announcement of her grandson’s death. He had, she said, recently been in rehab.

With such a family mythos—incidentally, Snow’s maternal grandfather, Robert Thurman, runs Tibet House, making Uma Thurman his aunt—it might have seemed preordained that Snow would enter the art world in some manner or other. But, unlike Colen and McGinley who were determined to make art careers, Snow had no such ambitions. But both Colen and McGinley saw that Snow’s raw, messy work—the Polaroids that envelop you in something like Nan Goldin’s young bohemia, a Downtownscape of affectless squalor and non-committal sex, the tabloid collages—was a good fit in a marketplace hungry for the raw, the messy (Think Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy). So Dash Snow became an artist. And an increasingly noticed one.

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July 18, 2009 | 7:10am

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Actually

Curious to the extent that Daily Beast's extensive Snow coverage is connected to Tina Brown's friendship with Charles Saatchi, who invested quite a bit in Snow and is now left with the risk of a considerable loss if his reputation disintegrates.

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