The Schorrs

A recent show of drawings at the SBMA highlights longtime collectors Lenore and Herbert Schorr, who have gathered work by emerging artists on two coasts.

- Charles Donelan

For Lenore and Herbert Schorr, collecting contemporary art by emerging artists has been a lifelong passion that they’ve indulged in both New York and Los Angeles. As New Yorkers in the 1970s and 1980s, the Schorrs were best known as among the first collectors to champion the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who became almost a surrogate son to the couple until his death from a heroin overdose in 1988. Having begun with Picasso prints in the 1960s when he was a young executive at IBM in Westchester, Herb Schorr soon learned that he could afford paintings by artists such as Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston for approximately what he had been spending on modern master prints. This change in direction led the young couple to explore what was then a nascent scene in Soho and the East Village, where he and Lenore met not only Basquiat, but also Keith Haring and many of the other influential artists working in downtown New York at that time.