Emanuel Wolf at his home in Carlsbad, CA during a visit by Richard Buxbaum and Alla Efimova.

Carl Heidenreich, *Alaskan Highway*, 1961. Mixed media on Japanese paper and hardboard. Collection of Emanuel L. Wolf and Patricia Recendez.

It is with sadness that the Carl Heidenreich Foundation announces Emanuel L. Wolf's death in February of this year.

Manny Wolf was a businessman and film producer, as well as an enthusiastic and steadfast collector. After moving away from New York, he lived for many years with his wife Patricia Recendez in Carlsbad, CA. As a dedicated supporter of Carl Heidenreich’s career, he began collecting many of the artist’s paintings beginning in the 1960s. Upon Heidenreich’s death in 1965, Manny purchased the artist's estate in its entirety.

In 2017, in one of my first interactions with the Carl Heidenreich Foundation, I sat alongside Alla Efimova as we conducted a phone interview with Manny, transcribing his memories of an artist who had lived more than 50 years prior. Looking back today, one section of the interview stands out in its passion and excitement: "Since I made my first purchase of Carl’s work, I just became overcome with the art,” Manny told us. “I never wanted to sell any.”

Manny described to us how one of Heidenreich’s most important and unique paintings, Kennedy’s Death (1963), came into his collection: “I remember I had an office at 425 Park Avenue with great views on the 27th floor, overlooking the skyline. Carl called me right after Kennedy had been killed. He was very distressed on the phone. He said it was very important that he see me as soon as possible. So I said, ‘Sure, Carl. When do you want to visit?’ He came over to my office, carrying with him the Kennedy painting. I’ll never forget this. He sat down in front of me and was truly distressed …. We must have sat there talking for an hour and, really, me just listening to him. He showed me the painting, which he had just finished. This was about a week or ten days after Kennedy had been shot. When he was about to leave, I asked if I can buy the painting. He said, ‘No, I didn’t come here to sell this to you; I came here just to show it to you. I've been working on this since Kennedy had died and it was important I show it to somebody important like yourself.’ So I said, ‘Well, Carl, I would like to have it.’ He sat down with me again and that's how I acquired the Kennedy painting.”

Manny organized the first posthumous exhibition of Heidenreich’s work; since then, his care and commitment have made the Carl Heidenreich Foundation possible. His collection includes many of the finest examples of Heidenreich’s work and is an indelible act of guardianship.

The Foundation would like to share our condolences with Patti and her family, as we fondly remember Manny’s life and spirit.
— Christopher Squier

——

“My memory goes back to the unidentified buyer of the Heidenreich trove of paintings. Richard then discovered it was Manny, who loved the paintings all his life, a true connoisseur, what a loss for Patti and the Foundation.”
— Regina Casper

“In 2017, I drove with Richard Buxbaum east of Los Angeles to the edge of the desert where Emanuel Wolf had moved with his wife Patricia Recendez. Emanuel bought and saved hundreds of works by Heidenreich after the artist’s death, moving the crates from New York to Los Angeles to San Diego to the California desert. We were visiting the couple in the living room of their new home where Heidenreich’s most vibrant paintings greeted us. The windows opened onto a flat vista parched and blasted by the midday sun. For two hours, Richard and I drove on desert freeways, past arid flatlands and scorched hills to be in the presence of a large thirst-quenching cobalt painting. Outside, large boulders balanced precariously above meandering roadways. Inside, there were fluid watercolors, intense oils, and portraits of friends and lovers from another world, another place, another time.”
— Alla Efimova

Richard Buxbaum shares his condolences and a story of searching for this Manny Wolf from New York to California:
“Thanks to my father’s connection with him, I knew of Manny since 1965, but we didn’t meet in person until much later. My father, a general practitioner in Canandaigua, NY, had become acquainted with Carl Heidenreich around 1950 through their mutual friends Carl and Carola Osner; they in turn had met Carl during their desperate days trapped in Marseilles in 1941. He and Manny met through their mutual friend, a Dr. George Holton, who had settled in Canandaigua in the late 1950s and who himself lived to the high old age of 94.

My father’s and Carl’s acquaintance quickly ripened into a deep friendship. Early on my father began the practice of sending Carl $100 a month, and in return Carl would have him pick one of his watercolors whenever he visited Carl in New York.

After my father, as executor of Carl’s estate, had finished the quite arduous task of making an inventory of the several hundred works still at his Lexington Avenue studio (5th floor, walkup) he sold all, except for a few he had purchased earlier but left at the studio, to Manny in a bulk sale. Carl’s daughter, Monica, needed the money at the time and understandably could not agree with my father’s plan to release them slowly over time in order to maintain their value. As I recall, the price was $35,000; of course, in 1965 that was the equivalent of $250,000 in today’s terms.

Manny and my father stayed in touch and met occasionally; we have a photo of them at a 1971 exhibition at which, largely thanks to Manny, some of Carl’s works were shown at the well-appointed Fifth Avenue offices of the Goethe Institut in New York. After my father’s death in 1979, however, I lost contact with Manny. But around 1995, after I had met Dr. Gabriele Saure in Osnabrueck and interested her in researching Carl’s life before he had to flee the Third Reich, and prepare a “life and work” biography, I needed to relocate him in order to make his substantial holdings (well over 1,000 pieces though of varying quality) available for her to photograph and catalog.

That became a major project. Since Manny had been the CEO of a small but listed company based in New York City, I started by poring over several years’ printings of telephone directory White Pages at the branch of the New York Public Library specializing in records. I found a few “Emanuel Wolf/f” numbers and tried them all. I recall one in a South Park Avenue office building, where an old-timer described “his” Manny Wolf — an accountant who clearly did not fit the description we had. Then I found him, or rather his widow, Ellen Rypp Wolf, in a high-class mid-town apartment building. When I arrived, I immediately saw a Heidenreich oil painting on the wall of her living room.

It was only a coincidence! Her late husband was not our Emanuel Wolf! She used the superb “House of Heydenreyk,” the best traditional art framing shop in New York and seeing this work for sale had bought it. (A digression: much later, when I went to the shop, the father of the current owner told me that Carl had worked for them in earlier years whenever he needed the money. In fact, judging by the one work they had kept and showed me, his frames were clearly distinguishable from other frames to the point that to this day I know immediately whether a piece I come across had been framed by Carl, as he used a kind of monk’s cloth for the outer mat and distressed wood for the frame).

But a few false trails later, I found another Emanuel Wolf on 167th Street. My wife, Catherine, and I went there but couldn’t find the name on the buzzer roster. I tried a few and finally found a long-time resident there who told me that yes, an Emanuel Wolf had lived there but had moved out a few years before.

At this point, stumped, I recalled that Manny had been the CEO of a small but listed company that had gone bankrupt years earlier leaving its employees’ pension claims unfunded. In that increasingly fraught situation, Congress, during the Gerald Ford interregnum, created the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which in essence guarantees a minimum pension funded by a small tax on each covered entity when the failed entity fails to honor the obligation. During a trip to Washington I went to its offices, found the specific unit in charge of the search for claimants without a known address, and convinced the sympathetic officer that I was on a legitimate mission. Regrettably, however, privacy concerns prevented her from helping me. To make the discussion easier, I showed her the last Manhattan address we had found and she confirmed that it was one of the ones in that file. At that point she excused herself to attend to something in a back office, so I hoisted myself over the railing and looked at the computer screen she somehow had failed to turn off.

It took me one step further; namely, that the last known but useless address was a California one and that the accumulated pension payments owed him by now were about $40,000. I returned to the supplicants’ chairs and when she returned thanked her for at least listening to my tale and left. Back in California, I checked all metropolitan area White Pages and found six or seven numbers for an Emanuel Wolf/Wolff. Three or four calls down that list I reached an Emanuel Wolf in Carlsbad. When I asked whether the person on the line was Emanuel Wolf he growled, “Who wants to know!” I mentioned the magic word “Heidenreich” and the journey came to a successful conclusion.

It turned out he had become a producer with Allied Artists on the LA movie scene; had in his view been illegitimately left off the “Producers” credits on a film that I recalled then but cannot now; and had taken a film poster and in some pre-photoshopping way inserted his name as a co-producer. I believe he had been threatened with a lawsuit over that action; that explained his reluctance to acknowledge his identity.

Manny died this February. He and his widow Patricia Recendez held the entire bulk purchase together over the decades at considerable expense and space difficulties; at my suggestion they invited Gabriele Saure to be their guest for several weeks to catalogue their holdings of about 1,200 sketches, watercolors, and oils; in short, they shouldered the immense task of preserving Carl Heidenreich’s work when most people would have dissipated or discarded them. They lent several for the 2004 Berkeley Art Museum “Hofmann and Heidenreich” exhibition; it was at the opening reception and dinner that my wife and I first met them. Patti is on the Foundation Board and I hope that despite her loss she will continue to serve in that role.”
— Richard Buxbaum