Stuart Pivar is an American art collector from Brooklyn, New York known for being one of the founders of the New York Academy of Art along with Andy Warhol. Trained as a scientist, he has long endorsed the study of anatomy and need for artists to acquire technical skills. Pivar grew his fortune in the plastics industry and is also the author of several books.
Early life and education
Stuart Pivar was born 1930 in Brooklyn, New York to a father who imported velvet ribbons and a mother known for being "intensely style-conscious". Pivar speaks Yiddish and was brought up in a Jewish family. He began collecting objects at age 7, starting with insects in Central Park, and later bottle caps on Kings Highway at age 8. He spent time at a summer camp in Kingston, New York. Pivar attended Brooklyn Technical High School before going on to earn a B.Sc in chemistry at Hofstra University, graduating in 1951.
Career
In 1959, Pivar founded Chemtainer Industries, a business that specialised in bulk-storage plastic containers. As an inventor, he made a large fortune in plastics. While remaining active in the plastics industry, he became an independently wealthy investor and buyer on the art scene.
At The Factory in the early 1970s, Pivar met Andy Warhol who became one of his closest longtime friends. With Warhol he would go on regular shopping trips to buy "masterpieces", which could be objects bought anywhere, from a high-end auction house to a fleamarket. After the artist's death in 1987, Pivar recalled that "Andy Warhol loved to buy art. We used to go shopping together for it for a few hours practically every day in the past couple of years." Pivar was a collector of 19th-century academic art at a time when it was unfashionable. A scholar of the work of the sculptorAntoine-Louis Barye, he wrote "The Barye Bronzes: A Catalogue Raisonne" in 1974, a collation of critical commentary on all the sculptor's known works. Pivar endorsed the reintroduction of traditional skills into art school curricula, including the study of human and animal anatomy. With Warhol, he helped to found the New York Academy of Art in 1979, becoming one of its board members. The academy opposed abstract art and promoted traditional skills. According to Eliot Goldfinger, Pivar "strongly supported the acquisition of an anatomical collection of comparative skeletons, related artwork, anatomical models and charts, and the use of dissection as part of the curriculum." He donated over $1.2 million to the Academy during his involvement with it. Pivar resigned from the Academy in 1994 and complained that he had been "lied to and outmaneuvered" by other senior figures at the institution. A report placed most of the blame on his "disruptive, angry and abusive" behavior for problems at the institution. Pivar attempted to sue the Academy for $50 million, claiming that he had been caused "emotional and mental distress" and that he had been ostracised for pointing out falsification of financial records and employment of illegal immigrants. Pivar has stated that he resigned from the Academy Board along with Caroline Newhouse. Pivar is a life long art collector. Pivar was also a well known friend of the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, however the two had a falling out prior to Epstein facing charges for sex crimes. Pivar corroborated the account of Maria Farmer, a graduate of the New York Academy of Art in 1995, who stated that she had informed him about her abuse at the hands of Epstein in 1996. According to Pivar, this was when the friendship with Epstein ended.
Biological theories
Beginning with his book Lifecode in 2004 Pivar has published novel claims about the evolution of species. He asserts that the body form of species are encoded not in DNA but in the patterned structure of a primordial germ plasm. However, critics have stated that Pivar's proposed developmental sequences bear no resemblance to anything actually observed during embryological development. In his book on the demarcation problem, Nonsense on Stilts, Massimo Pigliucci says that he and his graduate students received "more or less threatening" emails from Pivar complaining that his non-novel theory of form was not being taken seriously. On his blog "Pharyngula", developmental biologist PZ Myers reviewed Lifecode and concluded that it was "a description of the development and evolution of balloon animals". In 2007 Pivar attempted to sue Seed Media, whose ScienceBlogs hosted "Pharyngula", for describing him as "classic crackpot", but the case was withdrawn after ten days. On July 5, 2016 a scientific paper titled The Origin of the Vertebrate Body Plan in the Geometric Patterns in the Embryonic Blastula was published in the peer-reviewed journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology identifying Stuart Pivar as the principal investigator.
