“I fell in love with the illustrations of Howard Pyle and the Brandywine school of art as a boy,” said the Wilmington native in an interview at The Turak Gallery of American Art,  132 S. 17th Street. “In fact, I may have been the only kid in history to play hooky from school to hang out at museums —mainly, in my case, the Delaware Art Museum.”

What first captured his attention was Howard Pyle’s “Marooned,” one the great illustrator’s paintings for adventure novels, this one depicting a shipwrecked pirate on an empty beach. “The loneliness of it,” Turak said, “haunted my dreams.”

The son of a church sexton and a mother who loved to paint, Turak was impatient to follow his dreams. He enlisted in the Army at 19, was sent to Vietnam at the height of the war, was wounded twice in battle, and ended up in the Valley Forge Military Hospital with a Purple Heart and no specific life plan.

After stints as a ROTC training officer and anti-riot soldier, he started a paint contracting business back home in Wilmington.

“After a few years, I was doing well enough to start collecting art,” he said. “So I started with the Brandywine artists — Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover — later expanding my horizons to important 19th- and early 20th-century American artists like Mary Cassatt, Martha Walter, John Sloan, Charles Sprague Pearce, Albert Bierstadt, Martin Johnson Heade, Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington, Cecilia Beaux and many others.

“For more than 25 years,” he added, “I’ve handled works by artists of the Hudson River school, the ashcan school, luminists, tonalists, American genre painters, American impressionists and post-impressionists.” 

While he had been an art dealer since 1974, he opened his first gallery across from Haverford College on the Main Line in 1982 with his then wife, art consultant Penelope Lagakos. They moved to Philadelphia in 1985, hanging their fine art in a town house/gallery on Spruce Street. In 1992, they moved to the present location.

“Lately,” Turak said, “I’ve become fascinated with a unique collection of art by the late African-American artist James Lucien Crump, a Mississippi-born Philadelphia resident who would not sell his paintings in his lifetime, and whose estate I recently acquired.”

The gallery also handles the estate of Martha Walter (1875-1976), a “second-generation” Philadelphia impressionist and one of the few American women whose work is in the Louvre.

“And we now have the estate [of] L.A.D. Montgomery,” Turak said. He explained that the Philadelphia painter, who lived from 1904 to 1996, was president of the Cheltenham Art Center, and an executive for the Fellowship of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for more than 30 years.

Selling art and
solving crimes:
All in a days 
work for Turak

“It’s getting increasingly difficult to find great paintings,” Turak said when asked about the state of the market. “I’m talking about important artists, important subjects, the best in their field. I have paintings I won’t part with now because they would be impossible to replace. However, we do lend works. For example, we lent a Thomas Moran painting to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., for their 1997-98 exhibition. We are currently sending a framed lock of Napoleon’s hair to a museum in New Orleans, and we’ve lent works to the Pennsylvania Academy, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and other museums in this country and abroad.

”“We also arrange donations for our clients,” he added. “In particular, we've been instrumental in sending a number of paintings to Sweet Briar College in Virginia — which we are happy to support because they are a teaching institution for women."

He has always remained loyal to his roots, promoting Delaware Valley artists like his Chester County neighbor EM. Saniga, whose still lifes and dreamlike landscapes often include hunting dogs or horses, have sold rapidly at recent shows and are represented in the permanent collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

And when Turak’s not collecting, he’s detecting. Though he didn’t allow his name to appear in the national press, Turak was instrumental in returning two stolen Norman Rockwell paintings to their rightful owner several years ago.

“What happened,” Turak, who relishes a good story, said, “is that a banker from Brazil, who was visiting Philadelphia, came up to the gallery one day in 1998 with two original Rockwell paintings that he wanted me to buy. Something seemed fishy, so we ran a check, and, sure enough, they had been stolen from an art gallery in Minnesota in 1978.

Turak contacted friends at the FBI (with whom he had worked previously to recover “Five Dollar Bill” by William M. Harnett, which had been stolen in 1984 from the Philadelphia Museum of Art), and the matter was resolved quietly.

There were no arrests, and Turak, whose childhood seems to have left him with a strong code of personal integrity, asked the FBI to pay any reward to the banker, who, it turned out, had received the paintings from a client’s estate in lieu of a debt.

These days, when he is not gardening at his Chester County home with his companion, Michelle Berkowitz, Turak communicates with clients from all over the world who seek both his art and his expertise.

“The sky’s the limit." he said with his six war medals half-hidden in a dark frame behind his desk. “Lately, I’ve had Chagalls, Manets, Renoirs. It’s an international world.” 

And the world is his oyster.
 
 

by  Linda Dormont, "ART Matters,"     Philadelphia, Sept. 2003, Pp. 24-25.