“IT’S a view with an apartment,” said Mark Del Vecchio of his home on the 42nd floor of a beige brick behemoth near Lincoln Center.

Indeed, the panorama, which stretches from the Statue of Liberty to the George Washington Bridge, is so dramatic, it’s hard for a visitor to focus on anything inside the apartment.

But when Mr. Del Vecchio and his partner of 28 years, Garth Clark, begin speaking, the view starts to recede. Each has a commanding presence, thanks to a booming voice (Mr. Del Vecchio’s) and lilting South African accent (Mr. Clark’s).

Mr. Clark and Mr. Del Vecchio have run the Garth Clark Gallery, which specializes in ceramics, for nearly 30 years, and they are passionate when discussing what they have achieved.

Mr. Clark, 61, is the author of some 50 books on ceramics. (The 51st will be about Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” a urinal exhibited as a sculpture, which he considers “the most famous ceramic artwork in the world.”) Mr. Del Vecchio, 49, is the salesman. For years, when artists talked about their talents, he said, “I would say, ‘I can do something better — I can sell the stuff.’ ”

Their biggest transaction — part sale, part donation — came last year, when the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, acquired 400 pieces from their personal collection. There are works by artists known mainly for ceramics — like the California potter Beatrice Wood — and others who occasionally tried the medium, like Claes Oldenburg and Anthony Caro.

Now Mr. Clark and Mr. Del Vecchio have the thrill, they said, of seeing their names on museum walls. The first show of their works at the Houston museum opened last month and runs through Sept. 1.

But once most of the collection was in Houston, they knew their longtime home — a two-bedroom condo in a quiet building near Columbus Circle — would feel empty. So they put the condo on the market in March 2007, half hoping that nobody would want to buy it.

When they received a full-price offer on the first day, Mr. Clark said, they had to begin looking for a new place. Luckily, they had a goal in mind. “Mark and I have always lusted after a great water view,” Mr. Clark said.

They focused their search on South Park Tower, on West 60th Street, which at 52 stories offers unobstructed Hudson River vistas.

Though they were hoping to rent a two-bedroom, the one-bedrooms on the building’s southwest corner have the best views, they said. So they agreed to rent a 700-square-foot one-bedroom with a terrace, for $4,500 a month.

“The price was a shocker, because we hadn’t rented in years,” Mr. Clark said. And the apartment is less than half the size of their previous place, which, he said, also came as a shock.

Part of the adjustment was going to two closets from seven. Mr. Clark’s strategy, he said, was to get rid of all his clothes that aren’t black. “It’s an easy thing to do in New York,” he observed.

The apartment is almost as monochromatic as Mr. Clark’s wardrobe. To let the view take over, the couple chose gray paint for the walls and gray carpet for the floors. On a foggy day, the apartment seems to dematerialize, merging with its rarefied surroundings.

To keep the place from feeling cramped, they selected furniture on legs and kept it away from the walls. “The idea is that everything seems to float,” Mr. Clark said. Their dining table, by Jean Nouvel, is named Less — a reference to its barely there profile. Their guest “beds” are a pair of slim sofas. Mr. Clark’s two grown sons from a long-ago marriage, whom both men helped to raise, are regular visitors.

The men retained about 30 ceramic pieces that they felt attached to. One of them, which hangs in the dining area, consists of a stuffed doe’s head sealed in plastic and mounted on a ceramic plaque. The artist, John Byrd, “restores dignity to what is to some of us a fairly ugly thing,” Mr. Clark said.

The living room contains three pieces by Ms. Wood, who was 87 when Mr. Clark and Mr. Del Vecchio first met her at her studio in Ojai, Calif. She gave them items to sell, and they represented her until she died, at 105, in 1998.

One of their roles was helping her decide which pieces to exhibit and which to destroy. “We would take them into an alley somewhere with a hammer,” Mr. Clark said. “Editing is as important to a visual artist as to a writer.”

The three Wood pieces that they still own are a compote, a chalice and a vase, but no one plans to use them for fruit, wine or flowers. Vessels by Ms. Wood have sold for more than $100,000.

The men also collect photography, including works by Robert Mapplethorpe, Lee Friedlander and George Platt Lynes, but the sunlight that floods their south-and-west-facing unit means they can’t show any of the pieces. That’s one reason they are in the process of buying a house in Santa Fe, N. M., which will include shaded gallery spaces.

They haven’t yet decided when they will begin using that house, or how they will divide their time between the Northeast and the Southwest. They expect to continue running the Manhattan gallery, which these days is open by appointment only, for at least five years.

But in part because of the new apartment, they are thinking of more than just ceramics. Mr. Clark says the views have lived up to their promise. “I am partial to dawn, and to evening with its ostentatious sunsets,” he wrote in an e-mail message. And sometimes, he added, “I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and spend 10 minutes just looking at the city before going back to sleep. It’s overwhelming, and it’s humbling.”

By FRED A. BERNSTEIN

Source: New York Times – U.S.A.