home >> at home

A Bloomfield Hills collector
builds a home around his passion.

Lynne Konstantin I Design Writer
Brett Mountain I Photographer

W

In the front entrance to George Leach's Bloomfield Hills home, a floating glass banister

welcomes the outdoors' greenery inside year-round while bringing visitors' attention to an
Adolph Gottlieb painting called Rising Sun. The 17th-century black urn was purchased in

Hong Kong, and Leach had the Baker table stained to match the floors.

24 January 12 • 2012

TOP: A "gallery" is lined with
hen George Leach was
works by Donald Sultan (right)
a medical resident at
and Louise Nevelson (left), lead-
Botsford Hospital in
ing to a David Hockney from
the early 1970s, the endocrinologist
Irving Feldman Galleries in West
loved to visit art galleries on his
Bloomfield at the home's front
weekends off. "The Fisher Building
entrance.
"Everyone who sees it
had fabulous art dealers, like the
says
her
eyes
are moving," says
Gertrude Kasle Gallery," says Leach.
George
Leach.
"I've had it for
"There was the Allen Rubiner
25
years.
Irving
was also selling
Gallery in Royal Oak, Lee Hoffman
one
of
Warhol's
Marilyn
Monroes
in Birmingham. I loved to see what
for
$2,000,
but
I
couldn't
afford
was going on."
both
of
them."
He began reading about art,
educating himself with the help
of these knowledgeable dealers and visiting museums and galleries in New
York, Chicago and Florida.
"One day I came across a painting I loved at the Museum of Modern Art
in New York:' he remembers. "On the plane ride home, I was reading Detroit
Monthly and found that the Kidd Gallery in Birmingham was having an
exhibit of this artist, Dan Christianson. I felt like I was starting to make con-
nections and developing an eye."
He made his first purchase, a charcoal sketch by Robert Goodnaugh,
from Gertrude Kasle, and has steadily developed a world-class collection of
more than 50 museum-quality canvases, watercolors, prints on paper and
more — including pieces by Robert Motherwell, David Hockney and Helen

