Work Hard, Play Hard

Henry Buhl

Some leisurely pursuits seem whimsically predestined. For others, the matter is very pragmatic. “Not many people collected hands,” states Henry Buhl, a former investment banker turned photographer turned president of New York’s SoHo Partnership, who bares an eerie resemblance to Anthony Hopkins. What started as an investment purchase of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Hands With Thimble sparked what evolved into one of the most comprehensive, if not the largest, privately held art collections on the subject of human hands. Buhl’s collection contains well over 1,100 photographs and 110 sculptures, and since its debut in New York’s Guggenheim Museum, it has been on display in major museums around the world including those in Spain, Germany, Russia, and South Korea.

Buhl started SoHo Partnership, a non-profit organization aiming to employ the homeless, when a local homeless man asked him for $20. He offered him a job sweeping in front of his building instead and rallied boutique owners on the block to pay the man to clean their storefronts as well. Soon Tribeca and NoHo/Bowery followed with the same community initiative. It is in that “big picture” approach where Buhl’s passions for philanthropy and the arts meet. Still the rewards of his professional and leisurely endeavors are intimately personal. “I used to think that art collecting was a terribly nouveau riche thing to do. It is so self-aggrandizing and in a way it buys an entry into a certain society,” he admits. “But in the end, it is just so rewarding.”