Richard Ekstract, a magazine publisher who found success with niche audiences—from trade magazines like Tape Recording and Audio Times to a regional shelter franchise that began with Hamptons Cottages and Gardens—and played a notable part in Andy Warhol’s career, died on August 7. in West Palm Beach, Florida. He was 92.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by his son Steven. The cause was cancer.
Mr. Ektract was something of a media magnate, who had amassed a small fortune by creating a cottage industry of some twenty trade and consumer publications, ranging from electronics to video to decoration and real estate. But he is perhaps best remembered for an early collaboration with Warhol.
In the summer of 1965, Mr. Ekstract, then an upstart trade magazine publisher in New York with one title to his name, Audio Times, lent Warhol, who had made 16-millimeter films, a prototype Norelco “slant-track” device . video camera. (It took a few months for Nam June Paik, the so-called father of video art, to get his first Sony video recorder.)
Mr. Ekstract had met Warhol a few years earlier through an art director and, knowing Warhol’s frugality, often lent him equipment.
The clunky white Norelco was one-off, expensive, and difficult to use, but Warhol played with it for a month and created a milestone: the gripping “Outer and Inner Space.” In the film, on a split screen, the magnetic, doomed Edie Sedgwick starred delivering dueling monologues: Sitting on a stool she expresses an opinion on this and that, while a video of her opinion on this and that, but less clearly, playing next to her. her.
J. Hoberman in DailyExpertNews called the film “a masterpiece of video art made before the term even existed.”
In exchange for the use of the video camera, Warhol gave Mr. Ekstract a collection of acetates he had used the previous year to create a series of red screen-printed self-portraits. With Warhol’s permission, Mr. Ekstract took them to a commercial printer, who produced a second set of self-portraits, following Warhol’s telephone instructions.
As part of the deal, one of the portraits was to appear in Mr. Ekstract’s new magazine, Tape Recording. To celebrate the magazine’s debut, Mr. Ekstract threw a party on abandoned railroad tracks beneath the Waldorf Astoria hotel with characteristic flair. The portraits were exhibited – and given away to some of the magazine’s sponsors – and “Inner and Outer Space” was screened.
The red self-portraits had a complicated afterlife. One had been bought by filmmaker Joe Simon-Whelan in 1989 and had become the subject of a long and bitter court case. Despite ample documentation of its origins, his request was denied several times when Mr. Simon-Whelan asked for the work to be authenticated by the Warhol Foundation. He filed a lawsuit, and in 2010, after the foundation spent $7 million in legal fees, Mr. Simon-Whelan gave up, running out of money to continue.
Mr Ekstract kept one of the red portraits for himself. Last year he offered it to an auction house in Arizona, but the piece was not sold.
Richard Evan Ekstract was born on February 20, 1931 in Brooklyn to Max and Mildred (Last) Ekstract. His father was in the clothing business; his mother was a housewife. Richard grew up in Philadelphia and studied journalism at Temple University. He enlisted in the Army as a lieutenant in 1952 and served at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he became editor of Infantry magazine.
Mr. Ekstract’s first own magazine was Audio Times, a weekly trade journal. It had no significant revenue by the end of its first year, until audio electronics pioneer and philanthropist Avery Fisher signed on as its first advertiser.
Mr. Ekstract’s last publishing company was the Cottages and Gardens franchise. Hamptons Cottages and Gardens began as a free biweekly shelter magazine in the summer of 2002 and soon spawned spin-offs: Palm Beach Cottages and Gardens and Connecticut Cottages and Gardens.
The magazines were distinguished for using original photography rather than pickup shots of interiors and for generally punching above their weight as regional freebies, giving them the look and feel of national magazines. Advertisers responded and the local population – from old currencies to new lenders – opened their showrooms to the editors.
“Richard was a magazine publishing maverick on a level that surprised some people,” said Newell Turner, the first editor of HC&G, as it was known for short, in a telephone interview. (Mr. Turner went on to become editor of House Beautiful magazine and then editor-in-chief of the Hearst Design Group.) “He got into the world of Shelter magazine on a local basis when others didn’t see much value in it. But he realized there was a lot of interest in it, especially in the Hamptons, and he was right.
“Thanks to the audience — the creative and business classes of New York City — the magazine had tremendous power,” he continued. “He saw the importance of a micro-audience, and he was revolutionary in that he believed that a free magazine could still be worthwhile if someone picked it up and read it.”
Mr. Ekstract’s flavor was eclectic. He was stubborn, strong-willed and colorful in his language. He was notorious for hiring and firing, working through ten publishers in HC&G’s first five years.
In addition to magazines, “Richard also collected art and architecture,” says Alexander Gorlin, who designed a Tuscan villa for Mr. Ekstract on the site of a former East Hampton estate, one of a number of homes he built and turned east. End of Long Island. “But everything was for sale.”
He is survived by his wife Eileen, whom he married in 1990; his daughter, Janet; his sons Steven and Michael; and four grandchildren. His marriage to Claudia Tucker ended in divorce
In the spring of 2008, as the recession deepened, Mr. Ekstract launched his Cottages and Gardens franchise. A year and a half later, it was purchased by Marianne Howatson, an experienced magazine publisher, for an undisclosed sum.
But Mr. Ekstract told The New York Post with typical flair that the recession was not the reason for the sale.
“I’m 77,” he said. ‘It’s enough. I have nothing more to prove.”
