“It’s sort of a communion,” says Hugues Magen, examining the contents of his Tribeca living room—the largest existing dining table (nearly 12 feet long) by French designer Charlotte Perriand, an original Kangourou armchair by Jean Prouvé, a carved-wood Punu mask, a garbage drawing by American artist Mike Kelley. “In order to communicate with each other, they have to have a certain degree of what I call a vibrational aesthetic.”
But vibes are just one element of the equation for the man behind the New York City design purveyor Magen H Gallery, who says, “I’ve always tried to buy the best pieces I can find.” When looking at furniture or art, he considers form, technique, and context, as well as his gut feeling. “I think it’s an instinct,” he explains. “You just gravitate toward the right object.”
Such a precise yet subjective system for measuring beauty is fitting for the Paris-born dealer, who moved to New York in 1980 to pursue dance. He performed with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the Dance Theater of Harlem, where he served as a principal for more than a decade before retiring in 1999. “To me, it’s just an extension of dancing,” he says of design dealing. “It’s poetry, motion, beauty, form.”
Magen came to his second career somewhat by accident at the end of the 1990s, when a friend in Paris asked him to find some American furniture in New York. Magen scored a pair of Eames LCW chairs in SoHo that he deconstructed, packed into a suitcase, and brought to France. When they quickly sold (for quite a profit), his wheels started turning. Soon he began doing the same with already collectible midcentury French designs by the likes of Perriand, Le Corbusier, and Prouvé, steadily mixing in work by lesser-known talents. In 2003, after several years of selling pieces to other dealers, he and his then wife, April Magen, opened a gallery on East 11th Street, just a few doors down from its current location.