Richard Ekstract, Magazine Publisher With Link to Warhol, Dies at 92

Richard Ekstract, {a magazine} writer who discovered success with area of interest audiences — from commerce journals like Tape Recording and Audio Times to a regional shelter franchise that began with Hamptons Cottages and Gardens — and performed a curious position in Andy Warhol’s profession, died on Aug. 7 in West Palm Beach, Fla. He was 92.

His dying, in a hospital, was introduced by his son Steven. The trigger was most cancers.

Mr. Ektract was a media mogul of kinds, having amassed a small fortune making a cottage business of some 20 commerce and shopper publications, transferring from electronics to video to adorning and actual property. But he could also be finest remembered for an early collaboration with Warhol.

In the summer time of 1965, Mr. Ekstract, then a budding commerce journal writer in New York with one title beneath his belt, Audio Times, lent Warhol, who had been making 16-millimeter movies, a prototype of a Norelco “slant-track” video digicam. (It was a number of months earlier than Nam June Paik, the so-called father of video artwork, obtained his first Sony video recorder.)

Mr. Ekstract had met Warhol a number of years earlier via an artwork director and, understanding Warhol’s frugality, would typically lend him gear.

The clunky white Norelco was a one-off, costly and tough to make use of, however Warhol performed with it for a month, making a landmark work, the affecting “Outer and Inner Space.” The movie, in a split-screen format, starred the magnetic, doomed Edie Sedgwick delivering dueling monologues: Perched on a stool, she opines on this and that as a video of her opining on this and that, however much less clearly, performs subsequent to her.

J. Hoberman, writing in The New York Times, referred to as the movie “a masterpiece of video art made before the term even existed.”

In alternate for using the video digicam, Warhol gave Mr. Ekstract a group of acetates he had used the yr earlier than to make a collection of pink silk-screened self-portraits. With Warhol’s permission, Mr. Ekstract took them to a industrial printer, who made a second set of self-portraits, following Warhol’s instructions given over the telephone.

As a part of the deal, one of many portraits would seem in Mr. Ekstract’s new journal, Tape Recording. To rejoice the journal’s debut, Mr. Ekstract, with attribute aptitude, threw a celebration on deserted rail tracks beneath the Waldorf Astoria resort. The portraits had been exhibited — and given away to some of the journal’s sponsors — and “Inner and Outer Space” was screened.

The pink self-portraits had an advanced afterlife. One of them had been purchased by a filmmaker named Joe Simon-Whelan in 1989 and turned the topic of an extended and bitter lawsuit. Despite ample documentation about its origins, when Mr. Simon-Whelan requested to have the work authenticated by the Warhol Foundation, his request was denied a number of occasions. He sued, and in 2010, after the inspiration had spent $7 million in authorized charges, Mr. Simon-Whelan gave up, having run out of cash to proceed.

Mr. Ekstract stored one of many pink portraits for himself. Last yr, he supplied it to an public sale home in Arizona, however the piece didn’t promote.

Richard Evan Ekstract was born on Feb. 20, 1931, in Brooklyn to Max and Mildred (Last) Ekstract. His father was within the attire enterprise; his mom was a homemaker. Richard grew up in Philadelphia and studied journalism at Temple University. He joined the Army in 1952 as a lieutenant and served at Fort Benning, Ga., the place he turned the editor of Infantry journal.

Mr. Ekstract’s first journal of his personal was Audio Times, a weekly commerce journal. By the tip of its first yr it had no income to talk of, till Avery Fisher, the audio electronics pioneer and philanthropist, signed on as its first advertiser.

Mr. Ekstract’s final publishing enterprise was the Cottages and Gardens franchise. Hamptons Cottages and Gardens started as a free biweekly shelter journal in the summertime of 2002 and shortly spawned spinoffs: Palm Beach Cottages and Gardens and Connecticut Cottages and Gardens.

The magazines had been distinctive for utilizing authentic pictures as an alternative of pickup photos of interiors and for usually punching above their weight as regional freebies, giving them the appear and feel of nationwide magazines. Advertisers responded, and locals — from previous cash varieties to the newly flush — opened their showplaces to the editors.

“Richard was a maverick in magazine publishing at a level that surprised some people,” Newell Turner, the primary editor of HC & G, because it was recognized for brief, mentioned in a telephone interview. (Mr. Turner went on to be editor of House Beautiful journal after which editorial director of the Hearst Design Group.) “He got into the shelter magazine world on a local basis when others didn’t see much value there. But he realized there was a huge interest in it, particularly in the Hamptons, and he was right.

“Because of the audience — the creative and business classes of New York City — the magazine had a huge power,” he continued. “He saw the importance of micro-audiences, and he was revolutionary in that he believed a free magazine could still be worth someone picking it up and reading it.”

Mr. Ekstract’s tastes had been eclectic. He was opinionated, sturdy willed and colourful in his language. He was infamous for hiring and firing, working via 10 publishers within the first 5 years of HC & G.

In addition to magazines, “Richard collected art and architecture,” mentioned Alexander Gorlin, who designed a Tuscan villa for Mr. Ekstract on the location of a former property in East Hampton, certainly one of quite a lot of homes he constructed and flipped on the East End of Long Island. “But everything was for sale.”

He is survived by his spouse, Eileen, whom he married in 1990; his daughter, Janet; his sons Steven and Michael; and 4 grandchildren. His marriage to Claudia Tucker resulted in divorce

In the spring of 2008, because the recession deepened, Mr. Ekstract put his Cottages and Gardens franchise available on the market. A yr and a half later, it was purchased by Marianne Howatson, a veteran journal writer, for an undisclosed sum.

But Mr. Ekstract, with typical brio, instructed The New York Post that the downturn was not the rationale for the sale.

“I’m 77,” he mentioned. “It’s enough already. I have nothing left to prove.”