STEVE AND JUDY ROMM: Of Romm Art Posters

Form and function, art and business, come together in a converted potato barn in Bridgehampton where a leading publisher of art posters has its hideaway warehouse.

From there, Steve and Judy Romm create the everyman's version of artworks that could otherwise be unattainable.

While exposure is the obvious commercial benefit for artists who allow their work to be published as posters, with royalties a bit farther down the road, Mr. and Mrs. Romm are quick to assert that posters are art too.

And theirs, they say, are among the best, winning awards nearly every year at the annual exhibit of the Association of the Graphic Arts, both for production quality and design.

Poster Pioneers

Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Mucha were among the pioneers of poster art. Lautrec's dance-hall girls and Mucha's turn-of-the-century actresses made the artists known to thousands who might never have heard of them otherwise.

"If 400 people go to an opening, only one could buy the original work," as Mr. Romm put it, "but 400 could take it home anyway."

Romm Art Creations' posters are sold to distributors all over the world. A poster and frame shop in Sag Harbor, for example, buys them from a distributor in Seattle, a deal that has some posters traveling 6,000 miles to end up five miles away.

High Volume, Low Profile

That is the way the Romms, who live nearby in Wainscott, prefer to do business. "We don't do retail," said Mr. Romm, who would rather keep quiet the warehouse and design studio's location.

"It's easier to accomplish big things when you have a low profile," explained the company's sales director, Ellen Silverberg, a retired gallery owner.

Romm produces three or four catalogue supplements a year, each one with up to 40 new posters. A typical run is about 3,000 to 5,000 posters.

Mr. Romm, an art and photography teacher for 17 years, worked later as an artist's agent, but decided after two years he would rather have the artists working for him.

Early Artists

He and his wife, an art teacher herself and a photographer, began their business 10 years ago in Glen Cove, publishing reproductions of Richard Ely's graceful fashion sketches, Fran Wohlfelder's vibrant landscapes, Mary Deloite Arendt's watercolors of the American Southwest, acrylic paintings by Romero Britto, also known for those sly Absolut ads, and others.

Their earliest artists have stayed with them, their name recognition and profitability growing one with the other.

Ms. Wohlfelder, who now lives in Virginia, used to exhibit her impressionistic acrylics in a tiny gallery in Nassau County, and asked $400 to $500 apiece before she agreed to mass reproduction. She was recently commissioned to paint 17 aboard-ship murals for a luxury cruise line, at about $10,000 apiece, said Mr. Romm.

'This industry runs in trends. Impressionism one year, Abstract the next. In the last two or three months, there has been a huge resurgence in the photography market.'

Recognition

Elizabeth Ann Tops, co-owner of the Lizan Tops Gallery in East Hampton, said artists who allow their work to be published are, for the most part, "not famous."

"There are few galleries and a lot of artists. It's one way of getting some recognition," said Ms. Tops.

Karen Lind, for example, a Lizan Tops artist who handpaints photographs, has her work published by Romm. "Karen's work is feminine and sophisticated. It lends itself to posters," said Ms. Tops.

Romm Art Creations had 40 employees at one time - "There were people around we didn't even know. It was total insanity," said Mr. Romm - and the owners never took vacations, except for a once-in-a-while weekend in the Hamptons.

In 1991, they started the yearlong process of moving to the East End.

Quality-Of-Life Move

"We wanted to be as close to paradise as we could. . . . We downscaled, and vastly upscaled our quality of life," said Mr. Romm.

Ms. Silverberg owned the Studio 53 gallery, then on Park Avenue in Manhattan, for 20 years. Year after year, she and the Romms would wave to each other at trade shows and expositions.

A scant few months after she retired, two years ago, she "came by to say hello, and looked fabulous," said Mrs. Romm.

That was because she had left her gallery, she told the couple, and moved to a house in Northwest Woods. They deemed her retirement ended, and named her Romm Art's director of sales.

Mr. Romm described the time-consuming process that costs the company, marketing included, up to $10,000 for each poster it publishes.

It begins with painstaking color separation, three printers around Long Island whose identities the Romms keep to themselves as "a trade secret," sifting through multitudinous weights and shades of paper, and correcting and recorrecting the dot registration.

The artwork comes to the Romms in a variety of ways. Sometimes an artist will submit work, sometimes a gallery will commission a poster for an upcoming show, and sometimes they go looking for something particular.

"We have to agree, or we don't publish," said Mrs. Romm. "It's a significant investment to launch a new artist."

Art Photography

Compromises happen easily, often with fortuitous results.

"Judy has found the potential in artists who later turned out to be our top sellers, when I didn't see it," said Mr. Romm.

A Sunday drive last year brought them to Gary Bartoloni's gallery in Greenport, where they found his black and white photographs of large trees, mystical images emerging from a mist that gives the trees a druidic power.

Mr. Bartoloni, who lives in Noyac, is now one of several artists featured in Romm Art's latest venture, the marketing of art photography.

Their upcoming catalogue will feature nostalgic glimpses of a vanishing East End by Kathryn Szoka, a Sag Harborite working in Polaroid transfers; Tulla Booth's flowers of O'Keefesque proportions, Richard Calvo's pristine Hamptons beach scenes, and Lou Spitalnick's platinum-plate still lifes, Old World images by a master of a disappearing craft.

"This industry runs in trends, Impressionism one year, Abstract the next. In the last two or three months, there has been a huge resurgence in the photography market," said Mr. Romm.

There is "an exceptionally high level of quality photographers here," he added.

Spitalnick Series

A working lunch last week at Mr. Spitalnick's house in Montauk narrowed 40 prints to 10 chosen for reproduction as posters, the second series of Spitalnick posters Romm will undertake.

Mr. Spitalnick said that had the Romms not approached him a couple of months ago, the idea probably would not have occurred to him.

"I'm so busy, trying to print for shows and to do new work. . . . Artists generally don't think about the commercial presentation of their work," he said.

"And, there's a certain amount of hesitation about turning your work into a popular icon. If everyone likes it, then maybe it's not so special."

Ms. Silverberg, on the other hand, pointed out that collectors often buy posters before they start acquiring original works.

"Demand is created from exposure," she said.