Ben Heller

Ben Heller, an influential New York art collector and dealer best known for his early embrace of Abstract Expressionism and the sale of one of its masterworks to an Australian museum, which caused an international furor, died on April 24 2019 in Sharon, Conn. He was 93. The cause was a stroke, his son-in-law Peter Adler said. Benjamin Theodore Heller, the youngest of three children, was born in Manhattan on Oct. 16, 1925, to William and Rose (Landa) Heller. His mother was a schoolteacher. His father, who started out selling razors on the street, founded Heller Jersey, a small but successful textile manufacturing company. In 1953, Mr. Heller succeeded his father as president and expanded the company into a major firm; it was one of the first to produce double-knit jersey and synthetic polyester-cotton blends. He sold it to Uniroyal in 1970 and thereafter concentrated on real estate. The family was well off, with a farm in Connecticut, where Mr. Heller rode horses on weekends. He attended the Ethical Culture School in New York and then its high school, Fieldston, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. He graduated from Fieldston in 1943, attended Yale for a semester and then enlisted in the Army, serving as a Morse code radio operator and sharpshooter. He was injured and earned two bronze stars. Upon discharge, he enrolled in Bard College and graduated in 1948 with a degree in philosophy. His firest wife, Judith Heller, died in a car accident in 1970. The next year Mr. Heller married Patricia Rosenwald Sedgwick, a psychotherapist. He is survived by his wife; his daughters, Patti Adler, a retired professor of sociology, and Deedy Mishler, a web designer; his son, Woody, a Manhattan realtor; his sister, Naomi Heller Rosenbloom; his stepchildren, Nico Sedgwick, a painter, and the actors Rob Sedgwick and Kyra Sedgwick; 11 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. He had homes in Sharon and Manhattan.