There are more examples of these preserved studios than you’d imagine. Along with Wesselmann’s, there’s the cluttered Chelsea townhouse of the painter and sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who died in 2010; the studio in a former Queens carriage house of the painter Jack Whitten, who died in 2018 and just had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art; and the shared home of the conceptual artist Geoffrey Hendricks and the painter Brian Buczak in Hudson Square. The conservation of such spaces is often a labor of love by an artist’s family or friends. Sometimes, as with the Upper West Side apartment and studio of the modernist painter Milton Avery, a space survives intact almost by accident. After Avery’s death in 1965, his wife, Sally Michel Avery, a painter and illustrator who was a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine in the 1940s and ’50s, continued to work for decades on the same table he’d used in the living room. When she died at 100 in 2003, the apartment passed to their daughter, the painter March Avery, who is now 92 and still lives there. Neither she nor her mother ever embarked on any serious renovations. The apartment is full of the work of March’s parents, and much of the furniture is the same as when they were alive. The only aspects of the space that change frequently are the Milton Avery paintings hanging on the walls, which are rotated often. (There will be an Avery exhibition at New York’s Karma gallery in November.) Stepping into the home is like entering a time portal that tells the story not only of a brilliant family legacy but also of a bygone era in Manhattan, one in which it was easier for artists to live and work where they pleased. An intercom system from the 1930s is practically a museum piece itself. Sean Cavanaugh, 56, March’s son, described this not so much as an act of preservation as a kind of pragmatic resignation — the apartment worked for her mother and father, and it works for March, so why fix something that isn’t broken?