Tag Archives: The Art Dealers

From Richard Serra’s Mouth: Dick Bellamy

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One of the art dealers profiled in The Art Dealers is Richard Bellamy, and they refer to him as a dealer’s dealer. Other dealer’s profiles were sprinkled with references to him. But when I read his profile, I don’t know that I quite got why or how he was so important. He talks like this:

“In the early years I hadn’t formed any allegiances or opinions yet, so there was no static around the art that interfered with what I was seeing. Being unpracticed, I was registering things very clearly, with an innocent eye. I had an intensity of perception, where things just got interiorized immediately.”

Interesting, but something was missing. Then I came across this essay by Richard Serra in The Brooklyn Rail. Here’s an excerpt:

After I arrived in New York, Dick would phone me every morning. He would always ask the same question: “Richard, how is the weather downtown?” I would put the phone down, walk the length of the loft to the window, look out, go back and report: gray, sunny, fog, rain, snow, whatever. It took me a while to realize that the weather was the same uptown, and this was Dick’s way of keeping in touch. The fact that he phoned every day without fail gave me a sense of security that I needed. I knew that art was being made around the corner and I was nowhere, driving a truck for a living and trying to sort it all out.

The whole piece is great read; I recommend you check it out. The list of artist’s who had initial shows through Green or Hansa or Goldowsky gallery–including Serra–is impressive. Now I think the book should refer to him as the artist’s dealer.

From the Horse’s Mouth: Impressions of Warhol

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Warhol’s persona is almost as iconic as his images have become. Here are some New York art dealers fascinating stories and first impressions of Andy Warhol from The Art Dealers:

“The boy is a very important artist, Andy, because he helped America. He mixes very much with youth, and with all the chic people—you know, the bums. When you have such a stupid expression as Andy has—when he is being silent, before the smile starts—when you look like that, you can do anything you want in the world. As Christ said to all those priests, “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” and Warhol is a horrible child.” -Alexander Iolas

“I saw the first Andy Warhol show, the Brillo boxes, at Stable Gallery. I went to the opening with James Harvey, a painter supporting himself as a freelance package designer. It was he who had designed the actual Brillo box, and strangely enough, he was a friend of Andy’s. Jim nearly collapsed when we went in and saw people actually buying Warhol’s identical versions. All Jim could do was write it off as part of the madness of life.” -Joan Washburn

“Warhol very badly wanted to join my gallery, to be with artists he admired, like Johns. I turned him down at first because I felt his work was too similar to Lichtenstein’s. Warhol told me I was very much mistaken. Was there another gallery interested? Yes, I was told. If I didn’t take him, Andy said, then he had no choice but to go to Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery. And he did. His show there a year later was fantastic: the Brillo boxes, the Marylins, and the Elvis paintings. I realized I had made a big mistake.” -Leo Castelli

“A few weeks later a very strange man with a terrible complexion and mottled gray hair came in, looking for drawings by Jasper Johns. Although I told him they were very expensive, $400 or $500, he asked for the drawing of a light bulb. I showed him the Lichtenstein girl with the beach ball, and he said his own work was very similar. He then asked me to visit his studio. I was intrigued by him and went to his place on Eighty-Ninth Street, where I saw beautiful antique furnishings alongside twenty-five paintings of Campbell’s soup cans and cartoon characters. He was playing rock-n-roll music so loudly we couldn’t really have a conversation.” -Ivan Karp

“Also at that time I had my first encounter with Andy Warhol. He was about halfway into his soup-can series when I visited his studio. I spent quite a bit of time chatting with him while looking hard at those paintings. I decided virtually on the spot to show them in California, and Andy was thrilled with the idea. He had no representation at the time; he sold one or two thins with Martha Jackson and Allan Stone, but he had no New York gallery. We struck a bargain then and there, and the paintings arrived in California in July 1962. I showed them by encircling the gallery with the thirty-two soup cans, all of them the same size, 20 inches high and 16 inches across.” -Irving Blum

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From the Horse’s Mouth: Betty Parsons

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Airport time is reading time for me, and so this past weekend was a chance for me to delve into The Art Dealers, a book profiling 42 art dealers that is surprisingly interesting. Based on interviews done in the 80s, the dealers speak about art and the artists they have worked with in a personal, knowledgeable way. These people shaped much of the art scene as we know it today, and Betty Parsons is a great example of how.

Betty Parsons opened her eponymous gallery in 1946 on 57th Street where she showed early Abstract Expressionists and championed many artists who had “The New Spirit” until her death in 1982. She is mainly remembered for showing Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and other New York school painters. The quotes of her below really struck me, from the beginning of white box galleries to vandalism (!) to women as dealers.

“I was the first to put up plain white walls in a gallery. Why? Well, showing these great big pictures of Abstract Expressionists, I got to thinking about the look of the gallery itself. In those days galleries mostly had velvet walls and very Victorian decoration. I decided to hell with all that, and the artists agreed. When you’re showing a large painting by Jackson Pollack, the last thing the work needs is a plush velvet wall behind it. The white was very severe; I wanted nothing else in the gallery, no furniture, except maybe one chair of bench. That was the idea, to have it as simple as possible, and it did catch on.”

“The worst thing was vandalism. People would come in, and when they left I would notice four letter words scribbled across Pollack paintings, Newman pictures. They would try to cut the paintings too.”

“When I started my gallery, nearly all art dealers were women: people like Marian Willard and Martha Jackson. It’s surprising how many women there were given the creative push to contemporary art, the pioneering and promoting. And there still are: Virginia Zabriskie is terrific, Paula Cooper has a beautiful gallery full of good artists. I think women are more creatively oriented than the male dealers, who are all money, money, money. That’s the first male consideration. My first thought is: Is the artist any good? If he’s good, and he doesn’t sell, that doesn’t change my faith in him.”