The Tamesis
Marian Goodman, a prominent New York gallerist and art collector, died late last week in Los Angeles, a spokesman for her gallery said. Goodman was 97 years old.
One of New York’s most influential art dealers since the 1980s, Goodman led a group of respected and valued artists in the contemporary art world, including Gerhard Richter, Julie Mehretu, Steve McQueen and Pierre Huyghe. In early 2023, she moved to Los Angeles after retiring from day-to-day operations of Marian Goodman Gallery.
At the time of her retirement, Goodman’s eponymous gallery maintained its longtime flagship location on West 57th Street since 1981, and its European headquarters, Galerie Marian Goodman, opened in 1995 in the Marais district of Paris. A series of major expansions begins in 2023, with a third gallery space opening in Hollywood and the New York gallery relocating to Tribeca in fall 2024. Another gallery in London operates from 2014 to 2020.
Goodman was born Marian Geller in 1928 to a first-generation Jewish Hungarian family and grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Her father, Maurice Geller, was an engineer turned accountant who collected modern art as a hobby. Goodman counted midcentury painter Milton Avery and gallerist Sidney Janis as friends and neighbors of her family, and their network of connections between the European and American avant-garde foreshadowed Goodman’s role in the 1980s. Once in 2004 new yorker In Peter Schjeldahl’s article, Goodman recalled frequenting Janice’s apartment as a child and playing in front of Henri Rousseau’s legendary jungle paintings. dreamlater became a permanent exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.
She graduated from Emerson College in the late 1940s and then entered graduate studies in art history at Columbia University, where she was the only woman. By then, she already had two children with her engineer husband, William Goodman, but the marriage did not last long. By the mid-1960s, she and Goodman were separated on Central Park West, and, according to Sheldal’s article, she was threatened with eviction for “entertaining gentleman visitors” outside of their marriage.
Seeking professional and financial freedom, Goodman founded Multiples, Inc. on Madison Avenue and 74th Street, which sold limited edition prints, books, and items such as jewelry, furniture, and miniatures to nearly 100 artists, including Pop artists Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claes Oldenburg, and post-Pop conceptual artists Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Dan Graham, and John Baldessari. Goodman’s version work peaked in 1970 Artists and Photography The Box, in the style of Marcel Duchamp’s legendary portable museum, documents the work of 19 contemporary artists through photos, books, brochures, leaflets and other media suitcase.
Beginning with a visit to Documenta 4 in 1968, Goodman encountered a new generation of European artists then unknown in the United States; they included the elder conceptualist Joseph Beuys, as well as Richter, Marcel Broodthaers, Sigmar Polke, and Blinky Palermo. It was the work of Broodthaers, an unknown Belgian poet and conceptual artist, that prompted Goodman to open his first gallery on East 57th Street in 1977.
“Meeting him was a life-changing experience,” Goodman said in 2010. “It inspired me to start a gallery with very little experience. I did it because of him.” She exhibited Budals’ mixed media and found objects for the first time, but only one sold and received little media attention. But Goodman persisted. Performances by Anselm Kiefer, Palermo, Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz followed. Richter began exhibiting at the Goodman Gallery in 1985 and remained there until 2023. While working with the Goodman Gallery, the painter’s abstract image (1986) sold at auction for a record $46.3 million, making his work the most valuable by any living European artist.
