Gallerist Who Championed Artists Dies at 97

Art dealer Marian Goodman died Thursday at a Los Angeles hospital. She is respected for her enduring commitment to the artists she represents and her unwillingness to follow aesthetic or commercial trends. She is 97 years old. new york timesHer death was first reported on Sunday, but no cause of death was reported.

In 1977, at the age of 49, Goodman opened her eponymous gallery in Midtown Manhattan, exhibiting the work of the late Belgian artist and poet Marcel Broodthaers, whose conceptually rigorous works reflected her adventurous taste. Over the next five years, she exhibited and helped establish many of the top artists of her time, especially those from Europe who had not yet received their full due in the United States.

Once Goodman decides to work with an artist, she goes all-in. “One has to be willing to continue showing an artist for fifteen or twenty years,” she said in “The Art Critic Peter Schjeldahl.” new yorker 2004. (She rarely gives interviews, preferring to let the media spotlight her artists.) Mainstays on her roster include German painter Gerhard Richter and installation artist Lothar Baumgarten, Italian Arte Povera masters Giovanni Anselmo and Giuseppe Penone, British director Steve McQueen, McQueen, Ethiopian-American painter Julie Mehretu, South African draftsman and filmmaker William Kentridge, and many other notable figures.

“If you had purchased only works by Marian Goodman over the past 40 years, you would have one of the best museums in the world today,” Tom Eccles, director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, said in a report. wall street journal magazine Her profile in 2014.

Marian Geller was born in New York in 1928, where she spent nearly her entire life. Her father, Maurice Geller, was an accountant and avid art fan who collected 40 paintings by the American modernist painter Milton Avery. The future gallerist attended Emerson College in Boston, where she considered a career in journalism and, in her early 20s, married civil engineer William Goodman. They divorced in 1968.

There’s no set path to becoming an art dealer, but Goodman’s approach was particularly unusual. In 1962 she produced a series of prints to raise funds for the New York schools of her two children, Michael and Amy, who survive her. “I thought, maybe I could make a living from this,” she said in the interview. new yorker.

The next year, Goodman established a graduate art history course at Columbia University, and in 1965 founded a company called Multiples to publish and sell affordable editions of artists’ works. (She first proposed the idea to the Museum of Modern Art, but it was rejected.) The concept was “close to the socialist idea that art should be accessible,” she wrote in new york times 2021. Funded by a business partner and the sale of an Avery painting given to her by her father, the company went on to publish works by major artists such as Larry Rivers, Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein.

Goodman’s regular travels to Europe were crucial in honing her artistic interests, and after failing to find a New York dealer for Budals, she finally took the step to create her own gallery. She chose 57th Street as her base, then the center of the city’s art world, but as her peers flocked to Soho and then Chelsea in the coming years, she stayed. “I saw dealers chasing artists and throwing them out and moving on to the next one,” she said of the “SoHo” scene. new yorker. “I’m worried it’s contagious.”

In 1985, the gallery moved into its current location on the fourth floor of Building 57. Due to the modest size of the elevator, larger artworks had to be carefully transported in through the windows via crane. The somewhat unorthodox location, and the great reputation behind it, makes every exhibition there a special event.

As the art market boomed in the 1990s and 2000s, some ambitious dealers began to set up branches around the world. Goodman didn’t. She opened a space in Paris in 1995 (her current intimate Paris location dates back to 1999) and a large space in London in 2014, which closed due to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. (“Brexit has changed London’s role,” she told us) art news then. )

Goodman’s unique approach suits her artists. Like her, they tended to be steeped in art history and serious thought (even Maurizio Cattelan, who had long displayed her carnival tendencies). They are both hands-on practices and are in it for the long term. Many of the gallery’s artists were or were later highly sought after by collectors with deep pockets, but their dealers were known for converting their works into permanent collections.

Although Goodman maintained some distance (physically and mentally) from the ever-expanding art industry, she won the admiration of her competitors. David Zwirner told wall street journal When he started his own gallery in the 1990s, she was “the model I aspired to be.” Jeffrey Deitch tells new york times In 2021, “She defined the contemporary gallery model as having the same standards as the great museums.” (When Scherdal asked her to guess how the art world viewed her, her response was: “Responsible. Passionate advocate for my artists. Pretty good batting average. Better wise than unwise.”)

As Goodman entered her 90s, she assembled a leadership team to plan the gallery’s future and in 2019 hired Philipp Kaiser, the former director of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne; he is now the gallery’s chairman. As time went on, Goodman became less and less visible, and there were signs of change. In 2023, the gallery said it would move from Midtown to Tribeca, where many other blue-chip businesses have relocated. That same year, it opened in Los Angeles, another hothouse of commercial activity.

Richter collaborated with Goodman on a dozen solo shows between 1985 and 2020, leaving at the end of 2022 for David Zwirner. “Marianne was a presence,” he told reporters new yorker About twenty years ago. “She’s smart. She has courage.”