Artists may strive for immortality, but art dealers would be foolish to do so. They tend to be forgotten over time. A fascinating show at the David Nolan Gallery, “Mad Women: Kornblee, Jackson, Saidenberg, and Ward, Art Dealers on Madison Avenue in the 1960s,” tries to reverse the process of erasure by taking us back to an intrepid moment in American art when a constellation of female art dealers rose to prominence. The “mad” in the title refers not to their mental states but rather to their addresses on or off Madison Avenue, in the gilded heart of the Upper East Side.
That neighborhood, where Nolan itself recently relocated, on the fourth floor of a townhouse, is not exactly revolutionary turf. As a gallery district, the Upper East Side is the good-taste enclave where art is seen and sold — not made. Its marble townhouses, with their intimately scaled rooms and grand curving staircases, feel removed from the lives of artists, who tend to settle in working-class neighborhoods that offer lower rents and industrial-size spaces.
But, over the years, the Upper East Side has had its share of art-dealer provocateurs, and the current exhibition at Nolan attempts to pay homage to four. Eleanor Ward (1911-1984), the most prominent of the group, might not seem to satisfy the Mad Avenue prerequisite: Her Stable Gallery was initially located in an abandoned horse stable on Seventh Avenue, at 58th Street, and served as the site in the mid-50s of the spirited group shows known as the Stable Annuals. But she soon left the West Side for a ground-floor space at 33 East 74th Street, where she demonstrated her prescient taste when she gave Andy Warhol his first show in New York in his wonder year of 1962.
At the time, there was little money to be earned in the field of American art, and it helped to be well-to-do if you wanted to nurture unknown artists. Martha Jackson (1907-1969), an heiress from Buffalo, N.Y., ran her gallery out of the top floor of her townhouse at 32 East 69th Street. She died early and left a major collection to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, her estimable hometown museum.
Jill Kornblee (1920-2004) was a well-liked New York native who became known in the ’60s, when she opened a lively gallery at 58 East 79th Street. The critic David Bourdon described her as an intense personality who once confronted him after he whizzed through a show, asking: “Were you here to look at the art or did you just stop by?” “Both,” he replied.
Finally, Eleanore B. Saidenberg (1911-1999), who moved her gallery around before settling at 1018 Madison near 78th Street, feels less urgent than the others. While her fellow dealers risked their careers on the American avant-garde, Saidenberg focused on European modernists (Picasso, Klee, Dubuffet) whom others had already championed with fervor.
The exhibition at David Nolan skimps on inside intelligence. There is no printed catalog or scholarly handout. There are no wall labels; one must make do with a paper checklist. In place of a coherent story line, the show offers sentimental vibes, especially in the spacious lobby, which features a quaint display of old gallery posters. Take a few minutes to look; they leave you pleasantly haunted, suddenly alert to the vanished history that lies just beneath the surface of every square inch of New York.
Fortunately, the 40 works in the exhibition, most of which once hung on the walls of the show’s four honorees, are too powerful for mere nostalgia. Most date from the early or middle ’60s, that fecund period in American art when a radical movement seemed to erupt every time someone asked, “What’s new?” All at once, artists were advancing the colliding orthodoxies of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism. Or none of the above. Many works here blur categories, combining things that supposedly didn’t go together, especially abstraction and figuration.
Where, for starters, does Alex Katz fit in? An alum of the Stable Gallery, he is represented in the current exhibition by “February” (1963), an all-gray, poetic painting of a tall window in an empty room. Rendered in unfussy, big-brush strokes, it somehow captures with taut precision the glint of light on a windowsill.
Nonagenarian artists are clearly in. Rosalyn Drexler, now 95, is a relatively recent inductee to the Pop-art pantheon. Here, she contributes “Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health” (1967), a small, glossy, orange-on-black painting in which a man and a woman, shown in profile and facing each other from different corners of the canvas, light up for a smoke. Are they lovers? Impossible to know. Drexler deserves credit for adding a whiff of romantic plot to the deadpan blankness of Pop Art. (And Jill Kornblee deserves credit for having given her a one-woman show as early as 1964.)
Also noteworthy is an early Jim Dine — “Car Crash” (1959-1960), which according to its provenance was once owned by Frank Stella, who is most decidedly not an art dealer, but never mind. The painting is a large-scale, squarish, predominantly black canvas, with two pairs of actual woolen pants wadded up on the surface. A smattering of little white crosses — presumably first-aid signs — rise out of the darkness like ambulances glimpsed at night. “Car Crash” feels veiled and dreamlike compared to Andy Warhol’s car wreck scenes, which came a few years later and pictured American car culture at its most horrific.
Warhol weighs in here with an uncharacteristically quiet entry. “Untitled (Dollar Bill),” is a black-on-white silk-screen that stands only six inches tall. It proves, among other things, that money can be cute. Also in the too-small-to-fail category is an untitled sculpture by John Chamberlain that captures him as a deft miniaturist, dispensing with his usual crush of car fenders in favor of snippets of metal that twist and turn like paper scraps caught in a gust of wind.
Finally, the Southern California contingent is well-represented thanks again to Martha Jackson’s efforts. Billy Al Bengston’s “Erroll” (1961) is an unmistakably L.A. painting in which concentric squares of luminous blue could pass for swatches of sky. In the center, a small insignia that variously resembles sergeant’s stripes or a surfboard decal keeps things from becoming too ethereal.
In the end, there is probably no easy way to explain how so many women ended up as important art dealers in the postwar era. Which is not to suggest that female artists prospered in turn. In the pre-feminist ’50s and ’60s, most female dealers made little effort to end the routine exclusion of female artists from the mainstream art scene. Rather, their goal was to seek out first-rate artists regardless of their gender.
This was certainly true, at any rate, of the dealers who became the stuff of legend. Too far south for this exhibition, Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery opened the first commercial gallery in Greenwich Village, in 1926. Paula Cooper holds the distinction of having opened the first commercial gallery in SoHo, in 1968. Peggy Guggenheim and her Art of This Century were all-essential during World War II, when the European Surrealists fled to Manhattan and provided the local scene with a caffeine jolt of French culture.
In recent years, there has been a flurry of exhibitions paying tribute to female art dealers, perhaps most ambitiously at the Jewish Museum, where Edith Halpert was the subject of an absorbing show in 2019. Just last December, Martha Jackson was honored in a show (“Wild and Brilliant”) organized by the Hollis Taggart Gallery.
The current group show at the Nolan Gallery, in taking on four dealers, has probably taken on too much, resulting in an effort that at times feels scrappy and thin. But there is certainly room for more scholarship on New York’s more valiant gallerists. Female art dealers are often conjured in books about the postwar era in dopey anecdotes and observations from their male counterparts. Typically, a recent book on Warhol quotes the art dealer Ivan Karp describing Eleanor Ward, Martha Jackson and three of their colleagues as “five menopausal maidens.”
The social phenomenon that allowed women to claim a position of enduring influence as art dealers in postwar New York remains a mostly overlooked subject, not least of all by the women themselves. They were too busy living their lives to stop and chronicle them.
October 6, 2022
