Madison Avenue Galleries: Slices of History

Between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue is an upscale cosmopolitan neighborhood replete with beautiful historic brownstones and town houses, in which many famous galleries are housed. The art on view here is generally more established and blue chip, which appears to be a pretty good match to the neighborhood. However, when tracking back to history of these galleries, we may uncover layers of complexities underlying their “harmonious” relationship with the works they are representing nowadays.

During the last half century, the change of art in American has shaped these galleries conceptually and physically. In the middle and upper east side of New York, as Ann Fensterstock pointed out in her book, “the rule of an elite core of what were then quaintly (but accurately) known as ‘picture dealers’ was coming to an end and their practice of operating out of hushed and plushed salons on labyrinthine upper floors was about to change.”[1] The large-size, abstract, muscular works produced by Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman and de Kooning challenged the aesthetics of dealers as well as collectors who had been long saturated in feminine, domestic-like settings replete with Neo-classical paintings and older European Modern art. These revolutionary predecessors were rejected by the more unfathomable Pop artists who embarked on a more democratic manner and furthered the promotion and marking in the dealer-artist relationship. Simultaneously, the new art forms along with the values they embodied led to a departure from the intricate, elite-associated structures to a single, working class-aligned, neutral space that, said, allowed art to “to take on its own life”[2]-which was later known as the famous “white cube.”

The challenges earlier mentioned forced the owners of these beautiful townhouse galleries to bravely embrace the new frontiers by means of a new marketing strategy and a renovation of the physical spaces. Thanks to the efforts and the powerful endorsements of gallerists such as Samuel Kootz, Eleanor Ward, Betty Parson, and Charles Egan as well as their shrewder successor Sidney Janis, the names of these once renegades had been “lionized in the history of art;”[3] their works “were well placed in the major collections, both private and public,”[4] and were recognized as expensive masterpieces. At the same time, some of the galleries redesigned their interiors into the white-cube-like spaces that had been once envisioned as the ideal venues by the artists who initiated their leaves for the downtown areas. These twists and turns added layers of complexities to the current looks of these galleries.

The Gagoisan Gallery at 980 Madison Avenue, though not derived from a town house gallery, processes a very typical interior of the “white cube”(Figure 1):

“The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically ...”[5]

Figure 1: "HELEN FRANKENTHALER: Composing with Color: Paintings 1962–1963"Installation view. All artworks © 2014 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc. /Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Rob McKeever.

the interior appears no different from its Chelsea space, which is usually occupied by works of emerging young artists. However, the artist featured here, Helen Frankenthaler, an American abstract expressionist painter that greatly contributed to the history of postwar American painting, implies the neighborhood’s tumultuous history at the end of the 1960s. Dynamically as the colors flow, collide, and merge on canvas, the paintings’ initial spirit of rebellion appears to be vague in this “perfect” neutral space, for something that can visually remind us of what took place in the past has been missing. Another example is Mnuchin Gallery, of which the rooms closely resemble the non-style “rectangular boxes” that are replicated over and over in contemporary art exhibitions. Yet, the reliefs on the roof and the top of the doorway (Figure 2) as well as the winding spiral stairs (Figure 3) at the entrance of the gallery do reveal hints of the venue’s domestic tradition. In addition, the comparatively little space are confronted with the work in a much more immediate, visceral and aggressive way than when the same pieces were shown in larger spaces and viewers could distance themselves. These nuances, compared with the space of Gagosian, closely resonate with the history of the gallery’s architecture.

Figure 3: View of the installation in Mnuchin Gallery. Photo: Yangxingyue Wang.

Figure 3: View of the spiral stairs in Mnuchin Gallery. Photo: Yangxingyue Wang.

Figure 4: View of the installation in Acquavella Galleries. Photo: Yangxingyue Wang.

What got lost in this uniformity of architectural setting might be the tension between traditional art spaces and new art forms.[6] This tension can be exemplified in Acquavella Galleries, which was originally specialized in works of the Italian Renaissance and expanded its business to Modern art in the 1960s. The works currently on view here are from Wayne Thiebaud, an iconic American artist whose works shed painterly light on people, places and things in our daily lives.[7] In a gallery, his portrait and landscape paintings are niched under the arch plaster reliefs. The sharp contours and dense amassing of paints render the images so tangible that they closely resemble the volume of the plaster busts overhead; while the bright, rhapsodic colors suggest a sheer contrast with the solemn, elegant execution of those sculptures. The past and the present merge and contrast with each other, indicating the half-century-long interplay between American modern and contemporary artists and their dealers.

In this sense, the galleries that cluster around Madison Avenue preserve the remnants of the complicated art history that are usually eclipsed by price figures.

[1] Ann Fensterstock, Art on the Block. New York: Martin’s Press, 2013, 16.

[2] Reesa Greenberg, “The Exhibited Redistributed: A case for reassessing space,” Thinking about Exhibitions, London:Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005, 248.

[3] Ann Fensterstock, Art on the Block. New York: Martin’s Press, 2013, 17.

[4] Ann Fensterstock, Art on the Block, 17.

[5] Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the white cube: notes on the gallery space, part I”, Art forum XIV, no.7 (1976): 14-15.

[6] Reesa Greenberg, “The Exhibited Redistributed: A case for reassessing space,” Thinking about Exhibitions, London:Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005, 251.

[7] Acquavella Galleries, “Wayne Thiebaud,” http://www.acquavellagalleries.com/exhibitions/2014-10-01_wayne-thiebaud/, accessed October, 30.