Best Show in Town

Once, when asked by a visitor to recommend the "best show in town," a New Yorker would automatically suggest My Fair Lady or Naughty Marietta or the Statue of Liberty, or some girl like that. Today, the most eye-filling show in town --free and continuous--takes place in art galleries (see color on following four pages) that begin on Tenth Street, line 57th Street and sweep up the East Side, mostly along Madison Avenue, to the high 80s.

The proliferation is a recent development in the city's history, having mostly been started since World War II. The galleries come in all shapes and sizes, vary in their wares from old masters to the much-publicized "pop art" to flagrant fakes. No one knows exactly how many galleries there are: nearly 200 were listed in Art News this month. The blue-chip galleries, however, whether young or old, way out or traditional, can almost be counted on the fingers of five hands.

The Aristocrats. The galleries with the most formidable pedigrees are Duveen, Wildenstein, Knoedler and Paul Rosenberg. Duveen is run by courtly Edward Fowles, 77, who in 1898 noticed a "Boy Wanted" sign in the window of London's Duveen gallery, walked in and was promptly hired by Joseph Duveen himself. In 1939 Fowles took over in Manhattan (the London gallery closed during World War II, the Paris gallery shortly after).

The name of Lord Duveen will always be associated with the names of Mellon and Morgan and Kress, and today it is still true that a Duveen customer should be something more than merely solvent. Prices range from $850 for an illuminated manuscript page from a 15th century book to $500,000 for a Giorgione. But buying an old master is not a prerequisite for enjoying the treasures Lord Duveen stashed away during his incredible career. On a Saturday the gallery is usually jammed with art lovers of every age and income, perhaps dropping in to see a small but appealing exhibition of medieval and Renaissance sculpture such as the one on view last week. Since Fowles has little love for modern art, he does not deal with it. "The antiquities go up and down," he says in the manner of his late boss. "But they always sell."

One of the best exhibitions in town last week was at M. Knoedler & Co. It was a show, organized by the American Federation of Arts, of 75 paintings from the collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. But then, Knoedler's frequently has good shows, for among the artists it represents are Henry Moore, Andrew Wyeth, Etienne Hajdu, Lynn Chadwick and the abstract painter Vieira da Silva. Knoedler's has been in business since 1846, and the elegant mansion it occupies lends an air of Old World gentility to the business transacted in damask-walled rooms upstairs. President E. Coe Kerr Jr. says he will deal in "everything in paintings and sculptures," provided they are good. Prices range from $100 for a Chadwick drawing to $400,000 for a Cezanne. Whatever the price, a customer can have confidence that his purchase will be authentic: five full-time librarians do little else but trace the history of every item bought or sold.

Georges Wildenstein, known to his 25-man staff as "M. Georges/' does much of his own sleuthing. Nothing delights him more than to work in his office after closing hours and pore over what has become one of the largest collections of auction catalogues in the world. Occasionally, Wildenstein's may have an item, say, a quick sketch by Mary Cassatt, for as little as $100; from there the prices soar up to six figures. As an exhibition hall, the gallery has led a double life. On its fifth floor it has put on an average of five benefit shows a year that were of museum caliber; this week an exhibition called "The Painter as Historian" will display a number of masterpieces never shown in public before.

Paul Rosenberg & Co. is especially strong on 19th and early 20th century French art. It is wont to put on small retrospectives of such artists as Ingres and Sisley--a legitimate practice among dealers to boost the public interest in a particular artist as well as to provide a public service. Among living artists it represents are Kenneth Armitage, Karl Knaths and Graham Sutherland.

Rooms at the Top. The big four are by no means the only places in Manhattan to buy a masterwork. For certain living masters--Miro, Giacometti or Balthus, for instance--the place to go is the gallery owned by Pierre Matisse, son of Painter Henri Matisse. The Perls Galleries represent Calder and Archipenko, and they do a reputable business in "painters of the Picasso generation" like Braque, Modigliani, Soutine and Utrillo. Catherine Viviano on East 57th Street is strong on modern Italians like Afro and Cremonini, but she also represents the surrealist Kay Sage and the estate of Max Beckmann.

One of the more eclectic of the better dealers is polyglot George Staempfli, whose wares range from the elegant wired constructions of Harry Bertoia to the thick figure paintings of the late David Park to the haunting geometry of Painter Attilio Salemme. Otto Gerson deals mostly in first-rate sculpture from Barlach to David Smith. The Willard Gallery (Feininger, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Sculptor Richard Lippold) is excellent; so is John Bernard Myers' Tibor de Nagy Gallery, whose artists include Larry Rivers, Robert Goodnough and Fairfield Porter. In the print field, the sightseer or collector can do no better than start at the A.A.A. Gallery on Fifth Avenue, which has the most catholic assortment in town. The Seiferheld Gallery is a good starting place for old-master drawings.

American Dream. In the promotion of top American art Alfred Stieglitz was the great pioneer, five decades ago. If Stieglitz has an heir it is Edith Gregor Halpert, whose Downtown Gallery (originally downtown but now located on East 51st Street) opened in 1926 with three artists that Stieglitz had turned over to her: John Marin, Charles Demuth, and Stieglitz' wife, Georgia O'Keeffe. In addition to the works of these three, Dealer Halpert also sells the paintings of the late Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Arthur Dove and Max Weber. Other artists on this formidable roster: Ben Shahn, Abraham Rattner, Charles Sheeler, Stuart Davis and Sculptor William Zorach--a generation so firmly established that it is hard to realize that they were barely known when the gallery first opened. Two of Mrs. Halpert's former assistants opened galleries of their own with artists that she turned over to them; they are Charles Alan and Lee Nordness, the man who assembled the immediately famous Johnson Collection (TIME, Sept. 7).

Until the end of World War II, Edith Halpert was just about the only woman dealer; now there are many. One striking figure in the invasion is Grace Borgenicht, whose excellent gallery shares a building with Bella Fishko's no-nonsense Forum Gallery and Mrs. Jill Kornblee's offbeat Kornblee Gallery. A sometime painter herself, Grace Borgenicht began going around with a crowd of artists in 1947 that included Jimmy Ernst, Gabor Peterdi and Milton Avery. All three joined up with her when she opened her gallery in 1951. To these she has added such stars as Leonard Baskin, Sculptor Jose de Rivera and, more recently, the veteran Paul Burlin.

The Modernists. More than any other dealer, Betty Parsons is credited with bringing abstract art to its present status. She opened in 1946 with about 13 artists, including the even then venerable Hans Hofmann and Ad Reinhardt. She gave one-man shows to Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman. The public was either indifferent or hostile at first, but Betty Parsons got an unexpected boost her first year from a most unlikely source. "Anyone who wants to spend $100 or $150 for a picture by one of the younger American abstractionists may eventually own a masterpiece," cooed Elsa Maxwell in one of her columns. "Some dissenters scream, 'Hang the abstractionists!' I echo: 'Certainly, but why not hang them on your walls?' " One dealer who enthusiastically agreed was Charles Egan, who gave De Kooning and Franz Kline their first oneman shows.

Virginia-born Sam Kootz, who now has Hans Hofmann, was also an early champion of nonobjective art. A onetime lawyer and then adman, he was writing about American art as far back as 1930, became convinced that the wave of the future in art lay in the U.S. and that the U.S. should start paying attention. And so, in 1945 he signed up Robert Motherwell and William Baziotes, packed them off to Florida to paint. Later, Adolph Gottlieb and Sculptor David Hare joined the list. Kootz refused to take Pollock, and when he began adding such foreign names as Soulages and Mathieu to his gallery (he has long been Picasso's U.S. dealer), some of his more American-minded artists left. But it is a fact that Kootz has all he can handle with the 15 artists he has, including James Brooks, Marca-Relli, Kyle Morris and Kumi Sugai.

Sidney Janis, the onetime shirt manufacturer who also turned to writing about art, has had in some ways an even more spectacular career. Janis is not known among his colleagues as a discoverer, but he has a good eye for properties that others have already started on their way. It was to Janis that Pollock finally went, and so did Gottlieb, Motherwell and Willem de Kooning. Last week Janis was the cause of a good deal of speculation with his big new show of "pop art." Instead of the masters of abstractionism, he has gooey cakes of painted plaster by Claes Oldenburg, blown-up comic strips by Roy Lichtenstein, rearranged billboards by James Rosenquist, portraits of cans of soup by Andy Warhol. Janis has apparently spotted a new bandwagon--but he did not discover pop art.

A share of the credit for that goes to Martha Jackson, the most deceptively scatterbrained dealer in the business. In between shows of her soberer artists such as John Hultberg, Paul Jenkins and the Spaniard Tapies, she has turned her gallery over to "happenings" and "environments," once even allowed her entire backyard to be filled with tires in the name of art. She could well be called the bridge between the established abstractionists and the new wave that the Castelli Gallery and later the Green, Stone and Stable galleries have encouraged.

From Giorgione to Oldenburg is a long way; but Manhattan goes the whole route. A crazy art critic once estimated that, with the galleries normally putting on about ten exhibitions a year of anywhere from 20 to 50 items, the number of art works that could be seen in the course of a New York season would be anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000. Even if there were only the top galleries and the handful of others that, while uneven in performance, are still honest and earnest, a person would be hard put to see Manhattan's biggest, splashiest, dottiest, noblest and most beautiful show in its entirety.

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