Review by Annabel
My fascination with the 1960s (the decade in which I was a child), will never die. Add in the world of art and a New York setting and even more boxes are ticked, so I was delighted to read this memoir by an ‘Englishman’ (sic) in New York, (said in jest, but Quentin Crisp whom Sting wrote the song about does put in an appearance!), who arrived and fell on his feet, landing a job at an Upper West Side gallery and making a career in the vibrant art scene there. Findlay is actually Scottish, but few distinguished between the British home nations in NYC then.
The memoir begins, however, with his memories of the first work of art that moved him, aged seven. It was Salvador Dali’s Christ of St.John of the Cross at the Kelvingrove Gallery in Glasgow, where he’d gone with his devout grandmother in 1952. The book includes a monochrome reproduction of the painting with its unique perspective looking down at Christ on the cross from an angle above – even more spectacular googled in colour. A postcard souvenir would be joined by Millais’ Ophelia couple of years later. Afternoons walking the Portobello road with his aunt cemented a love of watching the stallholders making deals. Catholic boarding school beckoned, a state-sponsored scholarship, and a first encounter with an inspiring art teacher, Mr Kerr.
That first day he set us all the same task. “Take your pencil in one hand and place the other where you can see it,” he boomed. “Now draw your hand.” Thirty minutes later he glanced at the gathered results and quickly divided the fifteen of us into groups of nine and six. “You will learn to make art,” he said to the nine. “And you will learn to look at art,” he said to the rest, of which I was one…
Kerr’s art lessons for us lookers-rather-than-doers was to insist we saw real art before we wrote or even spoke about it. When he mandated monthly visits to London’s museums we cheered loudly. …
His sole instruction to us was to find one work we liked and to look at it for at least ten minutes and not take notes.
Findlay lucked out too, when pondering his onward move – he spotted an advert for fully paid place for a British student at a new progressive liberal arts college affiliated with the University of Toronto. He joined an avant-garde theater group, and loved it. He was also introduced to the world of art collectors, as part of a scheme to borrow artworks for university display, meeting a Toronto couple who collected young artists. But Findlay was finding the university boring, and when it announced it was going to expand hugely, he threw in his degree and headed for New York. It was 1964. A couple of months of fun ensued, but funds were running low. A friend suggested he looked for a gallery job.
Hearing that an assistant position at the Feigen Gallery was vacant, Findlay lucked out once again, thanks to having met those Canadian collectors – he had the magic words of their names – and was hired on the spot. Richard Feigen gave solo and group shows of works by young artists including a group of Brits, of whom Bridget Riley is probably the best known.
The following May, he was at a post-show ad-hoc artist’s dinner at a restaurant in Little Italy, with some famous artists of the day seated around the table.
A thirty-something man with a crooked smile wearing what looked suspiciously like a silver-gray wig came up beside me.
“Can I sit next to you? I’m Andy, what’s your name?”
History caricatures Andy Warhol as a faux-naif given to oracular pronouncements. The man I knew for twenty-three years was a talkative, opinionated, curious, energetic workaholic, characteristics share by many artists.
“Of course, sit down,” I said, and introduced myself. “I’m a friend of Gerard’s. He and I read poetry together.” Gerard Malanga was Andy’s assistant.
What a time and place to be learning the trade of art dealership and living and loving in NYC! Findlay soon became a trusted associate of Feigen, and began to build his own client and artist lists. When Richard Feigen decided he wanted to concentrate more on the Grand Masters, Findlay would take the emerging artists into a new branch of the gallery, the ‘Feigen downtown’ in SoHo, which opened in 1968, discovering more new young artists and putting on shows in the spacious loft and warehouse they found for the gallery.
Although the actual art that Findlay talks about does feature in a fairly big way in this memoir, it’s less about the works themselves, although Findlay will always tell us why they inspired him, and more about the artists themselves and all that follows. Befriending and supporting them, dealing with their insecurities, setting up their shows, finding buyers for their work.
Along the way there was much fun for Findlay, two marriages, first to an Albanian collage artist, the second to the first Black supermodel, Naomi Sims, who Findlay wooed for two years before she said yes, parenthood too. Findlay had taken on the Feigen downtown as his own gallery, but was forced to close in 1977 when the building was sold. SoHo was being priced out as a gallery location anyway, so the new era for Findlay would begin in what would be called NoLita.
The book has many illustrations, each on a page featuring the relevant text- all in monochrome, including not just the works of art mentioned, but also snapshots of Findlay at work and at play, there are newspaper clippings and magazine covers. The Polaroid of the author on the front cover was taken by Warhol. It is a slight shame that none are in colour, although with the number of photos and artworks included that would have added greatly to the cost of the book. But as I have already said it’s more a memoir about being in the art world, with the artists, and being a dealer than the art itself. I did miss an index though, struggling to re-find various things I hadn’t tabbed. Otherwise Prestel have designed a well-laid-out book with plenty of white space around the text.
Within the text’s overarching four chapters dividing Findlay’s life into: his childhood and student days, first years in NYC, setting up Feigen downtown, and success and going it alone, Findlay tells his story in around a hundred vignettes, ranging from a couple of paragraphs to several pages in length. He is a genial narrator, writing breezily, always self-deprecatingly, and gives us some real insights into the art world of the time and interesting views on the work of the artists he chose to represent. There may be a lot of name-dropping, but hey this was 1960s into the 1970s in New York – it didn’t get any hipper! This book was an enjoyable read, that introduced me to works by plenty of new to me artists which I then went off to look up, as well as featuring the hoped-for appearances by those already known.
Annabel is a co-founder and editor of Shiny New Books.
Michael Findlay, Portrait of the Art Dealer as a Young Man (Prestel, 2024). 978-3791377261, 288pp., hardback.
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Sounds fascinating, Annabel – the setting alone is very appealing!!