If numbers alone indicate success, Robert Miller is probably one of the greatest art dealers who ever lived. But there’s another assay of greatness among art dealers, and it has more to do with having an eye for the outlier, a talent for selecting the unlikely but strangely right work, the ability to simply recognize vision, but above all, to be a Connector. If you happened to monetize these factors, all the better, your gallery’s doors stayed open.

But art history, and art gallery history, is more than a matter of who cashed in. There are those who truly mediate culture — in today’s scene Matthew Higgs and Lia Gangitano come to mind as prime examples — who cudgel creativity and platform things we’ve not seen before. These figures are Connectors, and theirs is a subtle and alchemical art. Swirl together an essence of Barnum, an ounce of Ezra Pound (for this job description a degree of insanity is not a liability), a soupçon of David Ogilvy, and the visionary who-says-we-can’t? style of a Sergey Brin, and you begin to see the skill-set required. One of the hallmarks of these wizards is that they’re almost always impecunious, and seeking backers.

Their gift is having an eye, and an ear, that sees and hears what others don’t. Their contribution rests in being there at key cultural moments, and having whatever combination of spark and grit that is required to reveal something truly new.

Meet Richard “Dick” Bellamy. Director and founder of the Green Gallery, who, in 1960, landed in the eye in a hurricane: the seismic upheavals called Pop and Minimalism. The odds were against Bellamy because unlike most founders of New York art galleries, he had little if any family backing, little if any formal art education, and pretty much zero business acumen. Growing up in the Midwest, he briefly studied at the University of Cincinnati, and later Columbia, but spent more time in Manhattan’s cheap bars than in classroom lectures. Desultory wandering in a Beat fashion, by the late ‘50s he decamped to Mexico and Provincetown, places where a lack of ambition and a talent for bohemian blather were perfectly OK.

Exactly what made him stop spinning his wheels is not exactly known, and it is just one of a long list of undiscoverables that stand out in Judith Stein’s new biography of Bellamy, Eye Of The Sixties, recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. One thing is clear: Bellamy took pains to cover his tracks, stay a shadowy figure, operate on the margins of society. Showing what he accomplished, and the lives he helped, and hurt, is wonderfully documented here. But as a portrait of a man, the book falls short. It is likely that the real Richard Bellamy is and will remain unknowable.

Stein’s biography stunningly fills in several yawning gaps of art history circa the early 1960s. We meet, up close and personal, artists such as Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, James Rosenquist, Yayoi Kusama — artists who would certainly have found an audience eventually, though Mr. Bellamy brought them out into the light. More thrilling still are smell-the-smoke-and-sweat reports of Lee Lozano, James Lee Byars, Jo Baer, Allan Kaprow, Robert Whitman, Ronald Bladen. They may lack the epoch-making stature of Bellamy’s big guns, but there is still a lot to be discovered about each. Stein’s research reveals many avenues for further scholarship, and future writers will follow the trails she blazes here.

Each page contains nuggets of original research that are pure gold. The problem is that there are great artist-biographies, and this book, despite its absolutely fascinating and voluminous cavalcade of facts, is not in that company. Stein allows herself here and there to speculate, which leaves the reader slightly distrusting of the whole. What is to be made of an observation like “Dick must have read Ezra Pound’s translations from the Chinese, poems Lydia (his Chinese mother) would have praised for their delicacy and economy”? What is such a string of assertions based on? in other places, sweeping generalizations needed further edits.

Bellamy’s business practices were a slow motion cliff-dive, and on this subject Stein is at her best. Though he managed to find an angel investor to support the gallery, taxi-magnate Robert Scull, it became apparent in short order that the business aspects of running a gallery bored him — which led to a fast-approaching expiration date. He could often be found rubber-legged drunk in the early afternoon, hiding away in the back office but still open for business. We see him stoned or buzzed, lying full-length on the gallery floor; what affluent Midtown gallery visitors made of this leave little to the imagination. Sometimes he would simply abandon the premises, and head to a bar, leaving the gallery doors wide open.

Bellamy blithely made his own rules and followed his own code of ethics; his record keeping was spotty, he sometimes paid artists haphazardly, and he was known to enrage them, even retitling works as he saw fit. Is it any wonder that Oldenburg jumped over to Sidney Janis after a year?

Simultaneously, Dick Bellamy’s son Miles has put together a personal selection of his father’s letters, which document the dissolution of a life — “bludgeoned by alcoholism” is how he self-describes — while inviting us into a world more exciting than most of us will ever know. And it’s a beautiful, strange, sad and arcane little book. Now in his mid-50s, Miles was his father’s gallery assistant for the final five years of Dick’s life. As a boy, Miles lived mostly with his mother, and knew his father on a weekends and vacations basis. The letters from father to son are some of the most revealing; one winces at a letter written to the eight-year-old Miles, which includes this lovely line, “I love you sweet baby Miles no good louse scum.” Dick should have known that irony and sarcasm as humor are lost on a child. Doubtless he was off on his own chemical planet when he composed that cringe-worthy missive. That Miles struggled with (and overcame) his own substance-abuse issues comes as no surprise; the fallout from drugs and alcohol is a theme that permeates both Bellamys’ life stories.

Like the letters of Jack Kerouac (another victim of the hard-drinking artist’s lifestyle) these documents both shed light on and cast enigmatic shadows over their author. While Miles has provided helpful endnotes, these letters would have benefitted from close annotation. For example, in a letter to a Peter Young, dated 1970, Dick refers to “Dan painting well.” Later in the letter he says “I thought Mike’s show at Marlborough in May-June good. […] Saw Rolf a few weeks ago […] he was visiting Mickey Ruskin.” I happen to know that Mickey Ruskin was the owner of Max’s Kansas City, New York’s iconic artists’ bar in 1960s and ‘70s; who the hell these other folks are I haven’t a clue. This book is keyed to art-world insiders only, those with access to the inside of the inside.

It is, however, worth the price of admission for a 1996 letter to Barbara Rose, the seminal historian of modern art, who was, apparently, a close friend of Dick. It begins “Dear Barbara, Long time no see or hear. I hope you are still fucking. I am unable to. I wish I had been able to do it better when I could.”

Stein, Judith E. Eye Of The Sixties: Richard Bellamy And The Transformation of Modern Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-0374151324. 384 pages, $28

Bellamy, Richard. Serious Bidness: The Letters of Richard Bellamy. Miles Bellamy (ed.) (Brooklyn, NY: Near Fine Press; Printed by Small Editions, Red Hook, 2016). ISBN-13: 978-0-692-51867-0. 72 pages, $40

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For some years, one of my reliably stimulating pleasures was my evenings with Thomas McEvilley.  I would come to the East Village, walk up to his third floor apartment, and then we would talk in his book-filled study before going out to dinner. His large library was double shelved, the volumes of a classics scholar mixed together with publications devoted to art history. On the wall was the Frank Jewett Mather Award given by the College Art Association in 1993—Thomas, not a vain man, was proud of that honor—and his place were filled with many works of art, including a painting by Julian Schnabel . Sometimes I would bring a younger friend along, someone I wanted to introduce to this famous critic. On other occasions we met in the country, at the house of our mutual friend Bill Beckley. Tom was great fun to be with because he could listen; because he had many great stories; and because he always was amazingly attentive, even (or especially) at the end of a long evening.  Once over two happy successive dinners he told me the marvelous story of his career. He couldn’t legally drive and so I had the chance to hear more taking him home.

Tom was trained as a classicist. And so when Ingrid Sischy, who wanted to introduce new writers into the art world, brought him into Artforum around 1981, his essays about his great friend James Lee Byars and a whole host of other figures introduced a challenging new sensibility. Soon his critique of MoMA’s “Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern” (1984) made him famous. Most art world disputations are of merely parochial interest. This was one of those rare moments when a critic hit a nerve, touching in an exhibition review upon issues with larger resonance. The debate that followed was seminal to ‘postmodernism.’ “When I first met Tom,” Bill Beckley recalls,

it was to negotiate a truce between Tom, [William] Rubin and [Kirk] Varnedoe. I wanted to include the essay and exchange of letters in Artforum in Uncontrollable Beauty.  The problem was that upon the publication of the anthology fourteen years later, all three parties wanted to continue the argument.   It had to stop somewhere, but truly, it never did.

After that–although, or so he told me, he was boycotted by the major Manhattan museums– Tom published a great deal of art criticism, all of it good.  His anthology, The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism, (2005) gives a great sampling of his discussions of such varied figures as Marina Abramovic, Les Levine and Yves Klein. In the 1980s, there was a seriously felt need for criticism to find some novel grounding, an alternative to formalism, which was exhausted. Most art writers looked to the French deconstructive literature in translation. Tom’s particular perspective, which must have seemed very exotic, was that of classical scholarship. In his critical discussion of the Hegelian conception (made famous by Arthur Danto) of “the end of art,” Tom observed that this “was not a new idea but in fact was known to the ancients—it occurs, for example, in Pliny’s Natural History. . . “

Tom was a classicist with an unusual bias- he was also a major scholar of Indian philosophy. “When I was young,” he once explained, “I tried to learn a new language each summer.”  In the early 1970s, sitting naked with a guru in a cave, he seriously considered moving to India, in the way I suppose that a century earlier American aesthetes moved to Tuscan villas.  I was stunned by his boldness. Tom’s magnum opus was his comparative study of Indian and Greek philosophy, The Shape of Ancient Thought, published by the School of Visual Arts and Allworth Press. The philosophers of ancient India, he argued, worked out their ideas in parallel with, though without necessarily borrowing from, their Western peers. He was very pleased when an affordable Indian edition was published. Aware of the pernicious history of imperialism, the many recent art writers who take an interest in art from outside Europe tend to be defensive. Thanks to his travels in China and India, and his linguistic skills, Tom was able, without undue moralizing, to offer a judicious cross-cultural perspective. He loved to tell an anecdote of Diogenes, which nicely comments on this situation: “When asked why he wished to be buried upside down, Diogenes replied, ‘Down will soon be up.’” The authors of every future global art history will owe an essential debt to him.

When in 2006 I invited Tom to a panel on critical disagreement at the New York Studio School, he gave a show-stopping presentation of an example from John Baldessari’s art. I haven’t yet, I fear, fully absorbed its implications. Afterwards I was pleasantly astonished when Leo Steinberg, who was a very critical critic, praised Tom. Tom was a great art writer because he was madly inquisitive; because he loved a great variety of art; and because he was a gifted stylist. His most recent book is the definitive biography of Sappho. Developing his doctoral thesis (1967-68), each layer of this book “represents the poet and her work in a certain way, and each represents my mind and its interaction with a finite body of text at a different stage of my life.” The place where we imagine her, he concludes, “is still somewhat empty—to be filled by other Sapphos yet to come.” Ancients, Moderns, and Postmodernists alike, inhabiting eastern spheres and west, will miss his brilliant and beautiful mind.  He is dearly loved.

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By 1860, commerce developed between the United States and Asia. This trade affected the visual arts. Thanks to Ernest Fenellosa and his successors, we assembled great collections of Chinese and Japanese painting and sculpture . And our artists were influenced by their Asian peers. Mary Cassatt, John La Farge and James Whistler painted in ways that mimicked this exotic art. And some painters, Morris Graves is an example, did Asian subjects. But these were limited influences. “Not one of the original” Abstract Expressionists, Clement Greenberg remarked long ago, “has felt more than a cursory interest in Oriental art. The sources of their art lie entirely in the West.” I recalled his statement seeing the abstractions by Frank Kline, Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock in this show. Sam Francis worked in Japan and Yoko Ono was born there; John Cage was much taken by Americanized Zen Buddhism; and John McLaughlin lived in Japan. But they too really belong to an international tradition.  So too do Agnes Martin and Nam June Paik. I cannot see any connection between Asian art and Robert Irwin’s disc painting in the show. Nor do I understand why Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, or Adrian Piper, or the video by Bill Viola, which presents Western mysticism belong here. Ann Hamilton has provided an entertaining installation mounted on the balustrade. As carriages descend, Tibetan hand cymbals ring, nicely animating the museum. But apart from the cymbals, there is nothing  specifically Asian about this construction.

The problems inherent with the curatorial premise become clearer as we get near to the present. Asia is involved with the aesthetics of emptiness, as in Japanese Zen Gardens; but also with crowded multiplicity and obsessive repetition. Asians meditate and make patterns, as do Westerners.  In short, Asians are as varied as Americans.  And so, when we contemplate them, we see ourselves. James Lee Byers loved Japan, but to understand what he made of that experience you need to place him within 1980s American visual culture. Like some earlier Guggenheim exhibitions, Mark Rosenthal’s 1996  splendid, mindless history of abstraction and the more recent survey Russia! are two examples, The Third Mind presents much great art without a convincing visual premise. Contemporary Asian visual culture has no essence. Edward Said’s Orientalism killed that way of thinking about cultural relationships. Today there is no such thing as Asian-ness or American-ness because our ambitious artists all are hybrids.

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Mary Boone Gallery, New York NY
April 28 – June 24, 2006

Michael Werner Gallery, New York NY
April 27 – June 14, 2006

In Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951) Erwin Panofsky argues that the builders of Gothic churches did not need to read scholastic philosophy in order to adopt a similar worldview, for “they were exposed to the Scholastic point of view in innumerable other ways….” Very often art too reflects the period style of its supporting culture. By displaying Judd’s art on the twentieth and twenty-first floors in midtown Manhattan, in rooms with large windows on all four sides of the building, Christie’s allows us to see how his sculptures and wall pieces mirror the architecture of America. Look from his boxes and stacks to the windows of the nearby skyscrapers, or compare his corner piece linking two panels with a black pipe and his wood blocks with horizontal and vertical lines to the banal architectural structures outside the gallery. In the city at large, as in Judd’s art, regular geometric divisions are omnipresent. He reconstructs our urban environments, making aesthetic the city’s basic visual vocabulary. It was instructive to walk from Renzo Piano’s newly opened reconstruction of the Morgan Library and Museum a few blocks uptown to Christie’s. The new steel-and-glass pavilions at the entrance, thrust into the older Renaissance-style palazzo designed by Charles McKim, bear a striking resemblance to Judd’s boxes. Christie’s most generous gift to the public (April 3 – May 9, 2006), the highest display of art I have yet visited, and one of the best, effectively presented Judd’s vision.

James Lee Byars’s “The Rest is Silence” was dispersed amongst gallery spaces of three New York dealers. And so when you traveled from Michael Werner uptown down to the Chelsea galleries of Mary Boone and Perry Rubenstein, it was natural to reflect upon the relationship of Byars’s art to its urban setting. The front room at Michael Werner was filled by The Angel (1989), 125 spheres of thin clear glass fabricated by a Murano glassblower, set in gracious curves. And there were two untitled drawings, an early one in Japanese ink that resembles Richard Serra’s later oilstick art on paper, and a late Byars gold design on Japanese paper. The Rubenstein show included the absolutely baffling Self-Portrait(1959), a wooden totem-like form; the granite Untitled (Tantric Figure) (1960); four gilded marble sculptures (1987/1995), figures which raise questions about death and philosophy;Untitled (American Flag) from “Two Presidents,” a relic from a 1974 performance; and The Sun (1990), 360 pieces of marble installed to form a circle, and centered so that you cannot walk entirely around it. At the entrance to Mary Boone was The Conscience (1985), a gilded wood and glass case containing a tiny golden sphere. The enormous Concave Figure (1994), five units of Thassos marble, was in the main gallery; and then The Spinning Oracle of Delphi (1986), a gigantic golden vessel you can look into, filled the back room. Unlike Judd, Byars did not have a signature style, but rather made objects that invoked a presence once associated with sacred art. When you approach a crucifix or Buddhist temple sculpture, you come to things that stand apart from everyday practical life. The sacred thus exists within a separate world, physically close to, but distinct from, the space in which we live and work. When Arthur Danto distinguishes between the physical object constituting Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) and the actual work of art, he secularizes this very traditional way of thinking.

Judd had a lot to say about the problems of the American art world–he was a famous polemicist. To my way of thinking, however, the ultimate limitations of his analysis are inadvertently revealed in his statement reprinted in Christie’s generously luxurious catalogue: “My work … was not made to be property … It is not on the market, not for sale….” But that, of course, is what has happened. That the auction proceeds will support the Judd Foundation, a good cause, does not undercut the problems here. Judd wanted his art to stand outside the culture, but that was not possible–how could it be? Artistic materialists like Judd believe that everything can be made explicit. Religious cultures, by contrast, think that the causal order can sometimes be suspended. They believe that the causally inexplicable intervention of the sacred within our world, which we may call grace or (along with Danto) transfiguration, makes possible spiritual experience and what historically is often associated with it, namely art. Judd’s very American art, in which everything can be revealed, because ultimately nothing remains to be concealed, expresses the worldview of a secular materialist society. Byars comes as it were from another place.

I better understood The Angel after seeing Carl Andre’s familiar floor plates magnificently installed in the back gallery at Paula Cooper (April 1-29, 2006). In this large, mostly empty space you can get to the far wall without treading on the sculpture. But many people choose to walk on the sculpture, whether because it is on the floor or because it is composed of industrial materials or, perhaps, as an expression of hostility. By contrast, The Angel really demands to be protected. However critical Andre and Judd were of art world politics, the style of these pragmatic materialists was at one with the working philosophy of present-day American corporate society. The art of Andre and Judd is relatively easy for Americans to understand, for it expresses our everyday style of living. Byars remains baffling. In his treatise The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (2002) Thomas McEvilley acknowledges the support of his friend Byars, “who for several years cherished a copy of the manuscript … which he carried about with him in two large shopping bags” (the book does not otherwise mention Byars). McEvilley claims that Greek and Indian philosophy, so seemingly different, are in fact deeply interconnected. Any “absolute dichotomy … between the Greek and the Indian needs to be reconsidered. It seems to have too much of that desire of the West to define itself by demarcating itself off from the East.” I can think of no better characterization of Byars’s unlocatable and yet pioneering “multicultural” art.

This article first appeard in print in art US, issue 14, July – September 2006

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