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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January 22 – May 1, 2004

I went to see the Lee Lozano show at P.S. 1 with a friend of mine who used to be her pot dealer and (briefly) her lover. In the reception area there is a painting done in Lozano’s expressionist style that depicts a hammer with three heads. Broad, straw-like brushstrokes and a deceptively understated palette infuse the hammer image with an organic vitality. It fills the rectangle like a restless, mythical beast. In the exhibition rooms where the majority of Lozano’s works are displayed there are more paintings of tools: hammers, wrenches and clamps.

The objects are pictured much larger than life size. Standing in front of one of these images allows one to feel like they are climbable, like the limbs of trees. The tools coil in on themselves, tucked under in a cramped, interior space. The paintings seem to be about imagining what it must feel like to be alongside a growing penis stuck inside trousers. They have a murmuring, heroic air about them, like awakening animals. Lozano’s tools are more personal then those in Claes Oldenburg’s repertoire of “object pornography” and infinitely more bracing than Jim Dine’s coy little tool drawings. Lozano makes the reference specific in a drawing of a man’s lower torso with a wrench handle bulge in his pants and the adjustable wrench head sticking out of the pants fly. Lozano was fascinated by sex and would discuss her sexual experiences and those of her friends with great specificity.

The rooms also exhibit her slightly better known drawing and painting style, an obsessive bundling of subtly toned curves and directed force lines. In a number of works on paper Lozano makes various conceptual proposals concerning society and observes the behavior that surrounds her drug-taking. Here is evidence of the drug influence on the post-minimalist generation of artists. The lettered grid paper evokes the lofts and bleak streets of lower Manhattan in the late sixties and early seventies: (I’m quoting from memory):”Well, you can’t go over to La Monte and Marians without smoking a lot of hash” she writes. Or, “Alan Saret just got a pound”. The public and private, the visionary and the anecdotal converge in these candid, irascible graph paper notes.

In the further rooms on the first floor there are the more freehand drawings. I first saw many of these at the Philadelphia house of art collectors Helen and Milton Brutten in 1976. These works, on sheets about 16 x 20in., feel executed on the run. They are also are filled with penis and tool imagery but continue into depictions of crayons, flashlights and many other disparate objects amid pronounced textual rantings. Lozano conflated advertising catch phrases with street talk. One page combines a crayoned mouth with heavy graphite letters that scream “I got my Blow Job through the NY Times!”

By the early seventies, Lozano had stopped making art except (perhaps) for some of these drawings. “This is now the age of information” she told my friend, “the most important work that will happen in the future will be the exchange of information between people; I see no real future for studio art”. She got money by selling work from her collection of drawings by Judd and Andre. Lozano was taking a lot of LSD. When she was seen around SoHo she had the faraway look. When I met the Bruttens a few years after that time, they were selling her drawings for her and would send her the money. They told me that she was mostly living on the street.

I remember I wanted to buy a Lozano drawing with some boiler and pipe imagery and the phrase ‘I got fucked in the G^ass by Con Ed!” at the time for $250 and had to pass on it because I needed the money to move to New York City. Lozano’s drawings moved me and inspired me like nothing else at that moment. I had just finished art school and the only thing that interested me was the nascent punk movement. Lunatic rage seemed the only appropriate expression and I was looking for the visual equivalent to what I had been listening to. When I moved to New York, I would be asked what artists interested me and I said “Lee Lozano.” Either she hadn’t been heard of or there were vague rumors that she was a “shopping bag lady”.

Within a few years many younger artists had found the visual equivalent to punk music in neo-expressionism. It wasn’t until seeing this work of Lee Lozano’s again that I understood why I found neo-expressionism so contrived. Amid the expressionist assault, there’s a depth and complexity–something wavy in the lines, soft in the edges–it’s neither piercing nor brittle beneath the first look. A good artist’s attention during execution has the ability to twist and counterpoint one’s impressions of a work.

Like punk music, her drawings have a way of conflating aggressiveness, ridiculousness and vulnerability. Years after their brief recording life, the Sex Pistols album reveals a musicality and spaciousness that was not apparent at the time they were performing. All the other bands of that era have fallen away. In the same way, I’m a little amazed at the resonance of Lozano’s work. The full-throated sexuality and profound irritation of the work is tempered with an unusual tenderness and clarity. How rare to see work so unguarded, so strange and refreshing.

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