“I set out on a search for beauty. And I’ve been very successful in that search.”
The longtime dealer Arne Glimcher was sitting in his office on a recent weekday afternoon, nibbling butter cookies and sipping black tea as he reflected on the 65th anniversary of Pace Gallery — one of the oldest — which he founded at the mere age of 21.
In a period when the art world has become a $58 billion business and many galleries have come and gone, Glimcher, 87, is not only a survivor but one of the rare pioneers whose gallery is one of the four that now dominate the market, along with Gagosian; David Zwirner; and Hauser & Wirth.
His influence has permeated the larger art world in ways that are now taken for granted — combining primary and secondary market work, the white cube gallery aesthetic, doing museum quality shows in a gallery. He developed strong friendships with artists like Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman and Robert Irwin.
While he ceded control of Pace 15 years ago to his son Marc, he is also still fully active in the gallery, runs a smaller satellite in TriBeCa, 125 Newbury, and comes into his office at Pace’s Chelsea headquarters every weekday.
“He’s the last of the old style dealers,” said Barbara Haskell, a longtime curator at the Whitney Museum. “He was obviously a very savvy businessman and a tremendous sales person, but he had a real love of art and a real commitment to his artists.”
While he continues to tend to the estates of his artists after they have died, Glimcher said he is not nostalgic for the past, but instead continues to get excited by living artists, including those Pace represents, like Adam Pendleton and Kiki Smith, and those he has brought to 125 Newbury, like Lauren Quin.
“I am in love with the present,” said Glimcher, still looking fit as a result of his regular workouts. “There were wonderful things in the past that I think were more powerful than the present moment, but what we have is what we have to work with. And I think if you don’t live in the moment, then you become old.”
To be sure, there are aspects of the current art market that Glimcher could do without, such as the frenzy for figuration — realistic as opposed to abstract paintings — which he called “a repetition of things we’ve seen before,” and the rush to crown emerging artists before they’re ready for fame, which he said inhibits creativity, making artists afraid to attempt new bodies of work.
“It comes so early right now to artists, and it’s so dangerous,” he said. “If a young artist has an exhibition and it sells out and there’s a waiting list of 30 people, how many artists are going to be courageous enough to say, ‘You know, I really finished that. I’m thinking of something else that’s completely different.’ Or are they going to feed the waiting list?”
“What does inspiration mean?” Glimcher continued. “Is it making a painting for the Basel art fair? It’s a very hard time for the artist because there’s such demand and confusion, and only the very best artists are going to be able to resist this. But they’re there. And that’s what this gallery has been about.”
While he doesn’t relish the crass salesmanship of standing in a booth to sell paintings at an art fair, Glimcher conceded that — with the decline in gallery foot traffic — it’s “the only way to meet new clients.”
And Glimcher has not focused on the commercial aspect of being an art dealer. “He really never saw it as a business,” said his son Marc. “He only did it because he loved it so much. I never saw him make a strategy or a financial plan.
“You did not talk about money, you did not talk about value, you did not talk about any of that,” he continued. “When someone said, ‘What’s your best price?’ he would say, ‘I’m not a rug merchant.’ And never give a discount.”
Having grown up in Duluth, Minn. — where he worked on his father’s cattle ranch during summers — Glimcher’s family moved to Boston when he was 8. Young Arne loved drawing. His mother took him to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she enrolled him in Saturday morning classes; at 10, he was allowed to linger by himself in the afternoons.
“It was all fascinating,” he said. “I learned about Impressionism. I learned about Egypt. I grew up at the Boston museum. I owe it everything.” (He has, as a result, donated several works of art to that museum, as well as to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to the Morgan Library, he said.)
He met his wife, Millie, in high school and they’ve been together ever since, married for 65 years.
Coming out of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Glimcher wanted to be Alfred H. Barr Jr., he said, the prominent director of the Museum of Modern Art. After his father died of cancer in 1960, Glimcher at 21 years old opened Pace Gallery in Boston — named after his father’s first name — and then Pace in New York in 1963.
He and his wife were personal friends of Alexander Calder and Alberto Giacometti. They raised their two boys (Paul is a neuroscientist) on art, bringing artists like Lucas Samaras and Louise Nevelson to the dinner table and taking the kids to museums every weekend.
“If you did not say something that those artists thought was really interesting — whether we were 11 or 12 — you don’t need to come to dinner next time,” Marc said, only slightly joking. “Contribute something or don’t come to dinner.”
When the Hollywood mogul Michael Ovitz started buying art in 1980, his friend the literary agent Morton L. Janklow told him, “There are a couple of guys you need to meet if you want to collect art and one of them was Arne,” Ovitz recalled. “I started talking to him almost every single day and still do.”
While some galleries pressure their artists to churn out work to meet demand, Glimcher has “respected that I needed more time to make shows,” said the artist Kiki Smith, adding that, “Regardless of what the market was doing or their momentary popularity, or non-popularity, he stuck with his artists.”
The artist Richard Tuttle said he has valued Glimcher’s extensive knowledge, which ranges from sailing to gardening to food to theater to fashion. Glimcher has also produced feature films, including “The Mambo Kings” in 1992 and “Gorillas in the Mist” in 1988.
“He can talk about any subject and have something intelligent to say,” Tuttle said. “A lot of people with Ph.D.s can’t even come close.”
Many art world insiders privately wondered at Glimcher’s decision to open his own small outpost in Soho in 2022 — 125 Newbury — just after Pace had completed a sleek new eight-story flagship on West 25th Street in Chelsea in 2019. Did it amount to a rejection of the program his son was pursuing uptown? Did he want to distance himself from reports of a “toxic” workplace culture at Pace that surfaced in 2020?
The allegations of misconduct prompted the gallery to conduct a legal investigation into two of its top sellers and longest-serving dealers, Douglas Baxter and Susan Dunne — who eventually resigned — and a restructuring of the gallery’s senior leadership.
But the elder Glimcher said 125 Newbury did not amount to a criticism of Pace’s expansion — “I love the light, and I love the exhibition spaces.”
And he largely dismissed the leadership controversy. “Pace has always been very familial,” he said in a text message, when asked about it. “We have over 200 employees and for a myriad of reasons, someone may be unhappy at any time with a transient situation.
“Douglas Baxter is a great art dealer and takes care of his artists as though they were his family,” he added. “He is brilliant and demanding, gives his most and expect [sic] the same from others. He has made enormous contributions to Pace and the development of the New York art world.”
On Saturdays, Glimcher said he sits at the front desk of his downtown space so that he can interact with visitors. He said the modest gallery has allowed him to do what he’d missed: “small exhibitions that are very provocative.”
“I don’t have to sell anything there and the shows that I do are mostly not for sale,” he said. “It’s like a laboratory that keeps me very grounded.”
Nor did the opening of 125 Newbury represent any kind of break with his son, whose taste and management Glimcher said he respects. “This is Marc’s gallery,” he said. “He has the final decision.”
That is not to say they always agree on what to show at Pace. “I don’t support all of it,” Glimcher said. “But, you know, people have very individual tastes and his tastes are broader than mine. His tastes include figuration. For the most part, mine don’t.”
His son responded: “My father has always accused me of having too much respect for too many things. He comes from that generation when connoisseurship meant saying no to 99 percent of everything.”
Marc, though, made clear that he has modeled himself after his father and continues to value his help. “He still has involvement in everything,” Marc said. “He’s pretty critical to the operation.”
In looking back on 65 years, the senior Glimcher said he has no regrets, except that is, failing to repair the reputation of one of his closest artists, Chuck Close, who in 2017 was accused of sexual harassment (Close denied some of the allegations, but apologized if he had made women feel uncomfortable).
“I love him very much,” Glimcher said. “We were like brothers.”
Last year, Glimcher organized an exhibition of Close’s last works, calling him at the time “one of the great painters of the 20th and 21st centuries,” adding that the controversy surrounding the artist was not his concern. “There has been too much about Chuck that isn’t about the art,” Glimcher told The New York Times. “I only want to talk about the art.”
What initially attracted him to Close’s work was the idea of how we see. “How much information do you need to process it into an image?” Glimcher said in the recent interview. “How do we build imagery? What is the visual vocabulary?”
The installation artist Robert Irwin taught him that art is “the tool by which society extends its perception,” Glimcher said, “how we process information and make the invisible visible.”
When the American abstract painter Agnes Martin started making grids, “nobody thought it was art,” Glimcher said. “They thought it was like notebook pages. You learn to see differently.”
Glimcher continues to encounter artists who teach him to see differently, he said, such as those Pace currently represents, like Adam Pendleton, Adrian Ghenie and Qiu Xiaofei.
“What I’m always looking for is to be amazed,” he said. “You know how rare it is to see something you’ve never seen before in your life? And I’ve been there.”
Robin Pogrebin, who has been a reporter for The Times for nearly 30 years, covers arts and culture.
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