Barbara Gladstone, a dealer who built one of New York’s most important galleries, died on Sunday in Paris after a brief illness, aged 89. The gallery confirmed her death in an email sent to the press on Monday.
Her gallery, Gladstone Gallery, currently has locations in New York, Brussels, Seoul and Rome. She has assembled a roster of celebrated artists, including Matthew Barney, Alex Katz, Joan Jonas, Wangechi Mutu, Keith Haring, Robert Rauschenberg, Carrie Mae Weems, Arthur Jafa and many more.
She opened her gallery in New York in 1980 and became one of the city’s most notable dealers. Steady, carefully planned growth characterized the gallery, but even in a market climate where bigger is better, Gladstone kept her business modest. In 2020, for example, the dealer Gavin Brown merged his space with Gladstone’s, a move that many observers saw as a major step forward for the two closely watched gallerists. But Gladstone generally shrugged it off.
“Our gallery’s goal is not to have a global presence, which seems to me to be the core idea of a mega-gallery,” she told ARTnews at the time. “We don’t need an outpost in every city, like a retail store. Instead, my gallery stays attuned to the granular movements and energies that best serve artists and the spirit of their intentions in a localized and nuanced way. I still think of this as a small operation built solely on relationships and the hard work of getting better at what we do.”
In 1980, when Gladstone opened her gallery, she was a twice-divorced mother of three. She was a professor of art history at Hofstra University at the time and had been collecting prints because they fetched lower prices than works of art in other media. Subscribing to a newsletter devoted to prints led her to go into the business of selling the prints in her collection.
"I bought a print, I listed it, someone bought it, I rolled it up, put it in a tube, sent it off, bought another one. Very boring," she told journalist Charlotte Burns. "And at a certain point I thought, 'There have to be other artists, there have to be.'"
She began seeking out artists who were exhibiting in alternative spaces but who did not have commercial representation. She then cultivated relationships with these artists and sold their works on paper through her gallery.
When she started her gallery, Gladstone paid $700 for a space on 57th Street that she described as "the size of a shoebox." Her ambitions quickly exceeded her means, and she later moved to a larger space in SoHo, where she began exhibiting cutting-edge art by artists who were not as established.
One of them was Matthew Barney, who in 1991 staged a performance show in which the artist wore a harness, inserted an ice screw into his anus, and climbed the walls of the gallery. He was just 23 at the time. Today, that show, which also featured sculptures formed from oil, is considered iconic.
"It takes wisdom to navigate a path between what everyone else wants you to do and what serves you best," Gladstone told critic Linda Yablonsky in 2011. "Every situation is different. There's no formula. I trust my instincts."
Further signs of Gladstone’s business acumen emerged in 1996, when, with the galleries Matthew Marks and Metro Pictures, her company bought a 29,000-square-foot space in Chelsea. The neighborhood was not yet a burgeoning art district, though it would become one in the decades that followed. “Because I started showing large sculptures, I needed a different kind of space, with concrete floors and big garage doors,” she told The New York Times.
Then, in 2002, she doubled down on Chelsea, bringing in the dealer Curt Marcus to help run her operations there. She had officially moved her gallery from SoHo less than a year earlier. The Times reported that Marcus’s hiring was the result of six months of negotiations—yet another example of the slow, deliberate quality that permeated Gladstone’s business dealings.
His legacy is abundantly evident in the art world. Many artists who have come through his gallery have gone on to ascend to the highest echelons of the art world: Jenny Holzer, the subject of a current exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, had some of her earliest shows with Gladstone, and Richard Prince was represented by the dealer before joining the mega-gallery Gagosian.
There have been signs of discord among the Gladstone Gallery staff recently. A former gallery manager sued the company and Gladstone in 2022, alleging that workers there experienced verbal abuse and racial discrimination. A gallery spokesperson said at the time that those allegations were “meritless.” (As of June 12, the lawsuit was still pending in the New York court system.)
In recent years, Gladstone said she had stepped back from certain tasks at the gallery. She described a healthy relationship between some of the gallery’s senior figures. Max Falkenstein, who joined the gallery in 2002, currently serves as a senior partner; Gavin Brown serves as a partner alongside Caroline Luce and Paula Tsai.
“Barbara valued her relationships with artists above all else and remained their advocate to the end,” Falkenstein, Brown, Luce and Tsai said in a statement. “She championed artists who were breaking new ground with their work and stood by them as they developed their practices, noting that ‘you have to see in someone’s work the possibility of longevity.’”
Gladstone is survived by two sons, David and Richard Regen. His third son, Stuart Regen, who co-founded the Regen Projects gallery in Los Angeles, died at age 39 in 1998 of cancer.
Asked about the future earlier this year, she told journalist Charlotte Burns: "I think it's going to be fine because I think these people are all working really well together now. I don't go to art fairs any more. They do perfectly well without me. They've all developed their own relationships with artists, their own relationships with collectors. These things are bigger than one person. Much bigger."