From
Reading Room/7:
Viva the Green Gallery!
—Erik La Prade
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In early 1964, Mr. Kertess told me, he had recently arrived
in New York City from Yale with a Masters degree in art history and a big desire
to start a contemporary art gallery. “I had a ridiculous job in
advertising that required so little work that each day I would carry a copy
of the New York Times and a bathing suit in an attaché case. I’d
read the Times, take a swim, then spend most of the rest of the afternoon going
to art galleries and the Museum of Modern Art to further my education.” One
of the galleries he frequented was the Green Gallery, located at 15 West 57th
Street, at the heart of the Manhattan art world.
Besides its mission to exhibit bold, new work by young, emerging
artists— George
Segal, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Jean Follett, all showed there early in their
careers—the Green gallery was particularly keen on promoting young artists
and the new forms of art then being created: happenings, environments, a style
of art later categorized as Minimalism, and a then undefined form of art soon
to be called Pop, starting around 1962.
The artist Larry Rivers, whose work predated the Pop art
style, was already exhibiting at Tibor de Nagy Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street.
The Green Gallery was financially backed by the flamboyant
art-collecting owner of a fleet of taxi cabs, Robert Scull. The art dealer
Ivan Karp introduced Scull to Richard Bellamy, the former director of a cooperative
gallery, the Hansa. When the Hansa closed, Bellamy began working at the Martha
Jackson Gallery. According to one of Bellamy’s oldest friends, Alfred Leslie, “Scull
saw that by having a gallery he could get an early in on new talents and be
able to get deep discounts and make a good profit. He was like a double whammy
in that sense but he couldn’t run it all himself. Bob was a client at
Martha’s. So, Bob would have had the opportunity to see both of them
[Dick and Ivan] in action and feel a connection to both of them.”
Under the stewardship of the imaginative director Richard
Bellamy, the gallery quickly drew attention to itself within its first year,
even if it did not flourish financially. Artists who knew Bellamy during the
five years he directed the gallery, say that he was a poor businessman, an
alcoholic, a very loyal friend dedicated to helping artists, and someone who
had an incredible eye and sensibility for finding new artists and exhibiting
their art in his gallery.
Kertess warmly remembers what it was like to see a show there
of an artist whose perceptions would strike a new chord in him. “I remember my excitement
at seeing my first Ralph Humphrey show there.
“The pictures resembled paintings by the artist Paul Crain. The
paint was lightly put on with a sponge and all the pictures had an empty, almost
polluted grey look. They had a border with slightly thicker paint colored
dusty salmon or green, slightly bossed, and they were all named after single-resident-occupancy
hotels on the Upper West Side. They just seemed so empty to me and I
couldn’t understand why anybody would want to paint like that. They seemed
realistic the first time I went and I kept thinking about them. I must’ve
gone back to the show three or four times. Finally, everything sort of
turned around and they began to frame my space and make me think in a different
way than I had before. It was hard for me to understand how anything that empty
could actually have content but I learned that it could from that show. Bellamy
encouraged a pioneering spirit and cleared the path for the careers of some
amazing artists. In hindsight, Bellamy took huge risks by giving many
artists their first exhibitions. In today’s outrageously, bloated
market, that spirit is gone.”
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