Michael Findlay’s memoir of 1960s New York makes today’s art market look like a joke

“There was no fear of failure, because there was no success,” Michael Findlay tells me. The 79-year-old British art dealer is calling me from his home in New York to talk about his early years in the city, as detailed in his new memoir, Portrait of the Art Dealer as a Young Man. To Findlay and the artists in his 1960s SoHo circle, success was getting a second exhibition, or even better than that, getting a line in the New York Times or getting a work into MoMA, it didn’t necessarily mean making a living from your art. They didn’t need to: life was cheap, life was fast, “there was a new movement every Friday,” he says.

Findlay’s memoir isn’t an academic history of the scene, it’s a personal take on events. “I’m showing them yesterday from my point of view,” he says. “I’m not a professor, I’m a Sunday writer, you know? I’m a full-time art dealer.” He tells me that his book is “something that I had stabbed at a few times,” but now was the right time to write it. “The older you get, the more vivid your very early memories are, and then everything just gets very fuzzy and mixed up.” He admits that when he called up a few old roommates to check an anecdote, they flatly contradicted him; turns out a story he’d been telling for 60 years was wrong. He’s sure others will come out and say he had it all wrong, but this is his version. Findlay’s personal, casual style and short vignettes read like snatches of conversation overheard at a dinner, or the backseat chatter of a taxi cab.

The picture he paints is unrecognisable. The art world he talks about was far from the global industry it is today, it was small, well-connected and yet surprisingly accessible, unlike today it found no interest from the society magazines and the media, “even Andy Warhol wasn’t a bold-faced name at the time.” But it was in that era that today’s art world was formed. This was the world of young Andy Warhol, John Baldessari, Bridget Riley, and Findlay was central to it: he directed one of the first galleries to open up in SoHo and was the first to exhibit Joseph Beuys and Sean Scully in the United States. Later in life, Findlay would head up Christie’s Impressionist department during the 1980s market boom, where he supervised the sale of Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet for $82.5M, then the most expensive sale in the history of art. He still deals today, as director of Acquavella Galleries, New York.

However, when Findlay arrived in the city in 1964, he was just another bohemian kid and wannabe poet, the son of an alcoholic and adulterous army major turned sports hack father and an emotionally distraught mother, trying to make sense of the world. Growing up in post-war Britain, his generation lacked all concern for stability and a stomach for austerity. But Findlay says it made him a hard worker who never turned down an opportunity. The year earlier, he’d dropped out of a scholarship programme at York University Toronto as a political protest and in January 1964 he made his way to NYC with just $200 and the idea that he might stay for a week or two and drop by some jazz bars and take in some poetry readings. He’s lived in New York ever since.

Findlay was lucky. He hit the city at a unique point in its history. Abstract Expressionism, the art movement that had driven galleries and theory for the past 20 or so years, was going out of fashion. That generation of artists, who’d lived and worked through the war, was growing old, but the city still had the wealth and vitality that it lost in the 1970s. “I think some moments in different countries or towns and cities are moments of creative articulation,” Findlay says. “And then, I think they’re often followed by periods of assessment, of refining bits of it and throwing other bits away. And I’m not sure that every decade is a decade of invention. I do think that those particular mid-century decades were, for art, pretty inventive.”

The art scene was small, but it was wide open. Findlay found his way in through a mixture of naivety, curiosity, and his good looks and charm. With his long-ish blonde hair, something of an English accent and a crumpled suit, he found doors open to him that wouldn’t normally be opened. At the same time, he was a “wannabe poet” who had been brought up on Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. “I had no problem in the Village. I had no problem in jazz bars. I had no problem with the sort of what would have been called ‘the underground.’”

His recollections plunge you into the era, they read almost like a pastiche of the 1960s: a meeting with the son of a mob boss when Findlay and two friends try to open a bar; narrowly avoiding the Vietnam draft after gaining his green card; modelling jobs; late-night bars and dinners; his two marriages, one to art student Alex Malasko and another to model Naomi Sims; and minor experiments with the eras drugs of choice, hash and LSD. “That was a weekend activity, and you only did it a couple of times until you had a really bad trip, and then you’re cured,” he says. “I treated everything as a new and interesting experience. But I wasn’t ambitious, I didn’t have a life plan. I was going with the flow, but because of my upbringing, I was a hard worker. Ever since I got my first job, I worked every day, pretty much, as an art dealer.”

That job Findlay got by simply walking into Richard Feigen’s Gallery on 81st Street, ‘the first gallery he’d ever walked into,’ and asking. He bluffed his way through the interview, pretending to recognise one of the works in the back room, and was handed a job; the self-invented title of ‘director of exhibitions’. It’d be unfair to call it entirely an accident: Findlay learned quickly through the constant, in-person interactions between artists and dealers, dealers and buyers, and buyers and artists – not to mention poets, friends, and hangers-on.

One of the first artists he got close to was Ray Johnson, the founder of what became called Mail Art. Johnson would mail envelopes to random people with instructions to pass on to others. Findlay attended the first meeting of Johnson’s ‘New York Correspondence School’ and with it the first Mail Art event. A kind of a happening with no agenda, no VIP guestlist and no real purpose or explanation, but which “turned into a pretty lively affair.” He recalls a dinner later on at which “the person on my right was Andy Warhol and the person on my left was a young lady who I then subsequently spent a lot of time with, and I didn’t know either of them until I sat down at the table.” Across the table was Frank O’Hara, Kynaston McShine, and Marisol. “That’s something you don’t really forget,” Findlay says.

Findlay proved to be a capable dealer, so when in 1968 Feigen opened an offshoot contemporary gallery in the unfashionable, industrial district of SoHo, he chose Findlay to head it. The gallery occupied a space of 7,500 square feet across two and a half floors, though half was used as storage by Leo Castelli. Two years later, Findlay started up his own gallery, J.H. Duffy & Sons, in the same premises. In six years, Findlay had gone from a 19-year-old arrival to a 25-year-old gallerist. It’s a career path that today would make any long-suffering assistant curator envious.

Artists had a better deal back then too. Findlay notes that when he joined Feigen, all artists represented by the gallery were given two-year contracts and monthly stipends, in addition to sales. These were paid for through strong secondary market sales. This wasn’t unusual, this was at a respected, but small, gallery in New York. Today, you might only expect this kind of nurturing treatment from global mega-galleries. That willingness to take a chance on artists extended to those who turned up at the door. Findlay recounts how one day a young artist arrived with a box of black and white photographs of his work. He took a chance on the man, and the photos of word paintings made him laugh. He asked the artist his name – John Baldessari – Findlay included Baldessari in the first show at the first SoHo gallery. Without that meeting would the 20th Century have known one of its most significant conceptual artists?

Similarly, Joseph Beuys might not have broken America if it wasn’t for Findlay visiting the 1968 Documenta. He says that the experience of walking into a room seemingly full of trash still sticks with him to this day. He was, “profoundly moved… almost viscerally affected” by the work, which had no signs, no explanations, and didn’t appear at first to be art. “I think that there’s a lesson about not making assumptions about what art is or isn’t, and the importance of an engagement, a direct engagement with the object.” The run-ins with Beuys continued, he later bought and sold Beuys’ The Sled (1969) to MoMA, and was later responsible for finding the live coyote for Beuys’ infamous 1974 performance I Like America and America Likes Me at René Block Gallery. Findlay’s book ends, suddenly, dramatically, at 3 am on 1st January 1978, with Findlay and his wife Sims watching Grace Jones take to the stage of Studio 54. That moment marks the end of Findlay’s long 1960s. It was clear something new was on the horizon.

With hindsight, the 60s were an incredible eruption of creativity, but Findlay stresses that back then, and even today, these weren’t just names in books, but real people. With real interest in art. In Findlay’s view, art was enjoyed for art’s sake, nobody, neither artists nor collectors, were trying to make a ‘career’ of it. And they didn’t expect to. They had other jobs that paid the bills. The aim of making art was to make more art. “I don’t remember ever having a conversation with any young artist, my age or a few years older, where they were thinking, ‘Well, what if this doesn’t work?’ It wasn’t like they’d taken a career choice; they were doing something they had to do, and they would do it for as long as they could do it, however they could get the money together to pay another $150 a month for their huge cold water loft that had no toilet in it or whatever.”

The same was true of the collectors: “If someone was buying an Impressionist painting, they were paying $100-150,000 – serious money – but if they’re buying a contemporary artist, emerging artists, even a Leo Castelli artist, or Jasper Johns, you know, they might be paying $5,000, but this was nothing to a wealthy person.” Findlay describes how Joseph Hirschorn, the investor and art collector, would turn up personally to artists’ studios and buy works directly, sometimes trying to cut Findlay out of the deal, for anywhere between $500 to $2,000 dollars (around $4,000 and $18,000 in today’s money). Hirschorn was always trying to strike a deal, but he was doing so to build his collection – and ultimately his museum – not as an investment. Art was a pleasure not a job.

The strange thing I find is that Findlay says, none of this felt particularly special. “Nobody was going around. You know, saying oh isn’t this grand, or isn’t this wonderful? Or we’re in a golden age, because there wasn’t, there wasn’t that much golden about it.” He says. “Art History hadn’t got a hold of it, and a lot of people in and outside of the art world thought it was pretty foolish or insignificant” He compares the scene to a cityscape: “I guess what happens with art history is that when you live through a time, there are some buildings taller than others in terms of artists’ reputations, but the horizon is fairly similar. When you look back now, you just see those tall buildings.”

That metaphor is apt. Findlay lays the blame for the collapse of the scene on the changing landscape of the city and the rising prices of real estate in SoHo. “From the early 60s to 77 or 78, it went from being a totally non-residential area of light manufacturing to an extremely desirable one and unfortunately, that meant that artists, many artists, had to leave the area. It’s like a crucible one moment, and then it’s gone.” Findlay has since moved out of SoHo and Acquavella Galleries is located on the Upper East Side, a short walk from the Met, but he still drops by the area for the restaurants. Reflecting on the young man he once was, he tells me, “I’m fond of that person, but I’m not him. I’ve had to change with the times.”