Edward Ruscha

	Education Chouinard Art Institute, Los Angeles 1956-1960 Solo Exhibitions 2000-01 Edward Ruscha, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Traveling to: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Miami Art Museum, FL; Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England.* 2000 Ed Ruscha: New Work, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London Powders, Pressures and Other Drawings, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco* 1999 Ed Ruscha: Metro Plots, Gagosian Gallery, New York Edward Ruscha: Editions 1959-1999, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. Traveling to: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL. Edward Ruscha, Kukje Gallery, Seoul, South Korea* Ed Ruscha, Meta Gallery, Madrid, Spain 1998 Ed Ruscha's Light, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Inventors, Boxers, Racecar Drivers, Artists, Etc., Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris, France Ed Ruscha, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, England Ed Ruscha: New Paintings, Gasgosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA 1997 Spaghetti Westerns, Milwaukee Art Museum, WI* Edward Ruscha, Jurgen Becker, Hamburg Germany Edward Ruscha: Cityscapes/O Books, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York* Miracle, Royal Academy of Arts film screening in association with Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London 1996 Ed Ruscha, Kantor Gallery, Los Angeles VOWELS: Paintings on Book Covers, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA 1995 New Editions, Remba Gallery, Los Angeles Anamorphic Paintings, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Recent Drawings and Prints, Offshore Gallery, East Hampton, NY Sayings, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York The End, Close Range Gallery, Denver Art Museum, CO 1994 Clockworks, Laura Carpenter Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM 1993 Edward Ruscha: Romance with Liquids, Gagosian Gallery, New York * Edward Ruscha: Standard Stations, Amarillo Art Center, Amarillo, TX * Edward Ruscha: New York, Space Gallery, Casino Knokke, Brussels, Belgium The Books of Ed Ruscha, Gund Hall, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA * 1992 Edward Ruscha: Stains, Robert Miller Gallery, New York * Edward Ruscha: New Paintings & Drawings, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Austria * 1991 Ed Ruscha: Early Drawings, Modernism Gallery, San Francisco Ed Ruscha Paintings, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Edward Ruscha, Galerie Carola Mosch Multiples and Editions, Berlin, Germany 1990 Ed Ruscha Prints, Richard Green Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Edward Ruscha, Galerie Trisorio, Naples, Italy Edward Ruscha, Thomas Segal Gallery and Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston, MA Ed Ruscha: Prints from the 1960s & 1970s, Judith Goldberg Gallery Edward Ruscha, Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris, France Edward Ruscha: Obra Sobre Papel, Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona, Spain Edward Ruscha: Obra Gravada, Galeria Joan Prats, Barcelona, Spain Edward Ruscha, Centre Cultural de la Fundacio la Caixa, Barcelona, Spain Edward Ruscha, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, NE * Ed Ruscha: New Paintings and Drawings, Karsten Schubert Ltd., London Edward Ruscha: Paintings and Drawings, The Texas Gallery, Houston, TX Ed Ruscha: Selected Portfolios, Castelli Graphics, Robert Miller Gallery, New York Edward Ruscha: Works on Paper, Galerie Bebert, Rotterdam, The Netherlands Los Angeles Apartments, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York* Ed Ruscha: Paintings, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 1989 Dreams and Other Works on Paper, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York New Paintings and Drawings, Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan Ed Ruscha, Drawings and Prints, Thomas Babeor Gallery, La Jolla, CA Ed Ruscha: Selected Works of the 80s, James Corcoran Gallery, Santa Monica, CA Ed Ruscha: New Paintings and Works on Paper, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL New Paintings, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Ed Ruscha: Drawings, Michael Maloney Contemporary Art Inc., Santa Monica, CA Edward Ruscha, Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Traveled to: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Fundacio Caixa de Pensions, Barcelona, Spain; Serpentine Gallery, London, England; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 1988 Edward Ruscha: Early Paintings, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York * Edward Ruscha: Recent Paintings, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Edward Ruscha: Recent Works on Paper, Karsten Schubert Ltd., London Prints, Gallery Takagi, Nagoya, Japan Drawing and Prints, Galerie Susan Wyss, Zurich, Switzerland Henry Vincent Gallery, Santa Diego, CA New Paintings and Drawings, Institute of Contemporary Art, Nagoya, Japan * New Drawings, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Words Without Thoughts Never to Heaven Go, Lannan Museum, Lake Worth, FL. Traveled to: Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA * 1987 Edward Ruscha: Drawings, Acme Art, San Francisco Drawing Through the Years, Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles Edward Ruscha: 35 Lunette Paintings Commissioned by Metro-Dade Art in Public Places Trust for Miami Dade Public Library, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York New Paintings, Robert Miller Gallery, New York The Works of Ed Ruscha, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX 1986 New Paintings, Fuller Goldeen Gallery, San Francisco Galerie Susan Wyss, Zurich, Switzerland Janie Beggs Fine Arts, Ltd., Aspen, CO New Paintings, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Texas Gallery, Houston, TX 4 x 6: Zeichungen von Edward Ruscha, Westfalischer Kunstverein, Munster, Germany * 1985 Fischer Gallery, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Ed Ruscha: Quelques Dessins, Galerie Gilbert Brownstone, Paris, France New Paintings, James Corcoran Gallery, Los Angeles Octobre des Arts, Musee St. Pierre, Lyon, France Tanja Grunert, Cologne, Germany 1984 New Paintings, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Recent Paintings and Works on Paper, Morgan Gallery, MO 1983 New Drawings, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, Los Angeles Ed Ruscha: Selection of Graphic Works 1970-1982, Cirrus Editions Ltd., Los Angeles Drawings, Galleria Del Cavallino, Venice, Italy Edward Ruscha: Drawings and Prints, Route 66, Philadelphia, PA 1982 Edward Ruscha: A Selection of Drawings from 1967 to 1972, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco Edward Ruscha: New Drawings, Castelli Uptown, New York Edward Ruscha: 1960-70, Castelli, Feigen, Corcoran, New York Prints, Jacobson/Hochman Gallery, New York New Paintings and Drawings, Flow Ace Gallery, Los Angeles, CA The Works of Ed Ruscha (Retrospective), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Traveled to: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; San Antonio Museum of Art, TX; Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Steve's House of Fine Art, Los Angeles 1981 Ace Gallery, Vancouver, Canada Ed Ruscha: Drawings, Douglas Dean Courtenier, Inc., East Hampton, NY Castelli, Goodman, Solomon, East Hampton, NY Edward Ruscha: New Works, ARCO Center for Visual Arts, Los Angeles* Edward Ruscha: Drawings, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York 1980 Edward Ruscha: Paintings, Ace Gallery, Venice, CA Edward Ruscha: Paintings and Drawings, Portland Center for the Visual Arts, OR Nigel Greenwood, Inc., London New Paintings, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Ruscha: Selected Works 1966-1980, Foster Goldstrom Fine Arts, San Francisco 1979 Edward Ruscha: New Works, The Texas Gallery, Houston, TX heue Ausstellungen im InK, InK Halle fur Internationale neue Kunst, Zurich, Switzerland * Edward Ruscha: New Works, Marianne Deson Gallery, Chicago Ed Ruscha: New Works, Richard Hines Gallery, Seattle, WA 1978 A Selection of Paintings and Pastels 1974-1977, MTL Gallery, Brussels, Belgium Drawings and Prints, Castelli Uptown, New York Edward Ruscha: Books, Rudiger Schottle, Munich, Germany Edward Ruscha: Recent Paintings and Drawings, Ace Gallery, Vancouver, Canada Galerie Ricke, Cologne, Germany Graphic Works by Edward Ruscha, Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand* Peppers Art Gallery, University of Redlands, Los Angeles 1977 Recent Paintings, Ace Gallery, Venice, CA Edward Ruscha: Recent Drawings, Elmwood Arts Foundation and The Fort Worth Art Museum, TX Drawings by Joe Goode and Edward Ruscha, The Texas Gallery, Houston, TX Prints and Books, University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Alberta, Canada 1976 Various Drawings, Ace Gallery, Vancouver, Canada Dootson/Calderhead Gallery, Seattle, WA Exhibitions and Presentations, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, CA Institute of Contemporary Art, London Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works by Ed Ruscha, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY* Sable Castelli Gallery Ltd., Toronto, Canada Edward Ruscha, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands * Various Cheese Series, Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles Wadsworth Atheneum, Matirx Gallery, Hartford, CT * 1975 Edward Ruscha/Drawings/Selected Prints, The Glasser Gallery, La Jolla, CA Edward Ruscha: Prints and Publications 1962-74, The Arts Council of Great Britain, traveled to twelve Arts Council Member Galleries; Northern Kentucky State University, Highland Heights, KY; Ace Gallery, CA.* Edward Ruscha: Prints, Northern Kentucky State University, Highland Heights, KY Miracle and Premium film screening, Fox Venice Theater, CA Paintings, Drawings and Film "Miracle", Galerie Ricke, Cologne, Germany Jared Sable Gallery Ltd., Toronto, Canada Leo Castelli, New York Books, Northlight Gallery, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ Tropical Fish Series, Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles University of North Dakota Art Galleries, Grand Forks, ND Various Drawings, Ace Gallery, Los Angeles 1974 Works by Edward Ruscha, Francoise Lambert, Milan, Italy Contemporary Graphics Center, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA Edward Ruscha: Prints and Books, Root Art Center, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY * Golden West College, Huntington Beach, CA H. Peter Findlay Gallery, New York Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Recent Paintings, The Texas Gallery, Houston, TX 1973 Ace Gallery, Los Angeles Books by Ed Ruscha, UCSD Art Gallery, University of San Diego, CA Ed Ruscha: Drawings, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Edward Ruscha: Graphics from the Collection of Donald Marron, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Edward Ruscha: Projection, Galerie Ursula Weavers, Cologne, Germany Stains/Edward Ruscha, Francoise Lambert, Milan, Italy The Greenberg Gallery, St. Louis, MO Edward Ruscha: Young Artist, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco Nigel Greenwood Inc., London Works by Edward Ruscha from the Collection of Paul J. Schupf '58, The Picker Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY * 1972 Corcoran & Corcoran Gallery, Coral Gables, FL Colored People, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York DM Gallery, London Ed Ruscha: Drawings, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York Ed Ruscha: Books and Prints, Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery, University of California, Santa Cruz* Janie C. Lee Gallery, Dallas, TX Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN * 1971 Books, Nigel Greenwood Inc., London Drawings, Contract Graphics Associates, Houston, TX 1970 Alexander Iolas Gallery, New York * Books by Edward Ruscha, Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich, Germany * Edward Ruscha: Prints 1966-1970, Hansen Fuller Gallery, San Francisco Galerie Alexander Iolas, Paris, France 1969 Edward Ruscha: New Graphics, Multiples Inc., Los Angeles Irving Blum Gallery, Los Angeles La Jolla Museum of Art, CA 1968 Irving Blum Gallery, Los Angeles Galerie Rudolf Zwirner, Cologne, Germany 1967 Gunpowder Drawings, Alexander Iolas Gallery, New York 1965 Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles 1964 Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles 1963 Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles

Cult of Personality

Dealers of Castelli’s ilk, erudite and with experience in areas other than art—Castelli started as a banker—guided collections as well as careers. Another of these larger-than-life figures was Sidney Janis, the trendsetting 57th Street, New York, dealer and onetime vaudevillian who in the 1950s and ’60s promoted such American Abstract Expressionists as Rothko, de Kooning and Gorky, along with European modernists like Picasso, Mondrian and Klee. He was also one of the first anywhere to show Pop art.

“Sidney Janis was graduate school for me,” says the New York collector Barbara Jakobson, reminiscing about her initiation in art in the 1950s, when Janis inculcated her with his passion for it even though she was not yet prepared to become a client. “I was in my early 20s and he loved to teach,” she says. “Few art dealers now have time to spend with the merely curious.”

How about the world’s most powerful dealer in contemporary art today, Larry Gagosian, who claims all artists are naturally magnetic? Some say Gagosian is charming only as long as it takes to sign a check. Jakobson demurs, calling him “completely extraordinary … very intelligent and well-read.” While admitting that he can also be distant, she says that “what makes you decide to invest these people with magical power has to do with their sense of authority. A lot of the most successful have no charisma whatever. But they must be willing to act in loco parentis by taking on the artists, [who can be] narcissistic and more demanding than one’s children. They have to be incredibly good liars and say they love everything their artists do. And they have to be able to suffer fools instead of telling them to go home and write a check.”

Other old-school collectors grumble that high-powered gallerists today never sit still long enough to regale their clients with art stories the way Castelli and Janis did. But the brisk pace may be imposed by the new collectors, many of whom have time neither for leisurely conversation nor for prepurchase deliberation. Those who want top pieces snap them up quickly, particularly at art fairs, where discussions are not just brief but also impersonal.

Yet stories keep surfacing about dealers with a Rasputin-like influence on the people around them. One of these was Alexander Iolas. A significant force in Surrealism, Iolas had galleries in Paris, New York, Geneva and Milan before he retired to Athens, where the British-born collector Pauline Karpidas, who has spent most of her adult life in Greece, met him in 1975.

“He was like the Countess of Graumont,” says Karpidas, “trailing this Fortuny cape. I first found him having his hair dyed in the sink by his housekeeper. With the flick of a finger encircled by a 48-carat-diamond ring, he pulls a turban around his head like Marlene Dietrich as Catherine the Great and starts winding a diamond necklace around the turban. I was totally enamored. And he says, ‘Darling, do you have any idea what it takes to form a collection?’ Long story short, it took 10 years. But the fun we had!”

Karpidas played Eliza Doolittle to Iolas’s Henry Higgins. He not only started her collecting contemporary art but also introduced her to another aspiring patron, Dominique de Menil, and, later, to Charles Saatchi, as well as to Andy Warhol, who did her portrait. “If you’re going to collect a certain period, you have to buy in depth, and that’s where mentors come in,” says Karpidas, who includes among her tutors both Castelli and Robert Fraser, the rocking British Pop-art dealer who introduced Yoko Ono and John Lennon. “But the one who gave me real entrée into the world of art was Iolas. ‘You will always think of me,’ he said, ‘because I taught you how to focus.’ ”

The Swiss dealer Thomas Ammann is another whom many in the art world still regard with awe as well as affection. Famously discreet, he would never reveal the names of his blue-chip clients, although Giovanni Agnelli, Gustavo Cisneros and Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kaszon are all linked with him. By the time he died, in 1993, Ammann had made a place for the early work of such modern masters as Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and Brice Marden in European and American collections. (His sister Doris Ammann runs Thomas Ammann Fine Art today as a prominent secondary-market shop.)

Niki de Saint Phalle, born Catherine-Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle (October 29 1930–May 21, 2002) was a French

France

France , officially the French Republic , is a country whose Metropolitan France is located in Western Europe and that also comprises various Overseas departments and territories of France....
sculptor

Sculpture

Sculpture is Three-dimensional space artwork created by shaping or combining hard and or plastic material, sound, and or text and or light, commonly Stone sculpture , metal, glass, or wood....
, painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . In art, the term describes both the act and the result, which is called a painting....
, and film maker.

The early years

Niki de Saint Phalle was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine near Paris, to Jeanne Jacqueline (née Harper) and André-Marie Fal de Saint Phalle, a banker. After being wiped out financially during the Great Depression, the family moved from France to the United States of America United States in 1933. During her teens, she was a fashion model; at the age of sixteen she made the cover of Life magazine (September 26, 1949), and later the November 1952 cover of the French Vogue magazine. Niki enrolled at the Brearly School in New York City but she was dismissed for painting fig leaves red on the school's statuary. She went on to attend Oldfields School

Oldfields School

Oldfields School, founded in Baltimore County, Maryland in 1867 by Anna Austen McCulloch, is the oldest girls' boarding school in Maryland.A college preparatory school for girls in grades 8 through 12 located in Glencoe, near Sparks, Maryland, Oldfield's School has approximately 185 boarding and day students....
in Glencoe, Maryland

Glencoe, Maryland

Glencoe is an unincorporated area in Baltimore County, Maryland, Maryland, United States.References...
where she graduated in 1947. At eighteen, de Saint Phalle eloped with author Harry Mathews

Harry Mathews

Harry Mathews is an American author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays.Born in New York City to an upper middle class family, Mathews was educated at private schools there and at the Groton School in Massachusetts before enrolling at Princeton University in 1947....
, whom she had known since the age of twelve, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in the Greater Boston area of Massachusetts, United States. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England....
. While her husband studied music

Music

Music is an art form whose media is sound organized in time. Common elements of music are pitch , rhythm , dynamics , and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture ....
at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Massachusetts, United States, and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the Colonial Colleges institution of higher learning in the United States....
, de Saint Phalle began to paint, experimenting with different media and styles. Their first child, Laura

Laura Duke Condominas

Laura Duke Condominas, also known as Laura Duke, born Boston April 1951, is the daughter of French artist and film-maker Niki de Saint-Phalle and American novelist Harry Mathews....
, was born in April 1951.

De Saint Phalle rejected the staid, conservative values of her family, which dictated domestic positions for wives and particular rules of conduct. However, after marrying young and giving birth to two children, she found herself living the same bourgeois lifestyle that she had attempted to reject; the internal conflict led to her to suffer a nervous breakdown. As a form of therapy, she was encouraged to start painting.

While in Paris, de Saint Phalle was introduced to the American painter Hugh Weiss who became both her friend and mentor, encouraging her to continue painting in her self-taught style. She subsequently moved to Deya, Majorca, Spain

Spain

Spain or the Kingdom of Spain , is a country located in Southern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula.The Spanish constitution does not establish any official denomination of the country, even though Espa?a , Estado espa?ol and Naci?n espa?ola are used interchangeably....
where her son Philip was born in May 1955. While in Spain, de Saint Phalle read the works of Proust and visited Madrid

Madrid

Madrid is the Capital and largest city of Spain. It is the Largest cities of the European Union by population within city limits in the European Union after Greater London and Berlin, and its Madrid metropolitan area is the Largest urban areas of the European Union in the European Union after Paris aire urbaine, Greater London Urban Area, a...
and Barcelona

Barcelona

Barcelona is the capital and most populous city of the Autonomous communities of Spain of Catalonia and the second largest city in Spain, with a population of 1,615,908 in 2008, while the population of the Metropolitan Area was 3,161,081....
where she discovered and was deeply affected by the work of Antonio Gaudí. Gaudí's influence opened many previously unimagined possibilities for de Saint Phalle regarding the use of diverse material and objet-trouvés as structural elements in sculpture and architecture. De Saint Phalle was particularly struck by Gaudí's "Park Güell

Park Güell

Parc Guell is a garden complex with Architecture elements situated on the hill of el Carmel in the Gr?cia district of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain....
" which convinced her to one day create her own garden work that would combine both art

Art

Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music and literature....
and nature

Nature

File:Jungle in Punjab.JPGNature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical universe, material world or material universe....
. Saint Phalle continued to paint, particularly after her family relocated to Paris in the mid-1950s. Her first art exhibition was held in 1956 in Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerland is a landlocked Swiss Alps country of roughly 7.7 million people in Western Europe with an area of 41,285 km?. Switzerland is a federal republic consisting of 26 states called Cantons of Switzerland....
where she displayed naïve style

Naïve art

Na?ve art is characterized by a childlike simplicity. It is a gross oversimplification to assume that Na?ve art is created by people with little or no formal art training....
oil paintings. She then moved onto collage

Collage

Sorry, no overview for this topic
work that often featured objects of violence, such as guns and knives.

Shooting paintings

In 1961, she became known around the world for her Shooting paintings. A shooting painting consisted of a wooden base board on which containers of paint were laid, then covered with plaster. The painting was then raised and de Saint Phalle would shoot at it with a .22 caliber

Caliber

The term caliber designates the inside diameter of a tube, the diameter of a solid wire or rod, or a measurement of the length of a gun relative to its diameter....
rifle. The bullets penetrated paint containers which spilled their contents over the painting. This "painting style" was completely new, and she travelled around the world performing shooting sessions in Paris

Paris

Paris is the Capital of France and the country's largest city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the ?le-de-France Regions of France ....
, Sweden

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic countries on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden has land borders with Norway to the west and Finland to the northeast, and it is connected to Denmark by the ?resund Bridge in the south....
, Malibu, California

Malibu, California

Malibu is an incorporated city in western Los Angeles County, California, United States. As of the 2000 census, the city population is 12,575....
, and the Stedelijk Museum

Stedelijk Museum

The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is a museum for modern art in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It is located at Museumplein, close to the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Van Gogh Museum....
in Amsterdam

Amsterdam

Amsterdam is the Capital of the Netherlands and List of cities in the Netherlands with over 100,000 people of the Netherlands, located in the Provinces of the Netherlands of North Holland in the west of the country....
. Saint Phalle had stopped making these shooting pictures in 1963 as in her own words, ‘I had become addicted to shooting, like one becomes addicted to a drug'.

Her first solo exhibition in Paris at Galarie J featured assemblages and a public shooting arena. Soon de Saint Phalle appeared in group shows throughout Europe and the United States. During the 1960s, she became friends with American artists in Paris such as Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is perhaps most famous for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations....
, Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns

File:Jasper Johns's 'Map', 1961.jpgJasper Johns, Jr. is a contemporary American artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery....
, Larry Rivers

Larry Rivers

Larry Rivers was a Jewish American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York on and Zihuatanejo, Mexico....
and his wife Clarice, with whom de Saint Phalle collaborated over the years.

Nanas

After the "Shooting paintings" came a period when she explored the various roles of woman. She made life size dolls of women, such as brides and mothers giving birth. They were usually dressed in white. They were primarily made of polyester with a wire framework. They were generally created from papier mâché.

Inspired by the pregnancy of her friend Clarice Rivers, the wife of American artist Larry Rivers

Larry Rivers

Larry Rivers was a Jewish American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York on and Zihuatanejo, Mexico....
, she began to use her artwork to consider archetypal female figures in relation to her thinking on the position of women in society. Her artistic expression of the proverbial everywoman were named 'Nanas'. The first of these freely posed forms, made of papier-mâché, yarn, and cloth were exhibited at the Alexander Iolas

Alexander Iolas

Alexander Iolas was born in Alexandria, Egypt, on March 25, 1907, to Andreas and Persephone Coutsoudis, who were Greek. In 1924, he went to Berlin as a pianist, and later became a ballet dancer who toured extensively with the Theodora Roosevelt Company and later with the company formed by the Marquis de Cuevas....
Gallery in Paris in September 1965. For this show, Iolas published her first artist books that includes her handwritten words in combination with her drawings of 'Bananas'. Encouraged by Iolas, she started a highly productive output of graphic work that accompanied exhibitions that included posters, books and writings.

In 1966, she collaborated with fellow artist Jean Tinguely

Jean Tinguely

File:Tinguely by Wolleh.jpgFile:Basel Tinguely vor Museum.jpgFile:Z?rich - Seefeld - Heureka IMG_1605.JPGJean Tinguely was a Swiss Painting and sculpture....
and Per Olof Ultvedt on a large scale sculpture installation, "hon-en katedral" ("she-a cathedral") . for Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Stockholm

is the capital and largest city of Sweden. It is the site of the national Swedish Government of Sweden, the Parliament of Sweden, and the official residence of the Swedish Monarchy of Sweden....
, Sweden. The outer form of "hon" is a giant, reclining 'Nana', whose internal environment is entered from between her legs. The piece elicited immense public reaction in magazines and newspapers throughout the world. The interactive quality of the "hon" combined with a continued fascination with fantastic types of architecture intensifies her resolve to see her own architectural dreams realized. During the construction of the "hon-en katedral," she met Swiss

Switzerland

Switzerland is a landlocked Swiss Alps country of roughly 7.7 million people in Western Europe with an area of 41,285 km?. Switzerland is a federal republic consisting of 26 states called Cantons of Switzerland....
artist Rico Weber, who became an important assistant and collaborator for both de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely. During the 1960s, she also designed decors and costumes for two theatrical productions: a ballet by Roland Petit

Roland Petit

File:RolandPetit09.jpgRoland Petit is a France choreographer and dancer born in Villemomble near Paris, France. He trained at the Paris Op?ra ballet school, and became well known for his creative ballets, which include:...
, and an adaptation of the Aristophanes

Aristophanes

Aristophanes , son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a prolific and much acclaimed comedy playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his forty plays have come down to us virtually complete....
play "Lysistrata

Lysistrata

Lysistrata is one of the few surviving plays written by the master of Aristophanes#Aristophanes and Old Comedy, Aristophanes. Originally performed in Classical Athens in 411 BC, it is a comic account of one woman's extraordinary mission to end The Peloponnesian War....
."

The Tarot Garden

Influenced by Gaudí´s Parc Güell in Barcelona, and the garden in Bomarzo

Bomarzo

Bomarzo is a town and comune of the province of Viterbo , in the lower valley of the Tiber river. It is located at some 18 kilometers from Viterbo and 68 from Rome....
, de Saint Phalle decided that she wanted to make something similar; a monumental sculpture park created by a woman. In 1979, she acquired some land in Garavicchio, Tuscany

Tuscany

Tuscany is a region in Italy. It has an area of and a population of about 3.6 million inhabitants. The regional capital is Florence.Tuscany is known for its landscapes and its artistic legacy....
, about 100 km north-west of Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital city of Italy and Lazio, and is Italy's largest and most populous city, with 2,724,347 residents in an urban area of some ....
along the coast. The garden, called Giardino dei Tarocchi in Italian, contains sculptures of the symbols found on Tarot

Tarot

The tarot is typically a set of seventy-eight cards, composed of twenty-one Trump , one The Fool , and four Suit of fourteen cards each?ten pip and four Face card cards ....
cards. The garden took many years, and a considerable sum of money, to complete. It opened in 1998, after more than 20 years of work.(*)

Public works

On 17 November 2000 Niki became an honorary citizen of Hannover, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands....
and donated 300 pieces of her artwork to the Sprengel Museum

Sprengel Museum

The Sprengel Museum in Hanover houses one of the most significant collections of modern art in Germany. It is located in a building designed by Peter Trint and Ursula Trint and Dieter Quast adjacent to the Maschsee....
.

Many of Niki de Saint Phalle's sculptures are large and some of them are exhibited in public places, including:

• Stravinsky
  Igor Stravinsky
  
  Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian-born composer, considered by many to be the most influential composer of 20th century music. He was a quintessentially Cosmopolitanism Russian who was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people of the century....
  Fountain (or Fontaine des automates) near the Centre Pompidou, Paris
  Paris
  
  Paris is the Capital of France and the country's largest city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the ?le-de-France Regions of France ....
  (1982) - also featuring works of Jean Tinguely
• La fountaine Château-Chinon, at Château-Chinon
  Château-Chinon
  
  'Ch?teau-Chinon' is the name of two commune in France of the Ni?vre d?partement in France, in France:* Ch?teau-Chinon * Ch?teau-Chinon The two towns are neighboring each other....
  , Nièvre
  Nièvre
  
  Ni?vre is a departments of France in the center of France named after the Ni?vre ....
  . Collaboration with Jean Tinguely
• L'Ange Protecteur in the Hall of the Zürich Train Station
• Nanas, along the Leibnizufer in Hannover (1974).
• Queen Califia's Magic Circle, a sculpture garden in Kit Carson Park, Escondido, California(*)
• Sun God
  Sun God (statue)
  
  Sun God is a statue by French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle located on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. The statue is a 14-foot multicolored bird-like creature, perched atop a 15-foot-tall horseshoe-shaped rock pedestal....
  (1983), a fanciful winged creature next to the Faculty Club on the campus of the University of California, San Diego
  University of California, San Diego
  
  The University of California, San Diego is a public research university in San Diego, California, California. The school's campus contains 694 buildings and is located in the La Jolla, San Diego, California community....
  as a part of the Stuart Collection
  Stuart Collection
  
  The Stuart Collection is a collection of public art on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. Founded in 1983, the Stuart Collection's goal is to spread commissioned sculpture throughout the campus, including both traditional sculptures and integration with features of the campus, including landscape and buildings....
  of public art.
• La Lune, A sculpture located inside the Brea Mall
  Brea Mall
  
  The Brea Mall is a shopping mall located in the northern Orange County, California city of Brea, California, California. Brea is within minutes of California State University, Fullerton....
  in Brea, California
  Brea, California
  
  Brea is a city in Orange County, California, California, United States. The population, as of 2007 is 39,560.The city began as a center of crude oil production, was later propelled by citrus production, and is now an important retail center because of the large Brea Mall and the recently redeveloped Brea Downtown....
  .
• Coming Together, San Diego convention center(*)
• Grotto at the Royal Herrenhäuser Gardens in Hannover, Germany (*)
• Cyclop in Milly-La-Forêt, France - collaborative monumental sculpture with Jean Tinguely, a.o.(*)
• Golem in Jerusalem(*)
• Noah's Ark collaborative sculpture park with Swiss architect Mario Botta
  Mario Botta
  
  Mario Botta is a famous modern architect born in Mendrisio, Ticino canton, Switzerland.He designed his first house at age 16, although no-one mentions if it was built, and studied at the Liceo Artistico in Milan and the University Iuav of Venice in Venice....
  in Jerusalem(*)
• Lebensretter-Brunnen / Lifesaver Fountain in Duisburg, Germany

The Stable Gallery: In Conversation With Nicolas Carone

by Phong Bui

As part of the Rail’s ongoing effort to bring resources and historical awareness to the current dialogue in our ever-growing art community, I wrote an article several issues ago about The Club, and was able to interview Philip Pavia—the sculptor and organizer of The Club and publisher of It Is magazine. It was The Club that provided the informal yet critical format for panel discussions which included various topics: painting, sculpture, philosophy, music, anthropology and on some occasions even heated political debates. Now, with the recent addition of new gallery spaces beyond the Williamsburg area—Greenpoint, Dumbo and Bushwick—it would seem timely to follow up with the story of the legendary Stable Gallery.

The Stable Gallery began as a real horse stable on Central Park South, but it was more than just the first to convert an industrial space into an art gallery, a concept which anticipated fashionable Soho and the new Chelsea galleries. The Stable was also famous for having a broad and democratic philosophy. Besides the Stable Annuals, which involved the most established artists of the downtown scene at the time, it also showcased many young and emerging artists like Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and Joan Mitchell. In addition, it resurrected the eccentric and unique work of John Graham and Joseph Cornell.

The Stable Gallery was a perfect passageway for other galleries to come and pick their artists or to observe its unorthodox and experimental spirit. The following is an interview with the distinguished painter and teacher Nicolas Carone, who was the assistant director of the Stable Gallery’s first three or four crucial years. Carone was also a founding faculty member of the New York Studio School and the former director of the International School of Art in Umbria, Italy.

Phong Bui (Rail): In 1951, the members of The Club invited sixty-one artists to each submit one work for a big group show. It was called The Ninth Street Show. The appeal was that it included most, if not all, the artists of the downtown scene—the older and the younger generation. It must have been exciting to see the work of Kline, de Kooning or even Kewitin next to Fairfield Porter and Louise Bourgeois and Michael Loew. From what I’ve read and been told by some of the participants, it was a great success.

Nicolas Carone: Well, it was a success because it was more like a social event that anything else. Nobody was with a gallery in those days, especially the younger artists who were still trying to figure out what was going on, I mean in their own work. It was good for them to come to an event like that because they could meet the older artists, see what the older artists were doing.

Rail: Didn’t The Ninth Street Show consequently turn into the Stable Annual? Wasn’t that how the Stable Annual came to be?

Carone: I’ll get to that later, but first the story began with the Alexander Iolas who was running the Hugo Gallery at the time. I’m sure you remember the Blood Flame exhibit organized by Nicolas Calas and designed by Frederick Kiesler. Anyway, Iolas was a great friend of mine and given his background it made sense that someone like Eleanor Ward would be attracted to him. Iolas came from a mix Egyptian and Greek origins. He was very handsome and at one time a ballet dancer. He had a strong interest in esoteric philosophy. You can imagine the sophisticated European circles of Surrealist artists like Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta and many distinguished ex-patriots that were accessible to him. Even the formidable Donna Maria Ruspoli—she was a Princess—and the Marquis de Cuevas were helping Iolas with the gallery.

Rail: What about Eleanor Ward?

Carone: She was working for Christian Dior as a representative promoting The New Look. You know she primarily came from the fashion industry and had no experience in the art world. But she had this friend with a real horse stable building on 58^th Street and 7^th Avenue right by Central Park South. Since the friend had a long lease but was quitting her business—which was making mannequins, papier maché window displays for Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller, all those fancy uptown stores—well, she was willing to give the space to Eleanor. The first thing Eleanor did was to put up a casual Christmas show with all kinds of Sunday painters and dilettantes. It was not serious at all but it got a lot of attention. It even got coverage in the New Yorker and many things were sold. Just to remind you, Eleanor gained the backing of a wealthy man because of that Christmas show… and that’s when she came to Iolas and asked his advice. He came to see the space and agreed to help her as a curator. Well, through his gallery, he put up a big group show that would officially introduce the Stable Gallery to the art world. The show included the obvious names of the modern Italian artists like de Chirico, Modigliani and Morandi—and it also made exceptions with some other work like Fazzini and de Pisis. My work was included in that show as well.

Rail: But with all of Iolas’ European connections, how did that have anything to do with the undercurrent scene downtown?

Carone: See, you have to understand in spite of his involvement with the Surrealists and even the Neo-Romantic artists like Pavel Tchelithew and Eugene Berman, he knew there was a new climate in the making. So, to his credit, having seen an enormous space like the Stable, he thought it would be a perfect opportunity to show some large abstract paintings.

Rail: You mean Abstract Expressionist paintings?

Carone: Not quite exactly. He had some notion about showing some young French painters like Matthieu, I suppose, as a way of prefacing what was to follow in New York. Anyway, things didn’t work out with Eleanor Ward, so Iolas terminated his relationship with her.

Rail: So when did you enter the picture and what was your role at the gallery?

Carone: Well, I met Eleanor through Iolas, I came in right after he left. The truth of the matter was she didn’t know what to do next. I tried to propose to her all different kinds of paintings that could be available for showing in the gallery. In fact, I showed he a big article about the Betty Parsons Gallery and the New Paintings in Vogue magazine, you know, with Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clifford Still. I said to her, “that’s the new painting, the new avant-garde.” She responded right away, “Yes, that’s what I want.” I told her, in that case, she would have to give me some time to find young artists qualified to have a show because most of them didn’t necessarily have enough work. They were still working things out. No one could make a statement overnight, anyway. You see, at that time, making a statement was paramount. That would have meant who you were. You could be the most talented guy in the world but if you didn’t make your statement you were out. That was one of the big reasons why most artists didn’t show their work until they were older. Don’t forget de Kooning did not have his first one-man show until 1948. I believe he was about 42 years old.

Rail: Yes, at the Charles Eagan Gallery. In any case, most of the older artists like de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko or Kline or Gorky were already with other established galleries. So you didn’t have much choice except to find good artists among the younger generation.

Carone: (laughs) That was my intention anyway. For instance, I came to visit a collector friend of mine’s apartment and I saw a big painting by Edward Dugmore that I liked. You know Dugmore and Ernie Briggs were from the West Coast where they had studied with Clifford Still. They came to New York at the height of everything that was happening. They were considered outsiders, but I didn’t care too much for all of that. I liked his work. So we gave him his first show at the Stable. That also gave me more time to look for other artists.

Rail: So it would appear to be good timing because from the Annual you could certainly pick and choose all kinds of artists and invite them to join your gallery.

Carone: Actually a friend that made it possible for me besides Philip Pavia and Conrad Marca-Relli at The Club was Jack Tworkow. He instigated the whole arrangement. I suggested to bring The Ninth Street Show to the Stable, Tworkow spoke to Pavia and some other artists, and they were all for it. That’s how the Annual came to be. But again that was just the Annual—otherwise most of my friends like Philip Guston, Marca-Relli, Vincente, they all wanted to join Charlie Eagen because of de Kooning. Guston finally got in. You must understand the whole climate then was about de Kooning. Critics like Tom Hess, Harold Rosenberg, they were busy building up de Kooning. De Kooning was the hot painter. Pollock was already in South Hampton drying out, so to speak. He already made his statement. He was seeing his psychiatrist and Lee was protecting him from everything going on.

Rail: I think the whole phenomenon of de Kooning versus Pollock simply rests on the fact that in de Kooning’s work, because he was trained academically and had more skill than Pollock, the visual vocabulary and the evolution of his process appears to be more cohesive. It’s really not a matter of judgment. I am just making a personal observation. What I mean is that de Kooning’s work is more tangible for emulation. After all, practically the whole second generation of young artists were painting under de Kooning’s influence, both abstractly and figuratively. In Pollock’s case it was different. Pollock’s influence didn’t really stop with Clement Greenberg and his circle of artist friends, such as Frankenthaler, Morris Louis or Larry Poons—even though part of its appeal for them was the decorative side of his late drip paintings. Pollock’s greater spiritual legacy continued right in to the Happenings with Allen Kaprow, also with Earth Art and Michael Heizer and with Robert Smithson. Anyway, what happened next?

Carone: I went to see a group show at the Samuel Kootz Gallery. I saw Cy Twombly’s paintings for the first time. They were painted mostly in black and white with enamel house paint. The surfaces were thickly painted but smooth at the same time. They looked like a combination of Franz Kline calligraphy and that wuality of Ryder’s—painterly and glowing. They had a real plastic sensibilities. Both Eleanor and I went to see him in his studio. A few days later, he came to see the space and liked the idea of the gallery and eventually agreed to show with us only if we would take on his friend Bob Rauschenberg as well. I liked Cy’s work and his discretion, so we put up a two-man show with his and Rauschenberg’s work together.

Rail: Cool. Didn’t you also mount a show of John Graham at the Stable? How did that happen?

Carone: Well, I had a very strong idea about the Stable. I didn’t want it to be just a gallery that only shows abstract paintings. I told Eleanor that we needed some figurative artists but whose work had to have a strong metaphysical basis. Of course, when I read Graham’s book System and Dialectics of Art, like everyone else at the time, I knew right away that this was a man who knew. He was a great connoisseur really. I asked among my friends but they didn’t know where he was. As every one of us knew, Graham was important to Gorky and de Kooning’s formative years in the late ’30s and early ’40s but the whole art world was different by the ’50s. Anyway, I knew a man named Don Braider who ran a local bookstore near my home in East Hampton. He was the one who told me where John Graham was in South Hampton. The strange thing was that, before Eleanor and I went to see him, I found out that Graham was married to Ilena Sonnabend’s mother. That means he was Leo Castelli’s father-in-law.

Rail: Yeah. That’s a really strange fact. Please go on.

Carone: You wouldn’t believe it. When we invited Graham to have a show at the Stable he came in to the gallery and he was thrilled. He even suggested a retrospective of his work. He said that he could arrange to get a lot of his work from the Philips Collection in DC. You would be surprised at the range of his work. Most people identify Graham’s work with his landmark cross-eyed women with all kinds of esoteric symbols and writing on their face or neck. I saw paintings that were like Barnett Newman’s, I mean long before Barnett became the painter as we know him. It wan an amazing and haunting exhibit. Every single painter in New York came to that show even though we didn’t manage to see one painting. In spite of all of that, some of my friends were against the idea that I was showing John Graham’s work. They had the same reaction when I showed Joseph Cornell earlier.

Rail: Was the Cornell show through Iolas’s connections?

Carone: Yes. I knew him through Iolas. Believe me, only a few supported me with this idea. Noguchi loved the Cornell show and because of that he later joined the gallery. And later Jack Tworkow and Joan Mitchell and even Myron Stout came in.

Rail: How would you compare the Stable with other galleries like Martha Jackson, Pointdexter, Tibor de Nagy…

Carone: Well, at the Stable Annuals many galleries would come and pick and choose their new artists. After three and a half years I had to quit my job because my own paintings demanded more time and I needed to have my own career as a painter. As a manner of fact I quit the Stable in order to show my work at George Stampfli’s gallery. It was alright with Eleanor. I left on friendly terms. She continued to consult with me later on so I still remained somewhat involved.

Rail: The Stable Annual came to an end in 1957.

Carone: It was unfortunate. Abstract Expressionism was nipped at the bud. It was forced out to make way for Pop Art. Yes, everything comes to an end.

Danse Macabre

The Rockefeller and the Ballet Boys

Another spectacular will contest is dividing the dinner parties of tony America. The recently deceased was Margaret Strong, a plain-Jane Rockefeller who always attracted effete men. Her first husband was the ballet-mad Marquis de Cuevas. Her second was nearly forty years her junior: Raymundo de Larrain, who gave her a wheelchair and new teeth for the wedding. And then, according to her children, milked her out of $30 million. On the eve of the trial, the author investigates a society redolent of black orchids.

by Dominick Dunne

February 1987

There is no one, not even his severest detractor, and let me tell you at the outset of this tale that he has a great many severe detractors, who will not concede that Raymundo de Larrain, who sometimes uses the questionable title of the Marquis de Larrain, is, or at least was, before he took the road to riches by marrying a Rockefeller heiress nearly forty years his senior, a man of considerable talent, who, if he had persevered in his artistic pursuits, might have made a name for himself on his own merit. Instead his name, long a fixture in the international social columns, is today at the center of the latest in a rash of contested-will controversies in which wildly rich American families go to court to slug it out publicly for millions of dollars left to upstart spouses the same age as or, in this case, younger than the disinherited adult children.

The most interesting person in this story is the late possessor of the now disputed millions, Margaret Strong de Cuevas de Larrain, who died in Madrid on December 2, 1985, at the age of eighty-eight, and the key name to keep in mind is the magical one of Rockefeller. Margaret de Larrain had two children, Elizabeth and John, from her first marriage, to the Marquis George de Cuevas. The children do not know the whereabouts of her remains, or even whether she was, as a member of the family put it, incinerated in Madrid. What they do know is that during the eight years of their octogenarian mother’s marriage to Raymundo de Larrain, her enormous real-estate holdings, which included adjoining town houses in New York, an apartment in Paris, a country house in France, a villa in Tuscany, and a resort home in Palm Beach, were given away or sold, although she had been known throughout her life to hate parting with any of her belongings, even the most insubstantial things. At the time of her second marriage, in 1977, she had assets of approximately $30 million (some estimates go as high as $60 million), including 350,00 shares of Exxon stock in a custodian account at the Chase Manhattan Bank. The location of the Exxon shares is currently unknown, and the documents presented by her widower show that his late wife’s assets amount to only $400,000. Although these sums may seem modest in terms of today’s billion-dollar fortunes, Margaret, at the time of her inheritance, was considered one of the richest women in the world. There are two wills in question: a 1968 will leaving the fortune to the children and a 1980 will leaving it to the widower. In the upcoming court case, the children, who are fifty-eight and fifty-six years old, are charging that the will submitted by de Larrain, who is fifty-two, represents “a massive fraud on an aging, physically ill, trusting lady.”

Although Margaret Strong de Cuevas de Larrain was a reluctant news figure for five decades, the facts of her birth, her fortune, and the kind of men she married denied her the privacy she craved. However, her children, Elizabeth, known as Bessie, and John, have so successfully guarded their privacy, as well as that of their children, that they are practically anonymous in the social world in which they were raised. John de Cuevas, who has been described as almost a hermit, has never used the title of marquis. He is now divorced from his second wife, Sylvia Iolas de Cuevas, the niece of the art dealer Alexander Iolas, who was a friend of his father’s. His only child is a daughter from that marriage, now in her twenties. He maintains homes in St. James, Long Island, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he teaches scientific writing at Harvard. Bessie de Cuevas, a sculptor whose work resembles that of Archipenko, lives in New York City and East Hampton, Long Island. She is also divorced, and has one daughter, twenty-two, by her second husband, Joel Carmichael, the editor of Midstream, a Zionist magazine so reactionary that it recently published an article accusing the pope of being soft on Marxism. Friends of Bessie de Cuevas told me that she was never bothered by the short financial reins her mother kept her on, because she did not fall prey to fortune hunters the way her sister heiresses, like Sunny von Bülow, did.

Margaret Strong de Cuevas de Larrain, the twice-titled American heiress, grew up very much like a character in a Henry James novel. In fact, Henry James, as well as William James, visited her father’s villa outside Florence when she was young. Margaret was the only child of Bessie Rockefeller, the eldest of John D. Rockefeller’s five children, and Charles Augustus Strong, a philospher and psychologist, whose father, Augustus Hopkins Strong, a Baptist clergyman and theologian, had been a great friend of old Rockefeller’s. A mark of the brilliance of Margaret’s father was that, while at Harvard, he competed with fellow student George Santayana for a scholarship at a German university and won. He then shared the scholarship with Santayana, who remained his lifelong friend. Margaret was born in New York, but the family moved shortly thereafter to Paris. When Margaret was nine her mother died, and Strong, who never remarried, built his villa in Fiesole, outside Florence. There, in a dour and austere atomosphere, surrounded by intellectuals and philosophers, he raised his daughter and wrote scholarly books. His world provided very little amusement for a child and no frivolity.

Each year Margaret returned to the United States to see her grandfather, with whom she maintained a good relationship, and to visit her Rockefeller cousins. Old John D. was amused by his serious and foreign granddaughter, who spoke several languages and went to school in England. Later, she was one of only three women attending Cambridge University, where she studied chemistry. Never, even as a young girl, could she have been considered attractive. She was big, bulky, and shy, and until the age of twenty-right she always wore variations of the same modest sailor dress.

Her father was eager for her to marry, and toward that end Margaret went to Paris to live, although she had few prospects in sight. Following the Russian Revolution there was an influx of Russian émigrés into Paris, and Margaret Strong developed a fascination for them that remained with her all her life. She was most excited to meet the tall and elegant Prince Felix Yusupov, the assassin of Rasputin, who was said to have used his beautiful wife, Princess Irina, as a lure to attract the womanizing Rasputin to his palace on the night of the murder. In Paris, Prince Yusupov had taken to wearing pink rouge and green eye shadow, and he supported himself by heading up a house of couture called Irfé, a combination of the first syllables of his and his wife’s names. Into this hothouse of fashion, one day in 1927, walked the thirty-year-old prim, studious, and unfashionable Rockefeller heiress. At that time Prince Yusupov had working for him an epicene and penniless young Chilean named George de Cuevas, who was, according to friends who remember him from that period, “extremely amusing and lively.” He spoke with a strong Spanish accent and expressed himself in a wildly camp manner hitherto totally unknown to the sheltered young lady. The story goes that at first Margaret mistook George de Cuevas for the prince. “What do you do at the couture?” she asked. “I’m the saleslady,” he replied. The plain, timid heiress was enchanted with him, and promptly fell in love, thereby establishing what would be a lifelong predilection for flamboyant, effete men. The improbable pair were married in 1928.

From then on Margaret abandoned almost all intellectual activity. She stepped out of the pages of a Henry James novel into the pages of a Ronald Firbank novel. If her father had been the dominant figure of her maidenhood, George de Cuevas was the controlling force of her adult existence. Their life became more and more frivolous, capricious, and eccentric. Through her husband she discovered an exotic new world that centered on the arts, especially the ballet, for which George had a deep and abiding passion. Their beautiful apartment on the Quai Voltaire, filled with pets and bibelots and opulent furnishings, became a gathering place for the haute bohème of Paris, as did their country house in St.-Germain-en-Laye, where their daughter, Bessie, was born in 1929. Their son, John, was born two years later. Along the way the title of marquis was granted by, or purchased from, the King of Spain. The Chilean son of a Spanish father, George de Cuevas is listed in some dance manuals as the eighth Marquis de Piedrablanca de Guana de Cuevas, but the wife of a Spanish grandee, who wished not to be identified, told me that the title was laughed at in Spain. Nonetheless, the Marquis and Marquesa de Cuevas remained a highly visible couple on the international and artistic scenes for the next thirty years.

When World War II broke out, they moved to the United States. Margaret, already a collector of real estate, began to add to her holdings. She bought a town house on East Sixty-eighth Street in New York, a mansion in Palm Beach, and a weekend place in Bernardsville, New Jersey. She also acquired a house in Riverdale, New York, which they never lived in but visited, and one in New Mexico to be used in the event the United States was invaded. In New York, Margaret always kept a rented limousine, and sometimes two, all day every day in front of her house in case she wanted to go out.

The Ride Stripped Bare

Art

Modern Grottoes

So I got in the car, hit the road, and stepped on the gas. It was sleek, it was new, it was a white Pontiac. Out I went, through the cityscape of New York. Out on the blacktop, driving towards Philadelphia, towards a museum, towards a closed room with a wooden door pierced by two holes - a room to which entry is forbidden.

The question is ‘why?’ My ‘why?’ goes like this: I have a problem. I’m working on a long-term project to build a Modern grotto, and this has set me thinking about complete, enclosed worlds - what are thought of now as ‘installations’. For me, the beginning of our current notion of the installation, as opposed to the exhibition, is the grotto. Perhaps in this I am over-influenced by having visited Schloss Neuschwanstein in Bavaria as a child. A castle built by Wagner’s patron ‘Mad’ King Ludwig between 1868-1886, and made famous by its starring role in Disney’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), Neuschwanstein houses a grotto: a crazy passageway of papier-mâché stalactites and stalagmites. It’s a romantic evocation of nature, a world within the world. The Philadelphia Museum of Modern Art houses Marcel Duchamp’s final, secret work: Etant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas), made in his New York studio at 210 West 20th Street between 1946-1966 - a period when it was assumed he had given up his role as an artist. Upon Duchamp’s death in 1968, at the age of 88, Etant donnés was acquired by the Cassandra Foundation and, in accordance with his wishes, presented to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The piece was opened to the public in 1969. This was why I was in a white Pontiac: my feeling was that Etant donnés held the key to the idea of ‘installation’, and was, in fact, the first Modern grotto.

Yes, I bent to look through those two holes in the door, surrounded with smudges left by the many faces which have pressed against it, to see that extraordinary image. It looks flat even though you know it is, in fact, a three-dimensional construction of a female nude lying on a bed of branches, legs open, one arm aloft holding an oil lamp. Behind her is a shimmering landscape in which a waterfall flickers as if to indicate the wetness so absent from the barren vagina which is central to the gaze as you stare and recognise yourself, not so much as a viewer but as a voyeur. Having seen it I was not so sure.

Glancing through the windscreen as I drove back, I started to think of the philosopher Emile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951), best known by his pen name of ‘Alain’. His students, who included Simone Weil, Andre Malraux, and Jean-Paul Sartre, simply called him ‘L’homme’. One of the points that Alain makes in his book The Gods (1947) is that, like children, we forget that the world we know is the product of labour: ‘we know the Bishop Berkeley was persuaded that the world is only imagery within us, the imagery of our thoughts. For him the world was a bishop’s supper. And the child-man Berkeley went as far as Newfoundland to preach and came back, still persuaded that our perceptions have no substance. He let himself be carried by ship, while others hoisted the sails. The passenger’s job is no doubt the stupidest in the world, which is why there are travels and travels.’ 1 Somewhat later he adds: ‘travel, it is true, is a form of labour, though often we give up and go by car.’ 2

Sitting in that Pontiac, the world passed by the windshield as an almost incoherent spectacle; yes, with your foot on the gas and the wheel in your hand there is a sense of the world being responsive to your actions, but Alain is right. The feeling when bent, looking voyeur-like through those holes into Etant donnés is not unlike that of looking through a car window, a feeling of being passive and somewhat stupid. Perhaps in this lies the difference between painting and sculpture. Sculpture forces you to consider the issue of labour. Not only does it take physical work to make it, but you have to do physical work to look at it. In Etant donnés all the labour is hidden - indeed access to its physical reality is forbidden. It is Duchamp’s final return to painting, but without paint.

I began to make a mental list of those works in the Modern era which lead to installation as a practice in itself: first Kurt Schwitters’ Schwitters-Saule (Schwitters’ Column, 1918-1938), best known as the Hanover Merzbau. Then Lucio Fontana’s first ‘environment’, Ambiente spaziale a luce nera (Spatial Environment with UV Light) at the Galleria del Naviglio, Milan, in 1949: a black space in which suspended forms covered in phosphorescent paint were illuminated by ultraviolet light. From there to Yves Klein’s Le Vide (The Void, 1958) at the Galerie Iris Clert, Paris, and Arman’s Le Plein (The Fullness, 1960), again in the Galerie Iris Clert, which Arman completely filled with found objects, including 50 small paintings by artists ranging from Picasso to Manzoni. On to Yayoi Kusama’s Endless Love Room (1965-1966) and Lucas Samaras’ similar mirrored space, Room 2 of 1966. And, finally, to its current form in the work of artists such as Louise Bourgeois. Then I started to think of another work which bears a marked similarity to Duchamp’s Etant donnés, by an artist who made the concept of the tableau his own.

In 1966, Ed Kienholz was the subject of a huge one-man show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art. One work in particular caused considerable controversy: Back Seat Dodge ‘38 (1964). The piece consists of a curiously foreshortened 1938 Dodge standing on a rectangle of artificial grass. There is no front compartment to the car, the bonnet having been grafted on to the passenger section. The door is open and the spectator must peer in (and this is where the trouble lay) to see the figure of a woman with her legs open. But, unlike Duchamp’s tableau, she is not alone: a chicken wire outline of a male figure is positioned above her, his hand attempting to get into her pants, her high heel digging into his foot. The car’s windows are mirrored on the inside, a precursor to the mirrored rooms of both Kusama and Samaras, and presumably intended to reflect the scene and the voyeurs who found themselves looking in on this representation of teenage fumblings and American moral hypocrisy. Outside the car are several beer bottles, each on their own patches of Astroturf. The piece is set in the 1940s, the period of Kienholz’s youth, yet includes a working radio which transmits the sounds of today. This work was Kienholz’s succès de scandale and generated huge publicity. The Museum stood its ground against charges of immorality, although they placed guards nearby to prevent underage visitors from looking into its interior. Today it forms part of the Museum’s permanent collection. Duchamp’s Etant donnés is curiously sterile in comparison to Back Seat Dodge ‘38, more akin to Fragonard’s painting The Swing (1768-1769) in its lyricism, elegance, rural setting, and the displacement of the vagina (into a waterfall rather than a lost slipper). Kienholz’s Back Seat Dodge ‘38, although employing similar images and means, is fully sexualised, urban, and sculptural. Duchamp was aware of Kienholz’s work.

In 1963 the Surrealist dealer Alexander Iolas was the first to exhibit his sculpture in New York - which is where Duchamp saw it. Asked how he liked it, the latter replied: ‘Marvellously vulgar artist. Marvellously vulgar. I like that work.’ 3 When told of this, Kienholz said: ‘Well that’s nice. I like his work too.’ 4

The 1963 exhibition at Alexander Iolas in New York included the work Roxys (1961-1962), for which Kienholz coined the term ‘tableau’. First shown in 1961 at the Ferus Gallery (a space Kienholz founded with Walter Hopps on La Cienega Boulevard, LA, in 1957), Roxys was a complete environment depicting its famous namesake, a Las Vegas brothel. Whereas the concept of a tableau in relation to Duchamp’s Etant donnés can be said to derive from the French word for a painting, Kienholz took the word from the staged, costumed, stop-action presentations seen in rural churches during his youth. Roxys takes the form of a complete decorated space, with wallpaper, chairs, pictures on the wall, and occasional tables. It also incorporates a device which Kienholz was to use in the future: the figures of the girls are set on low, tiled plinths, which are themselves set on carpets - plinths, but at the same time, not plinths.

In Back Seat Dodge ‘38 he pushed the carpet/plinth further still: the truncated car sits on a rectangle of artificial grass and draws upon the common experience of millions of adolescent Americans for whom the car was a sexual space in which their desires could be consummated. Formally, Back Seat Dodge ‘38 is very similar to the way custom cars were exhibited at shows on the West Coast in the 1950s and 1960s. Hot Rods were often displayed on clean patches of Astroturf; beautifully crafted, outside and inside, these cars were mating bowers - ‘pussy wagons’ in the parlance of the times. It’s hard to believe that Kienholz wasn’t playing with this common convention and stripping its meaning bare. With regard to traditional sculpture, the real issue here is that Kienholz’s work differentiates between the complete theatrical occlusion of the exhibition space by the installation, and the discrete entity of a sculpture as a singular object.

This is the historical point at which sculpture becomes fragmented and loose. Kienholz’s significance as an artist lies not so much upon the notion that he originated a form of working so commonplace that it’s accepted today as the dominant mode (although perhaps this was simply a consequence of Abstract Expressionism), but rather, in terms of American art at least, he occupied the space between the narrative sculptures of George Segal and Duane Hanson, and the fragmented works of the post-Minimalists. Back Seat Dodge ‘38 tells a story in three dimensions - the eye accepts the task of moving around the sculpture, reading its constituent elements, and building a narrative from the common understanding of those parts. If Kienholz’s underlying aesthetic was traditional - in the use of incorporated detail to tell a story, for example - his use of assemblage was not, and the story told is ruthless in its biting criticism of American life.

At the first preview of Roxys at the Ferus Gallery, Kienholz insisted that all invited guests wear formal attire - he ‘wanted people to feel on their very best behaviour. No one should look down on the girls or feel superior to them.’ 5 As he said, ‘you can’t have a whorehouse without paying customers’. 6 In their need to modify the accepted construct of art into a critical position, both Duchamp and Kienholz borrowed from outside the artistic canon. For Duchamp, the model was literature. For Kienholz, it was the culture of his everyday life. Both artists radically modified the conventions of how art is seen. In the work of Duchamp, this position is well recognised. He restructured the conventions of art in terms of irony - a subtle form of sarcasm, a play of words where one thing is said but a different meaning intended - and great erudition is required to even begin to penetrate his intentions. With Kienholz there is no irony; the meaning and narrative are based on common cultural experience: vulgar experience, an American experience shared by millions, both in actuality and vicariously via the globalisation of American culture. The radical, inventive aspects of Kienholz’s work are comparatively unrecognised, perhaps because its aesthetic is low-brow, whereas that of Duchamp is high-brow.

If the installation, in the Modern sense of the word, begins anywhere, it starts with Kienholz. It originates with Roxys and achieves its definitive form in Back Seat Dodge ‘38 - a world within a world, a room within a room. If Back Seat Dodge ‘38 marked a significant point in Kienholz’s career, it also marks a significant point in the conventions of art practice.

Kienholz’s sculpture is narrative, not reductive like, say, the work of other significant West Coast artists such as Robert Irwin. If anything, it is excessive, and, like the stop-action church narratives of his youth, Kienholz’s tableaux freeze moments of time, moments compacted with images from common culture. The carpet/plinths, for example, function in a ‘back home’ kind of way; which is presumably what Duchamp was referring to when he described Kienholz as ‘a marvellously vulgar artist’. Vulgar means to refer to the common people. Kienholz always had problems with critics who tried to associate his work with Duchamp; he saw himself as an American artist: untrained, someone who went out and made his own way in the world. His first show, in 1955, was hung in Von’s Café Gallery, a Beat hangout in Laurel Canyon, LA. He supported himself by being a handyman, driving a pickup which carried on its doors the simple phrase: ‘Ed Kienholz: Expert’. He also traded cars throughout his life (he sold a Cadillac in 1994, a month before he died) and is buried in one. On the morning of 10th June 1994, he expired of a heart attack getting out of bed. On 14th of June, he was buried according to his wishes at his hunting camp in the Howe mountains in his beloved 1940 Packard coupé. He was embalmed, arms folded across his body; he had a dollar in his pocket, a good bottle of Italian wine (1931), and a deck of cards to get him started in the next world. His wife, and co-author of the greater part of his work, the artist Nancy Reddin, had grudgingly consented to this on the condition that he occupy the passenger seat. As she said, ‘I’m not going hurtling through all eternity with you at the wheel’. 7

And what of myself in that hired white Pontiac? Sadly, I was on the sterile trail of Marcel Duchamp. I drove back to New York, and returned the car to the car hire people. If I had gone to the Los Angeles County Museum, to see Back Seat Dodge ‘38 instead of going to Philadelphia to see Etant donnés maybe I would have spent less time in the front seat being a voyeur and more in the back seat making out. But, in a way, my question was answered; in his death Kienholz leaves what may, I think, be the first true Modern grotto: a last tableau, buried and even less accessible than Duchamp’s Etant donnés.

1. Alain, The Gods, trans. Richard Pevear, Chatto & Windus, London, 1975, p. 40.

2. Ibid., p. 41.

3. Walter Hopps, ‘A Note from the Underworld’, Kienholz: a Retrospective, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1966, p. 33.

4. Ibid., p. 33.

5. Pontus Hultén, Edward Kienholz, ICA, London, 1971, p. 6.

6. Ibid., p. 6.

7. Lawrence Weshler, ‘Cars and Carcasses’, The New Yorker, May 13, 1996, p. 56.

Edward Allington

frieze is now accepting letters to the editors for possible publication at editors@frieze.com.

Ο Αλέξανδρος Ιόλας και η Θεσσαλονίκη

ΤΟ ΙΔΡΥΜΑ

Το εκπολιτιστικό Σωματείο ΜΑΚΕΔΟΝΙΚΟ ΚΕΝΤΡΟ ΣΥΓΧΡΟΝΗΣ ΤΕΧΝΗΣ με την με αριθμό 12034/01.06.1993 πράξη της συμβολαιογράφου Θεσσαλονίκης Φωτεινής συζ. Παναγιώτη Κόκκα, σύστησε το κοινωφελές ίδρυμα ΜΑΚΕΔΟΝΙΚΟ ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟ ΣΥΓΧΡΟΝΗΣ ΤΕΧΝΗΣ, και με πρόταση του Υπουργού Πολιτισμού και του Υφυπουργού Οικονομικών εγκρίθηκε η σύστασή του και κυρώθηκε ο νέος οργανισμός από τον Πρόεδρο της Δημοκρατίας Κωνσταντίνο Καραμανλή. (ΦΕΚ 469/21.06.1994)

Ιστορία

Ο Αλέξανδρος Ιόλας και η Θεσσαλονίκη

Είναι αλήθεια ότι πάρα πολύ σημαντικά πράγματα ξεκινούν ανθρώπινα και απλά. Η παλιά φιλία του Αλέξανδρου Ιόλα με τη Μάρω Λάγια αλλά και η επιμονή της τελευταίας για τη δημιουργία ενός μουσείου σύγχρονης τέχνης στη Θεσσαλονίκη, μαζί με τη δραστική και άμεση συμμετοχή του Πέτρου Καμάρα, είναι η αφετηρία της «δωρεάς Ιόλα», η οποία συνολικά περιέλαβε σαράντα επτά έργα.

Από την πρώτη συζήτηση, το 1978, έγιναν πολλά, ενώ η ιδέα ενέπνευσε μια ομάδα ανθρώπων που δούλεψαν σκληρά ώστε σήμερα, το Μακεδονικό Μουσείο Σύγχρονης Τέχνης να είναι ένας θεσμός με οντότητα και εύρος και να εξακολουθεί να εμπνέει τα μέλη και τους πολυάριθμους φίλους και υποστηρικτές του.

Η Θεσσαλονίκη με τους ανθρώπους της σκλάβωσε τον Αλέξανδρο Ιόλα. Του θύμιζε την Αλεξάνδρεια, όπως έλεγε, ή διαισθάνθηκε ταυτόχρονα ότι η μοίρα θα συντηρούσε πάνω σ’ αυτή τη σχέση, σ’ αυτή την αόρατη κλωστή, την μνήμη του. Όχι στη φαντασία, αλλά απτά, με τα έργα που παρέδωσε στα χέρια τους. Ο ίδιος πίστευε, ούτως ή άλλως, ότι τα μουσεία είναι καλύτερα σε χέρια ιδιωτών, μακριά από κρατικές δεσμεύσεις. Όπως ο πολιτισμός, που για να υπάρξει δεν χρειάζεται κυβερνητικές αποφάσεις.

Ο Αλέξανδρος Ιόλας ήταν άνθρωπος της τέχνης, κοσμοπολίτης, διορατικός συλλέκτης, ικανός έμπορος. Νεαρός έφυγε από τη γενέτειρά του Αλεξάνδρεια στη δεκαετία του τριάντα, σπούδασε χορό στο Παρίσι και το Βερολίνο. Ως κορυφαίος χορευτής της Metropolitan Opera της Νέας Υόρκης περιοδεύει την Ευρώπη και ανακαλύπτει τα νέα ρεύματα και ρυθμούς στη σύγχρονη τέχνη. Όταν ένα σοβαρό ατύχημα τον αναγκάζει να εγκαταλείψει το χορό, αποφασίζει να αφιερωθεί στη συλλογή έργων τέχνης. Ενθουσιάζεται από τον Max Ernst, στη συνέχεια από τον Rene Magritte και τον Victor Brauner.

Αντιλαμβάνεται έγκαιρα ότι οι μεταπολεμικές Η.Π.Α. είναι έτοιμες να υποδεχθούν την ανήσυχη Ευρώπη. Η τέχνη αποκτά την αγορά της και τη δική της χρηματιστηριακή αξία. Δεν θα κάναμε λάθος να λέγαμε ότι ο Ιόλας συντέλεσε σ’ αυτό. Βασίζεται στο ένστικτό του και στις γνώσεις του, το έμπειρο μάτι του διακρίνει τα πάντα, τα πατρονάρει και τα προωθεί. Το 1953 ανοίγει την πρώτη του γκαλερί στη Νέα Υόρκη. Το ’63 στη Γενεύη, το ’64 στο Παρίσι, το ’65 στο Μιλάνο και λίγο αργότερα στη Μαδρίτη. Προέβαλε και καθιέρωσε καλλιτέχνες. Από τις γκαλερί του πέρασαν ονόματα σημαντικά, ανάμεσά τους οι Niki de Saint Phalle, Martial Raysse, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Pino Pascali, Eliseo Mattiacci, Andy Warhol, Jean Tinguely, Roberto Crippa, Novello Finotti.

Το 1965 αποφασίζει να μεταφέρει την έδρα και την κατοικία του στην Αγία Παρασκευή, στην Αθήνα. Χτίζει το σπίτι του με προδιαγραφές μουσείου και γνωρίζει νέους καλλιτέχνες, συνεργάζεται και δένεται μαζί τους. Ανάμεσά τους ο Τάκις, ο Ακριθάκης, ο Τσόκλης, ο Παύλος. Τους ανοίγει το δρόμο για διεθνή σταδιοδρομία και αναγνώριση. Οι δεκαετίες '60, '70, '80, σημαδεύονται από τον Αλέξανδρο Ιόλα.

Αμφιλεγόμενη προσωπικότητα, δυσανάγνωστη ως το τέλος. Όσο η τρέχουσα ηθική τον αρνείται τόσο ο ίδιος αντιδρά επιθετικά και απρόβλεπτα. Πληθωρικός και κυνικός δίνει και παίρνει πίσω. Ο Αλέξανδρος Ιόλας πεθαίνει το 1987 στην Ν. Υόρκη. Το όνειρό του για ένα "Μουσείο lόλα" στην Αθήνα έμεινε ανεκπλήρωτο. Η τεράστια και σπάνιας αξίας, καλλιτεχνικής και εμπορικής, συλλογή του, διάσπαρτη. Ένα μικρό της τμήμα βρίσκεται στο Centre Pompidou στο Παρίσι.

Η συνάντηση του Αλέξανδρου Ιόλα µε τη Θεσσαλονίκη αποκτά, ιδιαίτερη σημασία για την πόλη και την υστεροφημία του διορατικού συλλέκτη. Σήμερα στην Ελλάδα τίποτα δε θυμίζει το ευφυές και δημιουργικό του πέρασμα μόνον η συλλογή των 47 έργων που εκείνος δώρισε τότε, "σαν πυρήνα", για να ξεκινήσει τη ζωή του το Μακεδονικό Μουσείο Σύγχρονης Τέχνης στην πόλη µας.

Το Διοικητικό Συμβούλιο του Μ.Μ.Σ.Τ. µε πολύ χαρά αποφάσισε να τον τιμήσει δίνοντας το όνομά του στην τριώροφη πτέρυγα του μουσείου και αφιερώνοντάς του τον κατάλογο της μόνιμης συλλογής, η οποία περιλαμβάνει πλέον περισσότερα από χίλια έργα (πίνακες, γλυπτά, εγκαταστάσεις, συναρμογές, χαρακτικά, φωτογραφίες) µε την ελπίδα ότι θα παραμείνει ένα μουσείο αδέσμευτο, αντισυμβατικό και ανοικτό, ιδιότητες που εκτιμούσε ο Αλέξανδρος Ιόλας και χαρακτήρισαν την ζωή του.

Δωρητές

Η χειρονομία του Αλέξανδρου Ιόλα, μεγάλου ευεργέτη του Μουσείου, συνάντησε πολλούς υποστηρικτές. Γνωστοί συλλέκτες, η Μάγδα Κοτζιά, ο Franz Geierhaas, ο Αλέξανδρος και η Δωροθέα Ξύδη, ο Γιώργος Απέργης, ο Δημήτρης Μεϊμάρογλου και μαζί τους πάρα πολλοί καλλιτέχνες, συνεχίζουν να καταθέτουν συλλογές και έργα τους, με αποτέλεσμα η συλλογή του μουσείου να μεγαλώνει συνεχώς.

Επιθυμώντας να ευχαριστήσουμε όλους τους καλλιτέχνες δωρητές του Μακεδονικού Μουσείου Σύγχρονης Τέχνης, οφείλουμε να τους διαβεβαιώσουμε ότι η αξιολόγηση των δημιουργιών τους είναι μεγάλη. Μέσα από την μορφική και εννοιολογική τεχνοτροπία των έργων τους δημιουργείται ένας θεμελιώδης επικοινωνιακός διάλογος, μια διαλεκτική σχέση, που επιτυγχάνει να επηρεάσει μέσα από τα εκπαιδευτικά προγράμματα τις ιδέες των νέων μαθητών. Γιατί η τέχνη μπορεί ακόμα να μεταδώσει προφητικά μηνύματα και να επηρεάσει την πολιτιστική συνείδηση των νέων.

Στους ευεργέτες του μουσείου πρώτη θέση κατέχουν ο Γιώργος Φιλίππου της Φιλκεράμ-Jοhnsοn, που φιλοξένησε το μουσείο και τη συλλογή του από το 1979 έως το 2001 και η εταιρεία Ι. Μπουτάρης και υιός Α.Ε., που επιβαρύνθηκε την οικονομική του στήριξη στα πρώτα χρόνια της λειτουργίας του.

Επίσης, στους μεγάλους χορηγούς συγκαταλέγονται η ΔΕΘ-Helexpo, που παραχώρησε χώρο στο Μουσείο (περίπτερο της ΔΕΗ) για τη στέγαση κατ’ αρχήν των περιοδικών του εκθέσεων, και από το 1999 έως το 2020, για την ανέγερση των τμηματικών του επεκτάσεων, κατ’ αρχήν με την επιχορήγηση του Οργανισμού Πολιτιστικής Πρωτεύουσας «Θεσσαλονίκη ‘97» και στη συνέχεια με την μεγάλη επιχορήγηση του Ευρωπαϊκού Οικονομικού Χώρου (EFTA) μέσω της Ευρωπαϊκής Τράπεζας Επενδύσεων και της Ελληνικής Πολιτείας μέσω του Υπουργείου Οικονομικών και του Υπουργείου Πολιτισμού, το Ίδρυμα «Σταύρος Σ. Νιάρχος» που επιχορήγησε την οργάνωση της βιβλιοθήκης του μουσείου, αλλά και συνεχίζει να το υποστηρίζει στην εκθεσιακή του δραστηριότητα και συγκεκριμένα στην ανάδειξη της συλλογής του και παρουσίασή της στην Αθήνα και στο εξωτερικό.

Ιδιαίτερα σημαντικός για την ζωή του Μουσείου είναι ο θεσμός της χορηγίας και η συμπαράσταση της Πολιτείας. Το Υπουργείο Πολιτισμού δια του Υπουργού του και των υπηρεσιακών του στελεχών, εκτιμώντας την ανοδική πορεία του Μ.Μ.Σ.Τ. το στηρίζει ηθικά (υπογραφή Προγραμματικής Σύμβασης) και οικονομικά στις λειτουργικές του ανάγκες, αλλά και συμπράττει στην ανάπτυξη και τον εκσυγχρονισμό του (Γ’ Κ.Π.Σ. Επιχειρησιακά Προγράμματα «Πολιτισμός, 2000-2008» και «Κοινωνία της Πληροφορίας» με την επιχορήγηση του οποίου πραγματοποιήθηκε ο κόμβος αυτός).

Σημαντικό έργο πραγματοποιούν οι χορηγοί, οι οποίοι επωμίζονται την οικονομική επιβάρυνση των δραστηριοτήτων του, των εκθεσιακών και των παράλληλων εκδηλώσεών του. Μεταξύ τους συγκαταλέγονται Κρατικοί Φορείς, Πιστωτικά Ιδρύματα, Πολιτιστικά Ιδρύματα, ιδιωτικές επιχειρήσεις και ιδιώτες, ΜΜΕ, αλλά και μεμονωμένοι υποστηρικτές, ιδιώτες και Αίθουσες Τέχνης.

Τα Διοικητικά Συμβούλια του Μακεδονικού Κέντρου Σύγχρονης Τέχνης, Αρχιτεκτονικής και Βιομηχανικού Σχεδιασμού και του Μακεδονικού Μουσείου Σύγχρονης Τέχνης, ευχαριστούν όλους όσους συμπαραστάθηκαν ηθικά αλλά και υλικά στις όχι πάντα εύκολες προσπάθειές τους. Χωρίς την αρωγή των ευεργετών, των χορηγών, των δωρητών, των καλλιτεχνών, των αιθουσών τέχνης, αλλά και των ιδιωτών που στηρίζουν διαρκώς τις πρωτοβουλίες του, το Μακεδονικό Μουσείο Σύγχρονης Τέχνης δεν θα μπορούσε να ανταποκριθεί στους στόχους και τα προγράμματά του.