believing in the new
by
Douglas Messerli
A
couple of days ago Art News announced
that the gallerist-curator Klaus Kertess had died, at the age of 76.
I had never visited his noted Bykert
gallery, which he ran, with Jeff Byers, from 1966 until 1975, nor did I ever
meet Kertess face to face; but my husband Howard and I did know of several of
the artists his gallery showed, including Brice Marden, Barry Le Va, Alan
Saret, Chuck Close, Dorothea Rockburne, and Deborah Remington.
Kertess, himself, described the scene
before Bykert’s existence, arguing that, except for Park Place, run by Paula
Cooper, “there were no galleries that were actively looking for new artists and
no galleries where younger artists could turn to in the hopes that they would
show their work.”
Besides showing and curating great artists,
he also employed several of them, including sculptor Lynda Bengalis, as a
secretary, and later, future gallerist Mary Boone, who years later marveled at
Bykert’s commitment to artists as opposed to collectors.
Upon leaving Bykert, Kertess became a
curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, were he showed
Carroll Dunham, April Gornick, Jane Freilicher, Alfonso Ossorio and others.
In 1983, he became adjunct curator of
drawing at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Even after leaving that post in
1989, he curated the 1995 Whitney Biennial which featured Richard Serra, Agnes
Martin, Brice Marden, Helen Marden, Cy Twombly and younger artists such as
Jason Rhoades, Ellen Gallagher, and Stan Douglas (a Canadian artist).
In 1998, he curated “Willem de Kooning:
Drawing Seeing/Seeing Drawing” and the Drawing Center in New York
2007 saw him curating the premier show
for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, which, once again, included a wide
range of artists ranging in age and styles, including Mark Bradford (a personal
friend of Howard and mine), Kara Walker, Barry McGee and numerous others.
In 2009 Kertess received the Lawrence A.
Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History
from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.
In 1979 or early 1980, while he was still
at the Whitney, Kertess, out of the blue, sent my Sun & Moon: A Journal of Literature and Art a story, “Pisonia,”
which I accepted and published in the award-winning “Experiments in Traditional
Forms” issue in the summer of 1980.
Los Angeles,
October 11, 2016
Reprinted
from Art Là-bas (October 2016).
(The
factual information above is based on the story by Andrew Russeth published in Art News. October 9, 2016.)
