MAD WOMEN
KORNBLEE, JACKSON, SAIDENBERG, AND WARD, ART DEALERS ON MADISON AVENUE IN THE 1960S
Curated by Damon Brandt and Valentina Branchini
David Nolan Gallery, New York
September 8 – October 22, 2022
Madison Avenue, located on an Uptown-Downtown axis in Manhattan, is the ideal retail destination between the residential gold coasts and museums of Fifth and Park Avenues. Shops and galleries proliferated in the 1950s and 1960s along or close to Madison Avenue, forming a robust inter-connected community that catered to an expanding and inquisitive audience. Influential art critics Lawrence Alloway, John Ashbery, Dore Ashton, John Canaday, and Donald Judd were frequent Saturday afternoon visitors, moving amongst a fluid crowd of well-heeled clients and penniless young devotees of the more freewheeling Downtown art scene. Every Friday, The New York Times ran an expansive black and white patchwork quilt of printed ads, calling attention to the extraordinarily diverse array of the best of both European and American artistic creativity. It was in the midst of this fertile urban avenue of art and commerce that the Kornblee Gallery, Martha Jackson Gallery, Saidenberg Gallery, and Stable Gallery flourished.
The curatorial conundrum of selecting Jill Kornblee, Martha Jackson, Eleanor Ward and Eleanore Saidenberg from amongst an unexpectedly rich and varied bounty of female dealers working in the 1960’s in New York City was solved by a number of objective and admittedly subjective factors. A primary goal is to showcase the extraordinary history of inaugural exhibitions and the groundbreaking installations by many artists that went on to global recognition. There was also the wealth of critical academic, institutional, and private support of each of their respective programs that deserved illumination. The tactical decision to focus on the vibrant cultural ecosystem of Madison Avenue was born, in part from the desire to celebrate the geographic and cultural legacy of many other galleries, including David Nolan Gallery, that continue to thrive in many of the very same locations today.
Each of the four featured dealers possessed that essential talent of a keen and prescient eye, working in tandem with an innovative and responsive approach to a business that was often as challenging as it was rewarding. To survive dealing modern or contemporary art in the 1960’s took ambition, stamina, and an aesthetically driven six-sense for the strategic evaluation of the rapidly evolving local, national and international art scene. Whether with quiet resolve or the flamboyant self-confidence to buck popular trend, the moxie of these four women to encourage and support the audacity and genius of the artists that were there to show their work without compromise, is the grist and glue that lights up the mythic narrative of the dealer/artist relationship and forms the fundamental basis for this exhibition. That Kornblee, Jackson, Ward and Saidenberg were each able to flourish in an entrenched androcentric society is both inspiring and a true testament to their respective brilliance and tenacity.