Veteran Art Dealer Michael Findlay Looks Back on the ’60s

In 1974, German artist Joseph Beuys staged a now famous performance in New York, spending a week in isolation with a coyote inside a SoHo gallery. The piece, titled I Like America and America Likes Me, concluded with an unharmed Beuys being transported back to the airport in a decommissioned ambulance. Over the course of five days, Beuys refrained from interacting with with the animal’s handlers or gallery staff. Among them was the Scottish-born art dealer Michael Findlay, then 29 years old, who unexpectedly took on the task of locating the elusive coyote, which was critical to pulling Beuys’s vision together.

Findlay’s experience is detailed in his newly released memoir, Portrait of an Art Dealer as a Young Man, its title a nod to his early aspirations as a poet when he first arrived in the U.S. in 1964. Contrary to some accounts suggesting that Beuys’s confinement was chaotic, Findlay describes a “strange companionship” between the artist and the animal. “I felt that Beuys was creating an elementary relationship with the U.S. Every work of art, regardless of the medium, deserves to be seen in person,” he writes.

ARTnews recently spoke with the 79-year-old dealer, now a director of Acquavella Galleries, to hear about how his encounters with some of art history’s biggest pathbreakers shaped his entrance into the art scene.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

ARTnews: During the ’60s, when you were in your 20s, Richard Feigen was well-known for dealing work by Old Masters and modern artists on the Upper East Side. You’ve written that you thought a job in his SoHo space would be easy enough. But the area wasn’t developed yet, and collectors mostly lived in Upper Manhattan. How did it all begin for you?

Michael Findlay: In retrospect, it seems that I was extremely lucky because I arrived in New York with no legal papers, $200, and an ambition to stay a couple of weeks and listen to some jazz. So, I didn’t know anybody. 

During the week, SoHo in those days was an extremely busy, noisy light manufacturing district. You could not actually walk down many of the streets because flatbed trucks would be parked across the width of the street, backed up to loading docks. On the weekends, it was completely deserted, completely dead. I mean, you could hear a pin drop. The only people walking around would have been artists. The denizens of the Upper East Side might have gone to Chinatown or to Little Italy for a meal, but SoHo was a kind of dead zone.

You put on your first group show in 1968 at Feigen’s then-new gallery space onGreene Street, not far from where peers like Paula Cooper were setting up shop. What was the turnout like?

Interestingly enough, there was an audience, because the few collectors who were ardently looking at emerging artists were already used to going to SoHo to visit artists’ studios. The reception by both collectors and artists in New York at the time was extremely chilly. It sounds strange to say this, but it was more important in those days to get a few sentences in the New York Times or ARTnews than it was to sell the exhibition.

Ray Johnson, the architect of New York’s mail art network, was known in artist circles. You collaborated with him at Feigen’s gallery on a show, sharing a common interest in text.

My idea was a very simple one. I was looking at a lot of Pop art, and I [wanted to] organize an exhibition of paintings that had words in them. Ray Johnson was around at the time. He was a very elusive figure. He was very hesitant to be included in exhibitions, so he was a difficult artist to work with. He would have scorned the use of the word “career” to apply to himself. But he designed the ad for Artforum that we placed for the show. He helped me, to a degree, introducing me to some of the artists. 

The contemporary art scene is very different today. How has it changed?

It was so very different in temperature and approach. There were five jobs in the art world: the artist, the dealer, the collector, the curator, and the writer or critic. There were no other jobs. There were no jobs of advisers, there were no jobs as art market statistics, there was no business side. It’s not possible to equate it in almost any way.

You write in the book about your experiences working with Kynaston McShine, a curator who played a pivotal role at MoMA, where he worked for decades. Can you talk more about his influence?

His influence in identifying and supporting the generation that later became known as Minimalists can’t be overestimated. McShine was really responsible for bringing to a large collecting public’s attention what was already a trend in abstract sculpture. When he did the landmark 1970 “Information” exhibition, it was the first time the public was given a dose of Conceptual art. It was extremely controversial. 

McShine was working against the background of the Vietnam War.

Nelson Rockefeller was the governor of New York at the time. His brother David was the head of the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern Art. One of the works that was in the exhibition was MoMA Poll [1970] by Hans Haacke, a questionnaire regarding Rockefeller’s position on a controversial Nixon policy. Bringing this into the MoMA—basically, into the living room of the governor’s brother—was amazing, and Kynaston got away with it.

A year later, Haacke had a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum that was cancelled by the museum’s director, Thomas Messer, amid internal debate over the work, which mentioned several board members. In 2004, Artforum asked Haacke to reflect on it under a new conservative administration, and he said, “I don’t believe any museum today would allow a survey like my MOMA-Poll to be conducted on its premises.”

Maybe it’s not a good comparison, but you could say that with the social and cultural disruptions that we’re experiencing over the conflict between Israel and Gaza, the country is just as divided as it was over the war in Vietnam. 

Other than some of the major shows McShine did, he got artists like Beuys who weren’t as palatable to wealthy New Yorkers yet into MoMA’s collection. Spending large figures on Conceptual art was perceived as being excessive.

It’s kind of amusing to me that he seems to be rarely mentioned, since there’s such an emphasis now, a necessary and good one, on diversity in the museum world. He got the museum acquisition committee to buy Joseph Beuys’s Sled (1969), which I had bought in Germany for $25,000. The committee was like: “Really?” I mean, he had to fight and fight with the trustees on the acquisition committee.

A few years earlier, there were signs the scene around you was shifting. The U.S. was getting introduced to younger artists working abroad. You were around for British painter Bridget Riley’s introduction to the New York art world in 1965 when “The Responsive Eye” exhibition opened at MoMA.  In the book, you describe how those works were disorienting, sometimes vertigo-inducing, making them “ripe for slick promotion.” There’s an anecdote you recounted about the fashion designer Larry Aldrich reproducing Op paintings of hers that he owned for a dress line without her consent. She was incensed, he was mortified.

Pretty much the minute she got off the plane in New York, all she saw was her work being vulgarized. She thought she was being plagiarized. She was horrified. She was not at all interested in the commercial art world. In fact, she fled from it. She turned her back on it—she didn’t feed it. She stayed in England.