Open Exchange: Beyond the Boardroom with Jonathan Tisch

East Hampton, NY
Season 2, Episode 7

GUEST: Arne Glimcher, Founder, Pace Wildenstein
HOST: Jonathan Tisch

JONATHAN TISCH: Arne Glimcher, were here at your gorgeous home in East Hampton. Its a warm summer day. You grew up very far from here in Duluth, Minnesota. What was that like?

ARNE GLIMCHER: Freezing cold, which I dont like. I seemed to like it then. At 40 below zero, we got out of school and we went sledding.

TISCH: What brought the family to Duluth?

GLIMCHER: The migration across the country of immigrants. My grandparents wound up in Duluth, Minnesota, which I think is probably where the ticket ran out on the train. My father had a cattle ranch and my grandfather raised cattle. My father lived in Boston before that, and my grandparents lived in Boston before Minnesota. My mother felt that her kids were culturally deprived in Minnesota. She was very aggressive culturally. So she insisted in moving the family back. My dad loved his work. We lived winters in Boston and we lived summers in Minnesota.

TISCH: I cant imagine there was a big Jewish community in Duluth, Minnesota.

GLIMCHER: There were about 100 Jewish families at the time, I think. But we were completely integrated. It was a very different society. I remember when we moved to Boston and I heard Yiddish spoken on the street. I was shocked. I had never heard Yiddish spoken outside of the household. My grandmother insisted that all of the grandchildren speak Yiddish. She would only speak to us in Yiddish. For a long part of my life I thought she couldnt speak English. I remember once surprising her on the porch and she was talking this perfect English to the neighbor. I called my mother and I said, Do you know that grandma can speak English? She said, I didnt know she could speak English.

TISCH: My grandmother spoke Yiddish also. I understand probably about 10 words. You probably understand a lot more. Its such a beautiful language.

GLIMCHER: Im pretty fluent.

TISCH: Was there any art in your early years in Duluth?

GLIMCHER: Well, my mother liked art a lot. So there were some reproductions of paintings on the wall. When we moved to Boston, I was eight years old. There were some Picasso etchings, some Chagall lithographs. Not a lot, but the first thing that happened when we moved to Boston is we were there a week or two weeks and on Saturday morning I got taken to the Boston Museum art school and enrolled. I spent the entire day in the Boston Museum. Although I went to college and graduate school in art and art history, my education was formed at the Boston Museum.

TISCH: Would you go by yourself or your mother would take you?

GLIMCHER: No, Id go by myself. I did that until I was probably 12 years old.

TISCH: Then it continued through college, your wanting to understand art and artists.

GLIMCHER: It wasnt to understand art and artists. I was an artist. I went to art school. Even today, when I travel, I dont travel with a camera, I travel with a little pad and a pen or a pencil. If I wanted like something in the landscape or in a city, I draw. But its just for me.

TISCH: Growing up, who were your favorite artists?

GLIMCHER: My favorite artist was Picasso. I remember when I was about 15 years old in Brooklyn High School. In the creative writing class, we had to write our term paper. I wrote my paper on the Guernica.

TISCH: Thats pretty advanced in those days for a high school kid.

GLIMCHER: I know, but I was a weird high school kid. By the time I was 16-17 years old, I was interested in de Kooning and Rothko and Still and Newman, the abstract expressionists. When I recognized them, I thought Id gone to heaven. In 1960, my father died and I was sort of in graduate school not quite knowing what I was going to do. I was too much of a critic of my work. The terrific thing about being an artist is you have to have a very positive and sublime dominance. To think that in the face of the achievements of our history, you can still do something. I thought I couldnt. That drove me crazy. I decided you cant be outside of it and be an artist. You dont choose to be an artist; art chooses you.

TISCH: Was it at this moment that you decided to go to the other side?

GLIMCHER: Go to the--

TISCH: The dark side.

GLIMCHER: The dark side. For me, it wasnt--

TISCH: And become a dealer.

GLIMCHER: It wasnt a dark side, because it was a good thing in those days. I dont know how much of a good thing it is for young people today, frankly. There was no money in art. From the time I was five I wanted a life in art. It wasnt a compromise for me. I was going back and forth to New York weekends from Boston. Id see all the exhibitions and Id start meeting the artists and I knew Oldenburg and I knew Andy Warhol and all of these people were a generation or half a generation older than I am, but there was no audience for their work. Any audience was so welcome. As I started to say before, my dad died and I was walking down Newbury Street, where the galleries are in Boston, with my mother and brother the day after the funeral. It was a Saturday. We were looking for solace in the art galleries. We came out of a gallery and there was an empty shop. I said to my brother, what a great place for a gallery. Its next to the best gallery in Boston. He said to me, Open a gallery. I said, Dont be ridiculous. Some day, Im going to be the director of the Museum of Modern Art. He said, Well, there isnt as much money as you thought there was and mother is not very old. That was true. She was 60 or something like that. He said, I think you have to do something. I had never had to work. So he lent me $2,400 and I opened the Pace Gallery.

TISCH: Was it at that moment that you knew you were going to name it after your father?

GLIMCHER: Yeah.

TISCH: Immediately?

GLIMCHER: No. Millys dad, my wifes dad. I was looking for a name. I said I did not want the gallery to have my name on it. I wanted a level of anonymity in my life. My fathers name was Pace and Millys dad said to me, You know, its a great name for a gallery. It just clicked. It was right.

TISCH: You opened the gallery. Do you remember the first show?

GLIMCHER: My first show was a show of my professors at Mass College of Art. If we sold anything, we sold one thing. Shortly after that, I decided that the local art was not for me and that, obviously, the important artists had migrated to a center of activity, which they always have, which is New York City. Any time there was an avant-garde movement, there was a dialogue amongst artists. Today there is no avant-garde. So there are artists all over the world and its a different kind of community, which is pretty interesting.

(break:music)

GLIMCHER: I did a show of the artists that I was very involved with in New York who were Warhol and Lichtenstein and Oldenburg and Indiana and the whole group of pop artists. I did this exhibition called Stock up for the Holidays. It was the first exhibition of pop art outside of New York. We had these huge Oldenburg lingerie counter which was part of an installation he did called The Store in New York in the early 60s. He did a fantastic thing, where he made all the objects youd buy in a store, from clothing, from jockey shorts to ice cream sundaes to slabs of meat to 7-Up. And he rented a store and opened a store on the lower East Side and just opened the doors. Nobody knew what it was. It caused quite a phenomenon inside the art world. But that was 50 people. That was the art world. We brought the store to Boston. That was sort of the price point at that time. We were really lucky. We would sell something and we would make $25 and we would make $30 and we would keep ourselves going that way. It was very hard. It was this very different art world. It was an art world where it was about passion and about thinking, Hey, we are involved in something really important in history.

TISCH: Was that what drove you to then open in New York City in 1963?

GLIMCHER: Yes. I had a very successful show of European sculpture. It was critically very successful. Dick Solomons uncle, Irving Rabb, an extraordinary man. He owns Stop and Shop. Irving was my biggest client. Irving was out of town during that show. Irving came back after a holiday and it was a Saturday. And he said to me, I might by that Jaquemeddy [ph?], but Ill think about it. Maybe well send it over to the house next week. So I said to Irving, I have to send everything back Monday. He said to me, Well, what would it take to buy this entire show of sculpture for you? I said, I can buy all of this for $250,000. He said, Ill give you the $250,000 and well split the profits 50/50. The idea that I had this and didnt sell it in Boston, that I had the contacts with all of these artists, I showed Warhol way before Costelli showed Warhol. I showed Oldenburg before Leo did, too. Ive had all of these artists earlier. They were all getting galleries. They were all being snapped up. People were starting to buy their work. I couldnt get the work. So in a way, I moved to New York a year too late for them to be in my gallery. Now, a lot of them came back and are in my gallery. I showed Chamberlain in 63 and Chamberlain came back to me in about 1980.

TISCH: Where was your first New York space?

GLIMCHER: 9 West 57th. We were above a beauty salon. It smelled terrible. But it was a great gallery.

TISCH: Then in 68 you hired I.M. Pei to design the space that youre in now.

GLIMCHER: I.M. came into the gallery and was a client of mine. He was the most generous, extraordinary man. And I said to him, Weve got to move. He actually came with me and looked at different locations and we decided on that space together. He said, I can do something with this space for you. Heres what really happened, which was quite interesting. I was having dinner with Sydney Solomon, who was the president of Abraham & Strauss, Dick Solomons father. Sydney said to me, What is that you really want? I said, I want the best gallery in the world. He said, Get out of Boston. It would just click. I met Fred Mueller, who was a sort of failed off-Broadway producer, and had a little bit of money. So together, we put together $60,000 and we opened the gallery in New York.

TISCH: Its interesting. A moment ago, you said that theres really not a future in galleries for some of the young people today, but your son now works with you and is very involved in running Pace, today called Pace Wildenstein.

GLIMCHER: Yeah.

TISCH: Are you thrilled that your son is with you?

GLIMCHER: I am. Mark comes to the gallery from a sort of funny angle. Marks a molecular biologist, went to Harvard and graduate school at Hopkins, but was always really interested in art. So his minor at Harvard was art. When he graduated Harvard, he said, I just dont feel I can spend my life in the laboratory. He was really brilliant. There was an opening at the gallery. It was funny, because I said to Milly when the kids were little. I said, The only thing they cant do is come into the gallery. Thats mine. I dont think that kids should go into their fathers business. Look who Im talking to.

TISCH: I can argue all sides of that.

GLIMCHER: Right. So then when Mark wanted to do that, I said, Yeah, of course. He loves it. He has a real feeling for it.

TISCH: What is the Pace brand or the Pace name mean to you?

GLIMCHER: Its not a brand. My fathers cattle had brands. The whole application of business lingo to the art world actually offends me. You did this because you loved it. You didnt do this for money. Its now an elective in college to have art gallery management, and people who we employ and I meet just about every employee before theyre hired. When I see business administration and not art history, Im not even interested in that person.

TISCH: But Arne Glimcher, you have to admit its become a multi, multi-million dollar business.

GLIMCHER: I guess.

TISCH: Its a huge business. And we live in a world of brands. Your name is synonymous with some of the finest art thats ever been sold.

GLIMCHER: But what Im interested in is the finest art thats ever been sold. I mean, we are completely subservient to the artists. When we have a Picasso show, its Picasso whos the star. I dont do things like this. Were friends, Im interested in Plum TV, but I dont think thats such a good thing. Unfortunately, I think I made it happen in a way, too. I think there were two great watershed moments for American art in the 80s. That was Ben Heller selling Jackson Pollocks Blue Poles to the National Gallery in Australia for $2,000,000, which was unheard of. A $2,000,000 painting didnt exist. And then the next year, I sold The Whitney, Jasper Johns Three Flags, for $1,000,000. It was the first time that a living artist, not even Picasso during his lifetime sold for $1,000,000. Here was a fairly young artist who achieved $1,000,000. My motivation in that was the Tremains [ph?], who were extraordinary collectors, owned the Three Flags. There was a German collector, Peter Ludwig, who wanted to buy that. I knew that Peter Ludwig was about to offer $500,000 for that painting. Its the quintessential American painting. I thought it belonged in the quintessential American museum. So I went to the Tremains and I said, If I can get a million dollars for that painting, will you let it stay in America? They said, Yes. So I went to Len Lauder, who we raised our kids together, theyve been our friends forever. Len said, Ill put the money together. Ill get the money together. So they got four people to each put up $250,000 and we sold the Johns and it made the front page of the New York Times. I am responsible, in a way, for these exorbitant prices and Im slightly embarrassed about that. But there was a reason for that. Now, Im trapped in my own devices.

(break: music)

TISCH: When you see artists of moderate talent, and thats very subjective, and you see the hype around them and what their pieces are going for, how does that make you feel?

GLIMCHER: Well, I dont sort of care about that. Whats more disturbing to me is the business of art in the hands of collectors. That we never had before. The paradigm for that was Charles Saatchi, who I think is responsible in more ways than anyone else for ruining the art world. He had very good taste, and his wife had spectacular taste. She really was the beginning of Saatchis career. Here you had a guy who became the friend of the artist, but was buying too much art. You dont need 50 works by Julian Schnabel. The artists were selling as fast as they could to these people, to him. Suddenly, a couple other people started like that, but it was mostly Saatchi, without any suspicion, because there had never been a phenomenon like it in the art world. I was very suspicious and I sold less to Saatchi than any dealer. I am not in control of the art market anymore. And neither are my other colleagues. The collectors are in control of the art market right now. And we are hanging on to their coat tails until they get tired of it. But its not going to happen for a long time, because the investments are too huge now. When I sold Jaspers painting for $1,000,000, I got a letter from him saying, A million dollars to my generation is an astonishing sum of money, but it has nothing to do with art. Art is a tool by which society extends its perception. Its a very important tool. Society recognizes the value of this by putting the value of silver and gold on it. Theres nothing else like this that has that kind of value.

TISCH: But whos to say that that black mark on that white canvas is worth a million dollars, when this black mark on this canvas is being sold on TV at 4:00 in the morning for $39.95?

GLIMCHER: Because great art develops its own constituency. There is a circle of people who are not artists, but whose perception is extended, almost to the point of artists, who recognize it. All through history, people have recognized who the great artists are. I dont care if somebody who has great fortune and is making hundreds of million dollars a year and the hundred million dollars doesnt mean a lot to them for that painting. I have this idealistic feeling that that art is going to work on most people. Its going to make them so conscious of its importance, that ultimately, theyre going to realize the work is more important than selling it for a profit, and itll wind up in museums and theyll become major patrons of the institutions, which weve seen people do that. And they will be the next generation that supports very positive action in the arts and in the acquisition of things. I dont really care if kids who are terrible are selling out their next show for zillions of dollars, because this all shakes out in the long run.

TISCH: Is art a good investment?

GLIMCHER: No. Its not a good investment. If you have an eye and you really love it, youre going to collect great things. If you can afford to live with them, thats the thrill of having money, is being able to live with these astonishing achievements. These are the greatest achievements of our society.

TISCH: And then give them to a museum.

GLIMCHER: Then give them to a museum, sure. First of all, your kids cant afford them, cant afford to inherit them, and second of all, I think every generation should make its own collection. So yeah, art has proven over the years-- great art, to be something of value. But its not something you can invest in like stocks, because you dont know. Things dont look as good five years later then suddenly, wow, they do look better 20 years later and 30 years later, they say, Lets rediscover this artist, because its so relevant to what were doing now.

TISCH: What would you tell a person starting a collection today?

GLIMCHER: Id tell them not to buy anything for a year, and to spend every Saturday that they possibly can going to all the art galleries, finding the obscure galleries, the famous galleries, and as much time with contemporary art, if thats their interest, and museums. And then Id tell them to start buying prints. Find the artist you really love that you respond to and buy a print. The first thing I ever bought was Picassos etching The Dream and Lie of Franco, which is the study for the Guernica. Milly and I, before we were married, bought that together. I still have it. Its thrilling. I still have it up in our apartment in New York. Its something you should love and its something you shouldnt worry about, What is the value of this? Because its going to teach you about the value of art. The value of art determines its value in the economic world. What Id like to tell the people who are making major acquisitions is to take more time with their art, for their own sake. Its not that theyre going to get better art; theyre buying the best art. But the thrill of coming and seeing the art. There are people who are obviously intelligent people, and there are people who could really extend their own perception. They could really enhance their own intellectual pursuits. It would be thrilling.

TISCH: What would you say to the person who comes into the gallery and says, Mr. Glimcher, Ive watched your career. Unbelievably successful. I want to start a gallery.?

GLIMCHER: Id say, Start a gallery. It certainly can be done. I know people say to me, Well you cant start a gallery today with $2,400. Well you cant. But you can start a little hole in the wall. It takes longer, and you can do it.

TISCH: Do you think back to your little space on Newbury Street and just imagine the evolution of where you started to where the industry is today?

GLIMCHER: For me, in my heart, Pace Wildenstein is still on Newbury Street. The worlds changed around me; Ive adapted, but I havent changed. I still have my little badge that says, Started for the love of art, not the love of money. I dont like the hype. I dont like the festival. I dont like the fair. But if this fair and this festival makes it easier for the artists who will survive all of this, great. Its worth it. Last week I went to Captiva and I was with Rauschenberg for a day to see his new paintings which were going to show in the fall, that I think are just brilliant. Talk about the avant-garde. Milly and I were flying back from the day with Rauschenberg and we turned to each other and we said, Wow! Look at us. We spent the day with Robert Rauschenberg. That is the thrill. Thats the thrill for me of being a dealer. Its not the thrill of making a $50,000,000 sale or a $100,000,000 sale, which I have. Thats finished with dinner, but Rauschenberg is here today. That visit to Rauschenberg or lunch with Kiki [sp?] or Chuck Close. Thats exciting. But thats about a life of the mind. I think you have to keep pushing yourself or then, what are you? What are you going to do with the rest of your life? I could retire and I could work in my garden, which I love. I am a passionate sailor. Sailing is a huge part of my life. But that doesnt stimulate your mind as much as working with artists. I want to keep doing different things. I remember one of my sons recently, Paul, said to me, What are you going to be when you grow up? I said, When I grow up, Im going to let you know.

TISCH: Thank you.

(break: muisc)

(out takes)

GLIMCHER: Heres what really happened, which was quite interesting. It was about passion and about thinking, Hey, we are involved in something really important in history. I showed Warhol before Costelli showed Warhol. Ive had all of these artists earlier. And I said, I want the best gallery in the world. He said, Get out of Boston.

TISCH: Is art a good investment?

GLIMCHER: No. I still have my little badge that says, Started for the love of art, not the love of money.