Modern Art Galleries in New York

[Modern] Art and the City

When we first set out to outline the focus for galleryIntell, we decided to concentrate our attention on the rich history New York City shared with various art movements in the last 100 years. It soon became clear that the city’s role in the history of Modern and Postwar art was not only the most direct, but also the most consequential and therefore the most important.

Archipenko - modern and postwar artThe first step in this mutual history was most certainly The International Exhibition of Modern Art, or as it became known The Armory Show of 1913. It was in New York that Marcel Duchamp successfully exhibited his revolutionary work Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) after failing to garner any significant attention during the Paris exhibitions. In many respects Europe wasn’t altogether ready to embrace this new paradigm of visual communication, and soon many European artists found themselves moving to America. Piet Mondrian, Francis Picabia, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky, Albert Gleizes, Alexander Archipenko, and many others left Europe to pursue their artistic explorations in America, in New York.

Others like Man Ray, Alfred Steiglitz, Charles Sheeler, and Stuart Davis were already in the United States and were working on similar ideas. Many of those artists were also based in New York City, so this joining of the forces proved to be the impetus needed for Modern Art to gain the necessary platform, and cement the association between the movement and New York City.

peggy guggenheim hanging an alexander calder sculptureNew York was also a suitable destination because many wealthy patrons supported these new ideas. People like Abby Rockefeller, Peggy Guggenheim and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney saw the importance of supporting and promoting the arts and were instrumental to the rise of Modern and Postwar art in New York City. Since then the city has become home to some of the world’s top art museums, private art collections, art historians, curators and art galleries that specialize in Modern and Postwar art.

To help you find the right exhibition spaces we are starting a special directory which we will expand over the course of the next couple of weeks. This guide will list most of the Modern and Postwar art galleries in New York and give you important information you’ll need prior to visiting the gallery.

Modern Art Galleries in New York (1900 – 1950).

ACA Galleries,
529 West 20th Street – Chelsea

The gallery was established in 1932 and specializes in Modern & Contemporary, American & European paintings, drawings & sculpture.
Some of the artists represented by the gallery include: Milton Avery, Richard Anuszkiewicz, William Forsyth, John Fenton, Francis Luis Mora, Joan Miro, etc.

Acquavella Galleries, Inc.
18 East 79th St – Upper East Side

THIEBAUD_Poster_acquavella-galleryAcquavella is a family-owned gallery founded by Nicholas Acquavella in 1921. The gallery first specialized in works of the Italian Renaissance, but in 1960, when William Acquavella joined his father, the focus of the gallery expanded to major works of the 19th and 20th centuries, including masters of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism and Surrealism. Recently the gallery began to represent the entire scope of the 20th century art, including Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. The gallery has presented museum-quality exhibitions of Monet, Degas, Cézanne, Sisley, Renoir, Pissarro, Modigliani, Bonnard, Tanguy, Léger, Picasso, Matisse, Rauschenberg, Feininger, Giacometti, Miró, Braque, Thiebaud and Freud.

Adler & Conkright Fine Art
by appointment – Upper East Side

Beginning in 1979 in New York, Rachel Adler has dedicated individual exhibitions to Alexander Archipenko, Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, Erwin Blumenfeld, Carlo Carrà, Jean Hélion, Erika Giovanna Klien, Francis Picabia, Liubov Popova, Alejandro Xul Solar and Kirill Zdanevich. Group exhibitions have been devoted to such movements as Cercle et Carré, Italian Futurism, Arte Concreto Invención and Grupo Madi, Kinetism, and the Cologne Progressives.  The current gallery was founded in 2003 when Rachel Adler Fine Art merged with Charles Conkright Fine Art.

Peter Blum Gallery
20 West 57th Street NY – Midtown

simon-frost_peter-blum-galleryIn an atypical move, the gallery recently relocated from Chelsea where it maintained a large exhibition space to midtown. Peter Blum has collaborated with a wide range of artists both as a gallerist and publisher since he began his career in 1971 at Galerie Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland. In 1980, after moving to New York, he founded Peter Blum Edition, where he was among the first print publishers to work with a new generation of European and American artists. Peter Blum Edition has since published important editions by John Baldessari, Louise Bourgeois, Tacita Dean, Eric Fischl, Alfredo Jaar, Alex Katz, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Brice Marden, Josef-Felix Müller, James Turrell, and Luc Tuymans, among many others.

Some of the gallery’s represented artists include John Beech, Huma Bhabha, Louise Bourgeois, Simon Frost, Alex Katz, Esther Kläs, Yayoi Kusama, Agnes Martin, Richard Allen Morris, David Rabinowitch, Robert Ryman, and Su-Mei Tse

Featured image: The Athenaeum – Composition, (detail) 1922 Albert Gleizes.

Article Images – Two Nude Female Figures (Seated and Bending), 1923. Alexander Archipenko.

Wayne Thiebaud catalogue cover from Acquavella Gallery, Simon Frost, Untitled, Gouache on paper, 2006

Photo: Peggy Guggenheim installing an Alexander Calder Mobile.

This article ©galleryIntell 2013.