Influential Art Dealer Marian Goodman Dies at 97
The gallerist who put many European artists on the map in the US described her approach as finding a “humanistic concern” across different visual practices.
Marian Goodman, the pioneering New York gallery owner who introduced many 20th-century avant-garde European artists to American audiences, died on Thursday, January 22 at the age of 97.
Members of the Goodman family and partners at Marian Goodman Gallery confirmed the news of her passing from natural causes at a Los Angeles hospital in an announcement on their website. They praised her ability to cultivate talent and her “deep understanding” of the responsibility of a gallerist.
“Driven by a curiosity and a pluralistic view of art, designating its vast potential over market trends, she forged long-standing relationships with her artists and supported their practices within nonprofit and institutional realms,” Marian Goodman partners Rose Lord, Junette Teng, Emily-Jane Kirwan, and Leslie Nolen said in a statement.
Goodman’s discerning eye was drawn to post-war contemporary artists across the Atlantic who had never exhibited in the United States. Throughout a career that spanned six decades, Goodman represented Nan Goldin, William Kentridge, Julie Mehretu, John Baldessari, Lawrence Weiner, Tino Sehgal, Maurizio Cattelan, Andrea Fraser, Gerhard Richter, and Anselm Kiefer, introducing many of them to American patrons. Her practice was so successful that she opened galleries in Paris in 1995, London in 2014, and Los Angeles in 2023, before moving her flagship from Midtown Manhattan to a landmarked Tribeca building in 2024.
She described her approach as finding artists who shared a similar worldview, identifying common threads across different mediums and techniques.
“It is among the artists whose work I like that I have found the qualities I value from my own experience: a humanistic concern, a culture-critical sense of our way of life, a dialectical approach to reality, and an artistic vision about civic life,” Goodman once said.
Born in 1928, Goodman was raised on the Upper West Side before attending Emerson College. She returned to New York, harboring dreams of joining the United Nations. Instead, she got married, raised a family, and took a graduate art history seminar at Columbia University.
In 1962, Goodman decided to compile a portfolio of artist prints and sell them to raise money for her children's school. Three years later, she opened an art publishing company with several partners. Multiples, Inc., which sold prints and books by artists including Baldessari, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Smithson, Claes Oldenberg, and Andy Warhol.
After struggling to find exhibition spaces for European artists she adored, Goodman opened her own gallery on 38 East 57th Street in Midtown in 1977. Seven years later, she relocated to 24 West 57th Street, where the gallery remained for nearly a half century.
At the time, she was one of only a handful of women in the art world operating their own galleries and developed a reputation as unflappable.
“There was a joke that we used to make about Marian: ‘Carry a soft stick and lay it down hard,’” artist Lawrence Weiner told W Magazine in 2018. “She could handle anything. And there’s a kind of grandeur about her generosity.”
Goodman understood that she had to work harder than many of the male gallery owners to champion her artists and make sales. When W asked her whether much had changed over the years as more women joined the field, she said, “Men are more impressed by men than by women, when it comes right down to it.”
In 2021, three years after celebrating her 90th birthday at Versailles, Goodman retired and appointed Rose Lord, Junette Teng, Emily-Jane Kirwan, Leslie Nolen, and Philipp Kaiser as her gallery’s partners.
Lord told Hyperallergic that there was no doubt Goodman left an “indelible legacy,” and that her humanity and humor touched many people in the art world.
“All of us at the gallery are inspired by her example every day and, together with the artists, who stand at the center of all we do, we are committed to carrying forward the values on which Marian founded the gallery and which remain so important as the world shifts around us,” Lord said.
Artists shared heartfelt tributes to Goodman over the weekend, including Mehretu, who called the art dealer a “lioness” in a statement on her Instagram.
“To have shared a good part of this life with you was my honor and privilege,” Mehretu wrote. “You are the epitome of strength, courage, power and love. You will be sorely missed.”
