Portrait of the Art Dealer as a Young Man: New York in the Sixties

Findlay (The Value of Art), director of Aquavella Galleries, provides a charming chronicle of his early forays in the art world. Born in 1945 Dunoon, Scotland, Findlay was seven when he bought his first “piece”—a postcard of Salvator Dalí’s Christ of St. John of the Cross—sparking a love for art that led to a job at New York City’s Richard Feigen Gallery. In the scrappy, thrilling, informal art world of the 1960s—“a far cry from the... high-stakes glamor swamp it would morph into in the twenty-first century”—Findlay trafficked on a canny ability to be in the right place at the right time, as when he befriended Andy Warhol at an “ad hoc” artists’ dinner. Along the way, he developed an artistic sensibility that favored artists who “found good new use for existing language,” including Stephen Mueller, who drew on abstract expressionist influences for “fresh and exciting,” vividly colored paintings, and Billy Sullivan, whose “candid portraits... made me think of Degas.” Interweaving celebrity anecdotes about dodging the advances of Allen Ginsberg and trying to sell several pieces to a “well-coiffed” Donald Trump, Findlay paints an appealing if sentimental portrait of a “grubbier” yet more “congenial” New York as the “hegemony of Abstract Expressionism” gave way to pop art, minimalism, and “hard-edged abstraction.” Art lovers will find this irresistible. (Sept.)