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Barbara Gladstone, who died on Sunday at the age of 89, was a gallerist in extreme.
Gaggles of critics, curators, and museum people materialized wherever she went.
She was prickly and insistent, and she was a visionary.
Today, Gladstone has three New York locations and outposts in Los Angeles, Brussels, and Seoul.
But Barbara adamantly resisted going mega: Her New York spaces remained the center of her work.
She may have been a power player, but she was always in her gallery.
For a time, Barbara showed Pattern & Decoration artists.
(Both eventually left her.)
Later, Barbara took on the sculptural artists of Arte Povera like Alighiero Boetti and Marisa Merz.
I was inventing myself in a way, she said.
Wed met in 1980, when I was a very young artist.
Somehow, I made my way into her flat files in her original uptown gallery she represented me.
I dont remember ever dropping out, only that I stopped making art and it became an academic question.
The gallery took off in the 1990s when Barbara began representing a young unknown artist named Matthew Barney.
Barney was set to have an exhibition at Petersburg Gallery, run by Clarissa Dalrymple, but Petersburg closed.
I remember Clarissa and myself trying to figure out where Matthew should show instead.
Names like Paula Cooper and Sonnabend were mentioned.
Phone calls were made.
He told me: Barbara Gladstone.
At the time, Gladstone was good but not a dominant player.
Her ceilings, he said.
It is still one of the best first shows Ive ever seen in my lifetime.
MoMA currently has two retrospectives of Brown-Gladstone artists on view: Joan Jonas and LaToya Ruby Frazier.
The museums atrium will soon be adorned with Alex Katz paintings.
Not many gallerists can boast this throw in of success.
Barbara and I fell in and out of friendship.
We stopped being friends.
I spoke to Barbara less and less as time passed but grew to admire her more and more.
The gallery never stood still.
(For a time, the roster changed often enough for people to joke about Gladstones revolving door.)
It became very rich, powerful, fairly exclusive, and unquestionably important.
I do not think that I have ever missed a New York Gladstone show.
Her passing has jarred something in the art world.
Hed asked her what artwork had been the first in her personal collection.
Rothkopf wrote that he found it tender, dry, and chic, like she always was.
British gallerist Sadie Coles said simply: She was my bar.
