Renowned New York City gallerist and art collector Marian Goodman died late last week in Los Angeles, according to a spokesperson for her gallery. Goodman was 97.
One of New York’s most powerful art dealers since the 1980s, Goodman led a stable of revered and valuable artists in the contemporary art world, including Gerhard Richter, Julie Mehretu, Steve McQueen, and Pierre Huyghe. She had moved to Los Angeles after retiring from daily operations at Marian Goodman Gallery in early 2023.
At the time of her retirement, Goodman’s namesake gallery had maintained its longtime flagship location on West 57th Street since 1981, along with its European headquarters, Galerie Marian Goodman, which opened in the Marais neighborhood of Paris in 1995. A series of major expansions began in 2023, with a third gallery space opening in Hollywood and the New York gallery relocated to TriBeCa in fall 2024. Another gallery in London operated from 2014 to 2020.
Born Marian Geller in 1928 to a first-generation Jewish-Hungarian family, Goodman was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her father, Maurice Geller, was an engineer turned accountant who collected modern art as a hobby, and Goodman counted among her family’s friends and neighbors the midcentury painter Milton Avery and the gallerist Sidney Janis, whose networking between the European and American avant-garde foreshadowed Goodman’s role in the 1980s. In a 2004 New Yorker article by Peter Schjeldahl, Goodman recalled visiting the Janis apartment regularly as a child and playing in front of Henri Rousseau’s fabled jungle painting The Dream, later to become a fixture at the Museum of Modern Art.
In the late 1940s, she graduated from Emerson College and then enrolled in postgraduate courses in art history at Columbia University, where she was the only woman in attendance. By then, she already had two children with husband William Goodman, an engineer, but the marriage would not last. By the mid ’60s, she was living apart from Goodman on Central Park West, and according to Schjeldahl’s article, was threatened with eviction for “entertaining gentleman callers” outside of her marriage.
In search of a profession—and financial freedom—Goodman founded Multiples, Inc. on Madison Avenue and 74th Street, which sold limited-edition prints, books, and objects like jewelry, furniture, and miniatures for nearly 100 artists, including pop artists Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Claes Oldenburg and post-pop conceptualists Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Dan Graham, and John Baldessari. Goodman’s work with editions culminated in the 1970 Artists & Photographs box, which documented the works of 19 contemporary artists through photographs, books, brochures, leaflets, and other media in the style of Marcel Duchamp’s legendary portable museum Boîte en valise.
Beginning with a visit to documenta 4 in Germany in 1968, Goodman encountered a new generation of European artists who were then unknown in America; among them were the elder conceptualist Joseph Beuys, along with Richter, Marcel Broodthaers, Sigmar Polke, and Blinky Palermo. It was the work of Broodthaers, an obscure Belgian poet and conceptual artist, that prompted Goodman to open the first iteration of her gallery on East 57th Street in 1977.
“Meeting him was a life-changing experience,” Goodman said in 2010. “It led me to start a gallery despite having little experience. Because of him, I just did it.” Her inaugural show of Broodthaers’s mixed media and found objects sold only a single piece and received no press attention. But Goodman persevered. Other shows followed with Anselm Kiefer, Palermo, Sigmar Polke, and Georg Baselitz. Richter began showing with Goodman’s gallery in 1985 and remained there until 2023. During his time with Goodman, the painter’s Abstraktes Bild (1986) sold for a record $46.3 million at auction, making his work the most valuable of any living European artist.