I met Barbara Gladstone in the late 1970s, when I was a 19-year-old curator at The New Museum. Barbara had recently moved to Manhattan from the suburbs—where she had been married and was raising three sons—having been liberated through a consciousness raising group that led her to go back to school to get a PhD in art history.
Barbara quickly became interested in the world of Contemporary Art. There was little market to speak of for the work of young artists at the time. The art world was still small, and you got to know most of the people in it at openings and other art world events. Though she was a generation older than me, we were formed by the same values, which saw artists (and occasionally critics) as the center of the dialogue.
We would go on to follow different paths, our lives occasionally intersecting. When I became an art advisor in the late 1990s, we became more frequently and closely connected. My clients bought many artworks from Barbara’s gallery, and our earlier history placed me in a favored position with her. The artists she showed were some of the most important of our time. She had created a new life of interest for the work of Richard Prince, for example, one of the most important artists of the Pictures Generation. Prince’s international renown really took shape once Barbara took him on, forming the bridge between collectors and the art. Over the course of four decades, she discovered, represented, and nurtured a number of the most significant artists of younger generations, including Kai Althoff, Victor Man, and LaToya Ruby Frazier.
These selected works from Barbara’s collection provide insight into Barbara as a tastemaker, art dealer, collector, and a champion of talented artists. Richard Prince’s Are you Kidding? is one of the finest joke paintings the artist ever made, and hung prominently in Barbara’s living room. Just as Man Crazy Nurse is among the strongest of the series that launched Prince from an appropriation artist to a gestural painter, a leap within which lesser artists often faltered. Her exquisite Boetti Arazzo is a reminder of how important Boetti was to Barbara’s taste and her practice, having operated a gallery from 1989-1992 in collaboration with Christian Stein gallery, the gallery from Milan that represented most of the Arte Povera artists. Her Elizabeth Peyton painting of a kiss is achingly romantic, as if flesh kissing stone.
When it came to artists Barbara did not represent, her tastes were equally astute, her eye exact. Her Mike Kelley Memory Ware work is the most strikingly unique of the series in its dark monochrome. Her Warhol Flowers stands out as a singular example for its rare black-on-green coloration, just as her Thomas Schutte sculpture has a strength and presence that took a most refined eye to identify it and to display it so prominently at the foot of her curving stairwell. Her Sigmar Polke painting – dedicated personally to Barbara – is the finest late Rasterbild I know of.
Barbara maintained a keen interest in the new throughout her life. Her mind remained curious, open, and sharp. While her loss marks a huge absence, may this exacting selection of works from her personal collection set a new standard for collectors and dealers, shining a light toward the future of our art world.
- Allan Schwartzman, April 2025
