A nyone entering the front gate to Jeffrey Deitch’s Los Angeles home in the Los Feliz hills is essentially greeted by nearly a dozen Jeffrey Deitches. Ten bronze heads—each donning an approximation of Deitch’s trademark round spectacles—are clustered on a garden table nearby. The flesh-and-blood Deitch, dressed in an immaculate suit and tie, emerges from the front door of the house and explains: the heads comprise a sculpture titled “Jeffreys,” created for Deitch by Urs Fischer around 10 years ago.
All of these Jeffreys have quite a vista. Deitch’s house—a 1921 Spanish affair once owned by actor Cary Grant—enjoys unimpeded views of much of the city and the Santa Monica mountains. On a good day, you can see a silver strip of the Pacific Ocean gleaming in the distance. Also on full display is the Hollywood sign, which, from this vantage point, seems suspiciously like another installation in Deitch’s vast personal collection of modern, pop and contemporary art, acquired throughout the course of his 50-year career as a gallerist and art advisor.
“This is an expansive place, and there’s real room for art,” he says, settling onto a cloud-patterned Gaetano Pesce for Meritalia couch in his living room. “It’s a real pleasure to bring out some of the art I had in storage. Everything here has a personal story, some special connection.”
Works by Andy Warhol, Kenny Scharf and Jakub Julian Ziołkowski hang in places of pride on the living room walls. More Deitch homages are also everywhere you look, including a large 2020 portrait of Deitch by Julian Schnabel affixed to the dining room and two large 1980 Robert Longo photographs of Deitch looming above a stairwell. In a nearby sunroom stands a rather kinetic 2014 plaster-and-metal Pawel Althamer sculpture of Deitch—a longtime runner—in motion.
“It just happened,” he responds when asked how he amassed such a significant collection of Jeffrey Deitch portraits. “It wasn’t that I said: ‘Hey, can you do portraits of me?’ The artists asked if they could do them.” It amuses him, he adds, to have them around. Ditto the artists themselves, who often come over and hang out in Deitch’s private art-world playground.
In addition to the house, Deitch also owns two galleries in nearby West Hollywood. With these properties, Deitch has doubled down on Los Angeles—a city that he says he loves, even though its artistic gatekeepers haven’t always been particularly hospitable to him. In 2010, Deitch closed his New York City gallery, Deitch Projects, and moved west to become the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles. What followed was a now-notorious tenure during which Deitch’s exhibitions—such as his graffiti- and street-art-focused “Art in the Streets” exhibit in 2011—drew both critical ire and record attendance. (Several MoCA members, including artists Barbara Kruger, Catherine Opie and Ed Ruscha, resigned in protest over Deitch’s programs and direction.)
“The MoCA situation,” he says, then pauses. He shakes his head and continues. “That was really hard. I got really beat up. The Los Angeles Times did this campaign against me. But the audience here loved what I did. It was a very populist program, but also very rigorous.”
“Jeffrey’s an iconoclast. He opened up the museum to the city in a way that it never had been before,” says Maria Bell, one of Deitch’s supporters who was on the MoCA board at the time. “Through shows like ‘Art in the Streets,’ literally thousands of Angelenos saw themselves and their lives in a museum setting. He demystified the museum experience.”
Deitch resigned two years before the end of his contracted tenure. “I debated: ‘What am I doing this for?’” he recalls. “I should have my own mini museum where I can do what I want, my way.” He returned to New York City to what he had done in the past, opening a new downtown gallery in his name.
Then, five years after departing L.A., Deitch was back. In 2018 he opened a second Jeffrey Deitch gallery on West Hollywood’s Orange Drive. Architect Frank Gehry designed the interiors. Several thousand people attended the inaugural show, a solo exhibition by powerhouse artist Ai Weiwei.
With this noisy, triumphant return to the site of his former drama, was Deitch essentially giving the middle finger to his detractors?
“No, no,” he says. “It’s just that I’m very confident about my own mission—and about Los Angeles.” The city, he says, is “now really significant.” There are, he adds, other important art centers around the world, including Mexico City, Paris (“more and more,” he qualifies) and Berlin, but Los Angeles particularly excites him. In 2022, he expanded his footprint in the city further, opening a second gallery a block away from the Orange Drive operation.
“L.A. has an exciting interchange,” Deitch says. “There are writers, musicians, filmmakers who are very involved in the artistic dialogue. I knew this was the right place and the right building. We’ve had some amazing shows over the past five years.”
“So, yeah,” he says quietly, with a small smile. “It all worked out.”
M ore than once over the years, Deitch has been described in the press as an art-world Zelig—a chameleon who has often found himself at the ground zeroes of major cultural movements and art-market inflection points. Among his many bona fides: he was the first reviewer to write about the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat; he helped launch and build the careers of Jeff Koons and Keith Haring; he was among the earliest curators and art dealers to entrench in the world of street art in the early 1980s. “Jeffrey is an artist and a visionary,” says curator Paige Powell, who was close with Basquiat and Andy Warhol and has collaborated with Deitch. “He’s generous with his mind and time, getting strangers and friends excited about any art form.”
“I’m very lucky,” Deitch says. “Somehow I have a built-in compass that has taken me—since I was a teenager—to the center of art discourse.”
Deitch’s first “real art-market experience,” he recalls, actually occurred when he was a preteen: his mother took him to an art show at the family’s Hartford synagogue (a “mini, shabby version of a real art fair—can you imagine all the junk at something like this?”) and told him that she would buy him any work that he liked. Deitch immediately selected a Leger lithograph.
“I picked out a significant piece at the age of 10 or 12, something like that,” he says. “I guess it’s a kind of pattern recognition that draws me to accomplished works of art.” But he doesn’t see his precocity as unique: “[Many] people I know who are successful in creative fields started really early.”
Deitch’s career has also been Zelig-like in its diversity: art dealer, curator, talent scout, writer and art and financial advisor are just some of the roles he’s played in his long, dense career. After graduating in 1974 from Wesleyan University, where he studied both economics and art history, he materialized in New York City and famously managed to talk his way into a job at the influential John Weber Gallery. After immersing himself briefly in the heady world of modern art, with proximity to artistic greats like Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt, he absconded to Harvard Business School. In 1979, he returned to New York, where he helped pioneer Citibank’s then-revolutionary art-advisory and art-lending services.
“We then had a very central role in the art room of the 1980s,” Deitch recalls, “becoming one of the most active buyers…and working with some of the great collectors and artists of the world.” The bank, he believes, performed an important and previously non-existent service. “Let’s say a client in midwestern America wanted to collect art in a big way but didn’t know who the major New York dealers were, didn’t really have access, didn’t have that kind of information,” he says. “They needed help. So we provided this crucial advice by giving professional, objective art connoisseurship and art-market advice to people who didn’t already have access to this.”
Old-school art dealers—who previously functioned as clients’ primary conduits to art and now found themselves increasingly displaced by Deitch and his team—were understandably less than pleased by the development. “[Many of them] thought that this was terrible, that we were turning this special field of emerging art into a speculation game,” he recalls. Later on, however, “most of them became my customers.”
Deitch recalls the “ecstasy” of his trial-by-fire art education during his Citibank years. “I needed to learn about quality, condition, all these issues,” he says. “And the way I learned was going to every auction in New York and London for 10 years.” Rather than studying masterpieces solely in the pages of books and on museum walls, Deitch got to peruse them in the backrooms of major galleries.
“In those days, [private art dealership] Wildenstein had some amazing things,” he says. “Once they pulled out that beautiful Picasso portrait of his wife Olga. And I remember going to [art dealer] Gene Thaw and seeing this just astonishing Van Gogh. It’s amazing that I was, at that age, able to have access to this.”
His most thrilling art experience came when he bought, at auction, one of the great Jackson Pollock drip paintings for a client. “They weren’t ready to have it shipped to their offices yet,” he recalls. “So I hung it in my home for several months, where I could see it morning, noon and night.” It was, he adds: “the greatest experience that I’ve had.”
After nine years at Citibank, he realized that it might be time to excise another middleman: his employer. “A number of the collectors said to me: ‘Why do we need the bank? Let’s just work directly with you,’” Deitch says. He left in 1988 and launched his own art-advisory service. While the prospect of flying solo initially made him nervous, he contends that in that first year alone, he ended up making more money than Citibank’s chairman.
I n the decades since, Deitch has backed the careers of dozens of artists, earning a reputation as a bit of a gambler. “Jeffrey is one of the few risk takers in the contemporary art world,” says collector Jean Pigozzi, who notes the museum quality of Deitch’s gallery shows. Some of these projects have been safe bets and crowd pleasers, while others have been, in Deitch’s own words, “perverse” and “beautifully horrifying.” The New Yorker art writer Calvin Tomkins once described sitting through a Deitch-sponsored performance piece by Austrian arts collective Gelitin, in which performers urinated from wooden platforms into hats below; he concluded that Deitch’s “tolerance for transgression is probably limitless,” an assessment that makes Deitch smile.
L.A.-based artist Alex Israel describes Deitch’s modus operandi as “fearless curiosity.” “He’s always observing, listening, asking questions, following up, researching and learning about new things, and adding them to his ever-expanding worldview,” Israel says. “His perspective is informed by this accumulation of data and historic knowledge, but it is also of this moment, immediate and truly ‘contemporary.’”
“I’ve just always done what I thought was interesting,” Deitch says. “Some projects turned out quite well, financially. Others cost me a fortune.” For example, he once promised to underwrite a show by art performance group Fischerspooner. “They were the coolest thing going,” he recalls, “and I said: ‘Let’s go all the way; do your ultimate.’” The investment ended up costing Deitch every cent of a commission from the $7.6 million sale of an Andy Warhol flowers painting. Win some, lose some, he shrugs. “Other art dealers would put their money into buying another expensive work of art, or into buying a country house,” he explains. “I put mine into new programs.”
Deitch maintains that he is incapable of doing anything half-assedly: every show, every exhibit must go all the way, do the ultimate. He cannot compromise; his exhibitions must have museum budgets—“and even beyond a museum budget”—to meet his standards. Sometimes this requires him to sell a treasured work of art from his private collection, which is how he funded his just-concluded “Post Human” show at his L.A. gallery. (He won’t reveal which work he parted with but concedes that it was “really painful to sell.”)
L ast year proved to be challenging for Deitch’s business, he says, citing ripple-effect angst from world affairs and high interest rates. When asked about the financial landscape ahead, as the second Trump administration begins, Deitch says that he hopes for the best: “My nature is that I am an optimist.”
He remains committed to his longstanding mission, namely scouting and investing in what he calls “communities of talent,” and cites his decades-long commitment to raising the profile of street art. “It’s not an underclass of art: street art is art,” he says, calling his MoCA “Art in the Streets” exhibition one of his proudest accomplishments. Many Angelenos inherently understood its value, he adds: “It was at capacity every day and sometimes there was a two-hour line to get in. People visited four or five times.”
Deitch says that he sees the making of art as itself an inherently optimistic pursuit, especially in uncertain times. “More than ever, we need the moral stance, the openness to change, the diversity of opinion that you get with art,” he says. “I’m a total believer.”—Additional reporting by Cary Leitzes
