Tibor de Nagy Gallery

The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is an art gallery in New York City, USA. It is was involved in the discovery of many of the Second Generation Abstract Expressionist Movement’s most important artists and also representational artists of the era including Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Red Grooms, Ian Hornak, Kenneth Noland, Fairfield Porter and Larry Rivers.

History

The start of the gallery came in the unlikely form in 1949 of the “Tibor de Nagy Marionette Company,” which was the brainchild of John Bernard Myers, who was an avid collector of the arts, author and puppeteer, and also Tibor de Nagy who was a former Hungarian banker. Despite the fact that the first company was a financial failure, it laid the path for the start of the fine art gallery that was to come as a result of the marionette company's strong support from members of the First Generation Abstract Expressionist Movement, including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock, who urged Mr. de Nagy and Mr. Myers to open a commercial art business bearing the name “Tibor de Nagy Gallery.” With the English art collector Dwight Ripley agreeing to offer six years of financial backing for the gallery's exhibition space on East 53rd Street in New York, the gallery was formed with Tibor de Nagy and John B. Myers as co-directors.

The formation of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery would lead to two other art-related businesses associated with the gallery, including the Watson-de Nagy Gallery in Houston, Texas, and Tibor de Nagy Editions, which became noted for bringing about collaborations between visual artists and poets including John Ashbery, James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara, for whom Tibor de Nagy Editions would become their first New York publisher.

In the 1960s, the Tibor de Nagy Gallery relocated to 41 West 57th Street in New York City and began to shift its stable's emphasis from abstraction to realism hosting the first New York solo exhibitions for now-notable Realist artists including Rosemarie Castoro and Jonathan Lasker.

In 1993, Mr Tibor de Nagy died, although the Tibor de Nagy Gallery lived on under the direction of Andrew Arnot and Eric Brown. The Gallery remains open currently under the original Tibor de Nagy name at 724 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10019, with a stable of artists reflecting both the gallery's early support of Abstract Expressionism and its later support of Realism and Representational Art.

ources

* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE5DD1530F93BA15751C1A965958260&scp=2&sq=tibor+de+nagy&st=nyt] Tibor de Nagy, 85, Gallery Owner Who Helped Cultivate 50's Artists, New York Times, by Roberta Smith, December 28, 1993.

* [http://www.aaa.si.edu/search/index.cfm/fuseaction/Collections.ViewCollection/CollectionID/6439?term=ian%20hornak#ian1] Tibor de Nagy Gallery Records, Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art.

* [http://www.aaa.si.edu/search/index.cfm/fuseaction/Collections.ViewCollection/CollectionID/9325?term=ian%20hornak#ian1] Watson-de Nagy Gallery Records, Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art.

* [http://web.archive.org/web/20041009204714/www.tibordenagy.com/history.html] "The First Fifty Years," by Karen Wilkin

* [http://web.archive.org/web/20041011221200/www.tibordenagy.com/ashbery.html] "Statment," by John Ashbery