Joan T. Washburn: Veteran Art Dealer With A Fresh Eye

Photo: Morgan McGivern

The year Joan Washburn graduated from Middlebury College, she went to work as a secretary at the Kraushaar Galleries in New York City. One day, when she was alone in the gallery, a "rather attractive man" came in and showed interest in an exhibit of paintings of farmhouses and horses by a relatively obscure artist, Vaughan Flannery.

"I didn't know anything about the subject," Ms. Washburn said. "But I launched into a long monologue about horses and polo. Later, I was told the man was Alfred G. Vanderbilt."

The moral of the story is that "in this business, you sometimes have to play it by ear. You never know who you're talking to."

Many Artists And Styles

Joan Washburn has run the 57th Street gallery that bears her name for just over 25 years. In that time, she has shown works by a wide range of artists working in a broad range of styles, from Willem de Kooning and Pablo Picasso to Martin Johnson Heade and Albert Pinkham Ryder, and has established a reputation as one of New York's pre-eminent dealers.

Ms. Washburn has organized solo exhibits by her regular artists, such as Jack Youngerman and Bill Jensen, and group shows on art historical themes, such as "Miro and New York: 1930-1950," which examined the influence of the painter Joan Miro on younger artists working in New York during those decades.

To East Hampton

Recently, a visitor was led into the small, comfortable house on a quiet street in East Hampton Village where Ms. Washburn and her husband, Alan Washburn, stay on weekends and vacations.

A friendly-looking cat wandered up, seemingly in greeting. "Don't try to pet her!" Ms. Washburn cried. "She's very bad-tempered."

Ms. Washburn and her husband bought their first house in East Hampton in 1964, on Red Dirt Road. They'd been weekend guests of friends for many years before that, before their two children were born.

"When we had our first child, we still had invitations. But when we had our second child, all invitations ceased!" she said, laughing.

Pollock's Other Influences

The Washburn Gallery's newest exhibit, which opens on Wednesday, is called "Pollock, Orozco, and Siqueiros: The 1930s and '40s." It is typical of Ms. Washburn to go to the roots of a well-known artist's style, tracing connections that other dealers and curators may have overlooked.

Pollock, for example, is now the subject of an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that links him with his early teacher and mentor, the academic painter Thomas Hart Benton. But Ms. Washburn asserts that the Mexican artists Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros had a more profound and less easily understood influence on Pollock.

Pollock was inspired by the size and format of Mexican mural painting, and Mr. Siqueiros often dripped and splashed paint onto panels before adding representational images.

Ms. Washburn has been working in the art world since 1951, first at Kraushaar, and subsequently at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., the Graham Gallery, Cordier & Ekstrom, and Sotheby-Parke-Bernet. She started her own gallery in 1971.

The responsibility of an art dealer, Ms. Washburn said, is simply to "sell an artist's work and help him support himself. And you do that by arranging exhibitions on the highest possible level in terms of selection and quality. Based on the gallery's reputation, collectors and curators and the public come to see what the artist is doing."

With contemporary artists, Ms. Washburn tries to schedule an exhibit every two years, depending on how prolific the artist is. Her gallery has migrated over the years from Madison Avenue to a larger space at 42 East 57th Street.

A Healthier Market

The art world is much larger now than it was when she began her career.

"The art world doesn't have the cohesiveness today that it did in the '50s and '60s in that you can't walk up and down 57th Street and see everything. I regret that, in a way. It was wonderful for the viewers and for the artists."

"But in those days New York was the center of the art world, and all of the viewers were New Yorkers." When interest in art began to spread across the country, and to the rest of the world, things became "much healthier," she said.

Expanding Knowledge

"When the financial markets went bad in 1973 and 1974, it was terrible. Because everything was still concentrated in New York. But now people from every state in the country, and from abroad, come to the gallery. And museums have grown up all over the country."

"Years ago, we did a lot more 19th-century shows, because it was possible then to get groups of important paintings, to put a body of work together, which is what I enjoy doing most," she said.

"I like to hone in on a certain portion of an artist's work and expand the knowledge of their work that way. I never had the money to do buying. But gradually, over the years, people have liked the exhibitions and the way we handle them. And they've brought ideas to me, or artists' estates have come to me. I will often handle just a certain period of an artist's work."

Changes In Approach

David Smith, an American artist whose name is often linked with the Abstract Expressionists and who is best known for his large metal sculptures, is a case in point. "We handled his paintings of the '30s and '40s, which had never been shown in a cohesive way. The same with the Louise Nevelson show - work from the '30s and '40s that you don't generally get to see."

Ms. Washburn has seen changes in the approach subsequent generations take to art. Reminded of something the painter Jane Freilicher said - that it seemed to her that young artists today don't so much look at paintings as read art magazines - Ms. Washburn said that although that may be true, there is a variety of reasons for it.

Black And White Slides

"When I studied art history, everything was learned through black and white slides. When I went to Europe for the first time, and saw those Titians and Tintorettos, I was absolutely floored!" she said, exploding in laughter.

"Not only by the size, but by the glorious colors. If you go back through old issues of ARTnews, there are very few color reproductions. But today, consider the number of art books available," she said, noting that art students now are able to see art reproduced in ways unthinkable to earlier generations.

And the idea of what art is has changed since she began her career. "The emphasis today is not on painting. It's on installation art, and video, and context. And the geography of things has changed," she said.

First Date

Ms. Washburn recalled talking recently to a painter friend who knew Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. "She said that Lee and Jackson's first date was at the Frick Museum!" Ms. Washburn said, laughingly imagining Pollock and Krasner surrounded by frothy pictures by Watteau.

"You know, Bill de Kooning and Gorky used to go and stand in front of the Ingres pictures at the Met and just study the folds in the clothing, as abstract compositions. Those things mattered very much to those artists," she said.

Ms. Washburn noted that museums and galleries have had to grow larger and larger in the last few decades, in order to accommodate larger works.

Bigger And Bigger

What helped to make this necessary was the color-field painting of the 1960s. Color-field painters, working with quick-drying acrylic paint, rather than the slow-drying oil paint earlier artists had used, "could turn out two or three large canvases a day. Acrylic changed everything."

And both sculpture and painting have grown in size over the years. The big Pollock paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, she reminded her visitor, "were large to us because we were accustomed to pictures that were 30 by 36 inches, that could go over the couch."

She remembered a phone call that her first employer received "from a man who said that he was looking for a Cezanne that could go over his couch. In those days, galleries had things like that. You used to see ma jor Bonnard shows at the Wildenstein Gallery every couple of years. No more."

Freedom

Ms. Washburn looks for the unconventional or little-known while keeping art-historical context in mind.

"When I went into this business, I couldn't afford to get into Abstract Expressionism in a big way. But I was interested in the '30s and '40s. At the time, that period looked old hat to many people. It was too recent. But Abstract Expressionism did not arise from a void. And of course, now, it's a distant enough period for people to see it with a fresh eye."

"The thing that tends to grab me," she said, "is how I can make something meaningful of an exhibit. For the Pollock show, for example, I wondered how I could do something that hadn't been done before. Being in a gallery, you can do these things within a few months. You have a freedom that is not possible in a museum."