人物 I 玛丽安 · 古德曼：艺术是人类精神最高境界的证明之一

玛丽安 · 古德曼 / 摄影：托马斯 · 斯特鲁特（Thomas Struth） 

1977年，在为比利时艺术家马塞尔 · 布达埃尔（Marcel Broodthaers）寻找美国的代理画廊未果后，49岁的玛丽安 · 古德曼（Marian Goodman）决定自己开设一家画廊。此前她已开始与布达埃尔密切合作。在当时，由于缺少往来交流，美国对欧洲当代艺术的认知极为有限。在开画廊之前，古德曼女士和几位合伙人共同经营一家名为Multiples Inc.的出版公司，为安迪 · 沃霍尔（Andy Warhol）、索尔 · 勒维特（Sol LeWitt）及罗伊 · 利希滕斯坦（Roy Lichtenstein）等当时主要的美国艺术家推出版画、限量的小件作品（multiples）和书籍。

古德曼女士以对艺术家的忠诚度而闻名。很少接受媒体采访的她，去年底与《纽约时报》著名艺术写作者兰迪 · 肯尼迪（Randy Kennnedy）进行了访谈，以下为文章节选。

在艺术界低调而德高望重的玛丽安 · 古德曼，

希望市场冷却下来 (节选)

兰迪 · 肯尼迪，《纽约时报》，2016年12月16日

……

88岁的玛丽安 · 古德曼身上带有一种安静而坚不可摧的权威感，会让人以为她是位退休的银行家，或纽约某所中学的校长，又或者是高级外交官。后者的确是她早年曾向往过的职业。而到了60年代早期，这位住在纽约上西区的年轻母亲，已经彻底臣服在了艺术的魅力之下。

她的画廊将在下个月进入第四十个年头。在今天，当代艺术已摇身变为光鲜闪亮、吸纳金融资本的巨兽。而尽管与其它画廊的经营方式几乎大相径庭，玛丽安 · 古德曼画廊（Marian Goodman Gallery）仍然是行业内最有影响力的画廊之一。它始终坚守在西57街，从未延伸到SoHo区或切尔西区。它也从未成为拍卖市场上的玩家。画廊于1999年在巴黎设立了常驻展览空间（从1995年在巴黎的第一个空间搬迁），两年前在伦敦开设了第三个空间，并且最近刚刚在巴黎画廊的斜对面开了书店。它拒绝推行同行们的那种将足迹拓展到所有城市的扩张主义，同时又始终能够吸引抢手的年轻艺术家加入，比如朱莉 · 梅雷图（Julie Mehretu）和阿德里安 · 维拉 · 罗哈斯 （Adrian Villar Rojas）。

1984年，纽约玛丽安 · 古德曼画廊举办约翰 · 张伯伦（John Chamberlain）、托尼 · 克拉格（Tony Cragg）、理查德 · 阿茨希瓦格（Richad Artschwager）和索尔 · 勒维特（Sol LeWitt）的群展

玛丽安 · 古德曼画廊成为同代中最有影响力的画廊之一，其原因在今天似乎听起来有些不可思议。毕竟在这个时代，每个时区都有艺术博览会举办，推动着商业艺术环境在全球急速扩张。但当古德曼女士起步时，仍然处于抽象表现主义支配之下的美国画廊和美术馆，视野狭隘，固步自封，顽守民族主义。（“当时我们对欧洲只有一种概念，” 创立《艺术论坛》杂志（Artforum Magazine）的编辑菲利普 · 莱德（Philip Leider）曾描述道，“就是认为那是一场噩梦，而且法国什么都不好。”）

玛丽安 · 古德曼成长于曼哈顿一个自由的知识分子家庭，从小便受到艺术的熏陶。她热爱欧洲，从欧洲的工作室和画廊中看到有一批艺术家拥有巨大才能但是仍未得到赏识，并且这背后是一个很大程度上有待开发的市场。很多她从过去便一路支持的艺术家 － 例如德国画家格哈德 · 里希特 （Gerhard Richter），英国导演史蒂夫 · 麦奎因 （Steve McQueen），法国观念艺术家皮埃尔 · 于热 （Pierre Huyghe），还有诗人及挑衅者比利时艺术家马塞尔 · 布达埃尔 （Marcel Broodthaers）－ 都成为了重量级明星。

在几十年对艺术的全身心投入中，她早年也曾经历过很长的一段困难时期，仅能够维持自己的生活。而在赢得赞誉和财富之后，她也始终保持低调，坚持留在幕后。她以性格内向为由，拒绝了大部分采访。还有一个理由是她所抱持的基本理念，即艺术商 － 相比之下她更喜欢听起来不那么商业的“画廊主”一词 － 永远不应该把焦点从艺术家那儿转移到自己身上。

在过去的几年中，古德曼女士开始松口，放低了戒备。有一次甚至是在她的要求下，画廊组织了大规模的采访。她说之所以从幕后走出来，主要是因为“我想自己没过去那么腼腆了。” 但这其中的动机似乎更像是要向艺术行业提出某种告诫，因为她几乎是从道德的角度来看待这个行业。 

“我认为钱的话语权从未像今天这样巨大，” 她说道。“拍卖有助于业务增长，但我不确定这真的对艺术界是一件好事。” 仅仅在上个月，18幅里希特的旧作， 在纽约的拍卖中以远高于一亿美元的价格易主。作为最受崇拜的在世画家之一，里希特本人称这样的交易价格“贵得让人绝望”。众所周知，他自己在很多年间都以低于一百万美元的价格出售尺寸可观的新作品。即使是现在，在玛丽安 · 古德曼的坚持下，里希特已经提高了标价，目的也仅仅是弥补悬殊的价差，以及让投机者知难而退。新的作品很可能在拍卖上标价两千万美元，而他的定价远远不到这个数字的一半，更接近五百万美元。

90年代玛丽安 · 古德曼与格哈德 · 里希特

在艺术家位于德国科隆的工作室

古德曼女士对投机不屑一顾：“有些人买卖艺术品就像买卖农场的股份一样。” 对她而言，现在自己最重要的工作之一，“就是保证让艺术品远离拍卖，这样才会由负责任的人和美术馆经手。”

她说，如果能留下任何遗产，希望是成功地将画廊的艺术家们纳入公共收藏。在这方面她做得太好，甚至招来了一些批评，说她和另外四家画廊巨头 － 高古轩、佩斯、大卫 · 卓纳画廊和豪瑟沃斯画廊 － 在重要美术馆的展览项目中过多地出现。（《艺术新闻》认为，从2007年到2013年，美国的美术馆个展中，几乎有三分之一都被这几间画廊的艺术家占据。 ）

而古德曼女士独具慧眼，选择的艺术家始终能获得评论界的青睐，这是她成功的一个重要因素。另一个关键原因是她在面对艺术品藏家时的坚持，更愿意选择那些承诺向美术馆捐赠的藏家。和其他藏家有可能愿意出的价比起来，这样的销售有时带给画廊的利润会低一些。

“不论是在欧洲还是美国，很少有画廊像她那样对美术馆做到如此程度的奉献，” 英国泰特美术馆馆长尼古拉斯 · 塞洛塔（Nicholas Serota）评论道。他70年代就与古德曼女士结识，并说他知道在有些时候，她曾经将艺术作品以更低的价格出售给支持美术馆的藏家。宁可画廊少一点分成，有时甚至拿非常少，以保证艺术家拿到尽可能相当于更大金额销售的分成（画廊一般和艺术家五五分成）。

当被问到将艺术作品送入美术馆的例子，古德曼女士提出了异议。对于此类有关业务的问题，她的反应往往如此。但接下来她打了一个电话，随即列举了近期的一次交易，是将20幅里希特的作品出售给了收藏家唐纳德 · 马伦（Donald Marron）。纽约现代艺术博物馆（MoMA）的策展人非常想要收入这些画，但是美术馆在当下拿不出足够的资金购买。马伦作为美术馆的前馆长，买下这批画并捐给了美术馆，“它们现在已经放在MoMA里了。” 她补充道：“很多人想要里希特的画。我们尽量保持公平。但是作品价格涨得太高，美术馆的阵地在逐渐被私人藏家占领。所以我们比以前更努力地帮助美术馆拿到想要的作品。”

今年十月，国际独立策展人协会（Independent Curators International），一个备受尊敬的当代艺术组织， 向古德曼女士授予了最高荣誉。MoMA的另一位前馆长、收藏家艾格尼丝 · 冈德（Agnes Gund）在颁奖时说：“我把她的画廊当作美术馆一样看待。我会去那儿学习，寻找灵感，看她在看的是什么。”

 2016年10月玛丽安 · 古德曼获得国际独立策展人协会最高荣誉，全场起立致敬 / 摄影：弗拉基米尔 · 维因斯坦（Vladimir Weinstein），比尔 · 法雷尔图像社（Bill Farrell Agency）

古德曼女士的父亲是会计师，也收藏画家米尔顿·埃弗里（Milton Avery）的作品。她本人直到三十多岁以前，都没有想到命运会将她引上艺术商的道路。她曾就读于波士顿的爱默生学院（Emerson College），考虑要成为记者，或者为联合国工作。她在21岁那年结婚，很快生下一儿一女，此后大部分时间都以志愿者的身份为孩子们的学校工作。

“直到开画廊以前，我甚至没有自己的支票本，” 她说这话时面带微笑，谦和的声音下透着坚定和不妥协，“我属于另一代人。”

后来她通过学校的一次募捐活动偶然认识了画家弗兰茨 · 克莱恩（Franz Kline）（她至今仍然保存着克莱恩送给她的一小幅纸上作品）。他带她去了雪松酒馆（Cedar Tavern），格林威治村画家们的集聚地。在一定程度上，那次的经历帮助她下定了决心：如果说她终究要在什么事情上认真的话，就需要把对艺术的爱好变为专业。她去了哥伦比亚大学的研究生院学习艺术史。在婚姻摇摇欲坠时，她成立了一家小小的出版公司，经营便宜的限量作品……

如果没有决定在1968年去德国观看著名的卡塞尔文献展（Documenta），她的事业很可能便会止步于此。而在当时，对犹太人而言，去德国旅行仍然是充满顾虑的。在那一次德国之行中，她认识了布达埃尔。他的作品令人不安，充满诗意又带着尖锐的幽默，即使在欧洲也不好卖。但是她为之倾倒，并下定决心要在美国销售，即使前提是她必须开设自己的画廊。

而她也正是这样做的。她立刻就意识到挑战美国顽固保守的旧体系是如何艰难。业务状况很糟糕，她大部分情况下需要靠限量作品的销售来维持开支，画廊很多年里只有一个雇员，受邀前去的艺术家也只能安置在她自己家。

但是她的奉献精神逐渐吸引了越来越多的艺术家。这种对艺术的奉献也使得他们在几十年中都对画廊不离不弃，这在今天的艺术行业已经越来越罕见。就如古德曼女士所言，太多画廊 “忙于追逐对方的艺术家，然后很快丢弃他们，这无异于毁了他们。”

……

1990年，玛丽安 · 古德曼与芝加哥文艺复兴协会（Renaissance Society）的总策展人苏珊娜 · 盖茨（Susanne Ghez）观看艺术家托马斯· 斯特鲁特的新作品

“也许是因为，对历史，最终是艺术史的兴趣和学习，给我带来了深刻影响。我在成长过程中逐渐明白了艺术具有深深打动人心的力量。不知不觉中，我关注的都是对时间的思考、持久的价值或处境；以及社会和个人如何通过漫长的斗争，去找寻这些价值并表达它们。人类的创造力以及艺术憾动人心的力量，始终让我惊叹不已。这也是推动我与艺术家工作并且深深尊敬他们的原因。艺术是一种人类的需求，是灵魂和智力的表达，也是我们的社会中最后的几片道德阵地之一。它是人类精神最高境界的证明之一。”

— 选自1992年玛丽安 · 古德曼与《画廊杂志》(Galleries Magazine) 让 · 弗朗索瓦 · 谢弗里耶（Jean-Francois Chevrier）的采访对话

In 1977 Marian Goodman decided to open a gallery of her own at the age of 49, after being unable to find a gallery for Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers with whom she had started to work closely. At this time America’s knowledge of contemporary European art was scant due to a lack of travel and exchange of information between Europe and the United States. Prior to the establishment of her gallery, along with a few partners, Goodman helped run Multiples Inc., which published prints, multiples, and books by leading American artists, such as Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt and Roy Lichtenstein.

Ms. Goodman, who is renowned for her loyalty to her artists, gives very few interviews to the press but recently met The New York Times writer Randy Kennedy.

Marian Goodman, Art’s Quiet Matriarch, Hopes the Market Cools（Extract）

By Randy Kennedy DEC.16, 2016

(...)

At 88, Ms. Goodman carries herself with a quiet, unassailable authority that makes you think she could be a retired banker or New York City schools chancellor or a high-level diplomat, a job she aspired to before falling under art’s spell as a young, Upper West Side mother in the early ’60s.

Her gallery enters its 40th year next month as one of the most powerful in the business, despite having operated in few of the ways other galleries have as the contemporary art world morphed into the sleek financial behemoth it is now. Long on West 57th Street, it never branched out to SoHo or Chelsea. It never became a player in the auction market. And while largely rejecting the footprint-in-every-city expansionism of its peers — it set up a permanent space in Paris in 1999 and just added a new space there, after opening a London gallery only two years ago — it has still been able to attract sought-after young artists like Julie Mehretu and Adrián Villar Rojas.

The gallery became one of the most influential of its generation for a reason that might sound strange in today’s aggressively global commercial art world, fueled by fairs in every time zone. But when Ms. Goodman began, American galleries and museums, still basking in Abstract Expressionism’s ascendancy, were stubbornly provincial and resolutely nationalist. (“The only sense we had of Europe,” Philip Leider, the founding editor of Artforum magazine, once said, “was that it was a nightmare and nothing French was good.”)

Ms. Goodman, who grew up in a liberal, intellectual Manhattan household surrounded by art, loved Europe and saw in its studios and galleries immensely talented but vastly underappreciated artists and a largely untapped market, in that order. Many artists she went on to champion — the German painter Gerhard Richter; the British filmmaker Steve McQueen; the French conceptualist Pierre Huyghe; the Belgian poet-provocateur Marcel Broodthaers — have become critical stars.

Throughout all of her proselytizing, during many early lean years in which she was barely able to support herself, and later, as she gained esteem and wealth, Ms. Goodman has always operated resolutely in the background. She declines most interview requests, which she chalks up to intense introversion and to a general philosophy that art dealers — she prefers the less commercial-sounding “gallerist” — should never usurp attention from their artists.

In the last few years, Ms. Goodman has started to relent, lowering her guard. In a wide-ranging interview at her gallery, initiated at her request, she said she’s stepping out from behind the curtain mostly because “I think I’m not as shy as I used to be.” But the motivation seems to be as much a desire to impart some cautionary advice to a business she views in almost moral terms.

“I think money speaks more than it ever has before,” she said. “The auctions have been good for business, but I’m not sure it’s been so good for the art world.” Last month alone, 18 older works by Mr. Richter, one of the most admired living painters, changed hands at auction in New York for well over $100 million. Mr. Richter has called such prices “hopelessly excessive” and was known for years to sell sizable new works for less than $1 million. Even now, Ms. Goodman says, he has increased his prices, at her urging, only so much to make up for that disparity and discourage speculation; new paintings that would probably go for $20 million at auction are priced at well under half that, closer to $5 million.

Ms. Goodman said disdainfully: “There are people who buy and sell art as if it were shares in ranches or something like that.” And one of her most important jobs now, she said, is “to keep the work out of auction so that it’s dealt with by responsible people and by museums.”

If she leaves any legacy, she said, she hoped it would be her success in placing her artists’ work in public collections, a job she has done so well that it has occasioned criticism that she and four other prominent galleries — Gagosian, Pace, David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth — are overly represented in major museum exhibition programs. (The Art Newspaper found that artists from these galleries accounted for nearly a third of solo museum shows in the United States between 2007 and 2013.)

For Ms. Goodman’s part, a remarkable talent at choosing artists with critical staying power has played a role in that success. But so has her insistence on selling art mostly to collectors who pledge to donate their works to museums. Such sales sometimes make her gallery less money than other collectors would have been willing to pay.

“Few galleries, either in Europe or America, have the degree of commitment to museums that she has,” said Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate galleries in England. Mr. Serota has known Ms. Goodman since the 1970s and said he was aware of situations in which she had sold works to museum-friendly collectors for less money than she could have made otherwise, taking a smaller percentage for her gallery, sometimes very little, so that the artist would receive as much as he or she would have made from the bigger sale. (The gallery, as most do, usually splits sales 50-50 with artists.)

Asked for an example of steering works to museums, Ms. Goodman demurred, as she does on most questions involving the specifics of her business. But then she made a call and referred to a recent sale, to the financier and collector Donald B. Marron, of 20 Richter drawings that curators at the Museum of Modern Art badly wanted but did not have the money to purchase immediately. Mr. Marron, a former president of the museum, bought them and donated them “and MoMA has them in the building already.” She added: “There are a lot of people who want drawings by Gerhard. And we try to be fair. But museums are losing ground against collectors as prices get so high, so we work even harder to help museums get the pieces they want.”

In October, Independent Curators International, a highly respected contemporary art organization, gave Ms. Goodman its highest honor. Presenting her the prize, the collector Agnes Gund, another former president of the Museum of Modern Art, said: “I treat her gallery really as I treat amuseum. I go to be educated, to grasp ideas, to see what she sees.”

Ms. Goodman, whose father was an accountant and a collector of the painter Milton Avery, did not see her destiny as selling art until she was well into her 30s. She went to Emerson College in Boston with thoughts of journalism and also of working for the United Nations. Married at 21, she quickly had a son and a daughter and worked mostly volunteering for their school.

“I didn’t even have my own checkbook until I opened the gallery,” she said, smiling, speaking in a deferential sotto voce that belies an uncompromising tenacity. “I was from another generation.”

But she came to know the painter Franz Kline through a fund-raising drive for the children’s school. (She still has a small work on paper that Kline gave her.) He took her to the Cedar Tavern, the fabled Greenwich Village painters’ hangout. And partly because of that encounter, she decided that her amateur interest in art needed to become professional if she was ever going to be serious about anything; she went to graduate school in art history at Columbia University and, as her marriage was faltering, she opened a small business selling inexpensive editions, (...)

Her business might have remained at that level had she not decided, against grave reservations as a Jew, to travel to Germany in 1968 for the influential Documenta art exhibition. Through that experience, she came to meet Mr. Broodthaers, whose unsettling, poetic, acidly funny work was a hard sell even in Europe. But she was besotted and became determined to sell it in the United States, even if she had to open her own gallery to do so.

Which she did. And promptly found out how hard it was to bang her head against American parochialism. Business was terrible. She supported herself mostly with sales of inexpensive editions, had only one employee for many years and put up her visiting artists in her own apartment.

But it was a kind of dedication that drew artists to her. And it has kept them loyal over decades, in a way increasingly rare in a business where, as Ms. Goodman said, too many galleries “are busy chasing each other’s young artists and then just casting them off and ruining them.”

(...)

“Perhaps because my background was deeply marked by an interest in or study of history and then finally art history, I grew up understanding the power of art to profoundly touch one’s being. My thoughts were somehow about the perspective of time, about enduring values or conditions, and about society’s and the individual’s struggle throughout time to find them and express them.  And it is still a source of amazement to me – what a human being is capable of creating and how art can move people. It is what draws me to work with artists and to respect them so deeply. Art is a human need, an expression of one’s soul and intellect, and one of the very last moral positions in our society – an affirmation of the highest in the human spirit.”

From an interview with Jean-Francois Chevrier in Galleries Magazine in 1992

正  在  展  出  I  CURRENT EXHIBITIONS   

N E W  Y O R K

SUNSET DÉCOR

CURATED BY MAGALI ARRIOLA

JUNE 28 – AUGUST 25, 2017

P A R I S

CERITH WYN EVANS

JUNE 6  – JULY 28, 2017 

L O N D O N

ADRIAN VILLAR ROJAS

JUNE 5 – JULY 21, 2017

GIOVANNI ANSELMO

JUNE 5 – JULY 21, 2017

长按并识别二维码，关注画廊最新动态

微信：MarianGoodmanGallery

官网：http://mariangoodman.com