Feature

Marks Nabs Johns

In 1987, when he was 24, Marks organized an exhibit of British Modernist art, and he and D’Offay brought it to a gallery in New York for a month. One day, Jasper Johns walked in and wanted to buy a Gaudier-Breszka drawing of Ezra Pound and then, after having a longer look around, several other pieces. Marks had the idea that it would be better for D’Offay to offer them to Johns in a trade rather than merely charging Johns money. “The end result was that we went to visit Jasper—it was when he was still on 64th Street—and he let Anthony pick out a drawing,” Marks says. “He offered Anthony a handful of works. They were all wonderful. We chose a beautiful watercolor.”

By the time Marks decided to move back to New York and, in 1989, try to open a gallery of his own, his art-world apprenticeship had given him the first prerequisite for the job: a tremendous Rolodex. To afford the $6,000-a-month rent for a 1,000-square-foot space on upper Madison Avenue, he began selling off some of the artworks he’d bought as a teenager. “There were quite a few things that had turned out to be very good investments, like things I bought for $700 several years earlier that were now worth $20,000, easily,” he says. “At the time, everything was going up exponentially by the minute. There were a number of things I subsequently bought back for considerably less.” It also didn’t hurt that his father was head of Sloan-Kettering, which gave him ready access to a lot of rich people who were patrons of the arts. His mother’s best friend, for instance, is Barbara Walters.

Marks discounts the role these family ties played in firming up his business. “Not that many of their friends are that serious about art that they were going to buy things from me,” he says. “What my parents had on the wall was nothing good. The one decent thing they had was a Picasso etching from the Vollard Suite. I kind of got rid of everything else. Now I’ve filled their house with art. Now they have beautiful things by the artists I show.”

The open-house tour moved into Minneapolis proper—a collector’s home in Kenwood, the stately neighborhood where Mary Richards, of The Mary Tyler Moore Show fame, lived. The owners were delighted to see Marks, and they warmly recalled once visiting his gallery, but he didn’t remember them. “I guess they bought stuff from me, I don’t know. It must’ve been those six Cy Twombly photographs on the landing.”

“It was nice to see a house with real furniture,” Bankowsky said. After visiting one house earlier in the day, he’d asked if anybody thought it had been decorated by the same people who did all the Radissons.

Back in the Town Car, Bankowsky and Marks discussed the day’s first celebrity sighting. “Did you see Dr. Spock?” Marks asked. “The guy who played him on Star Trek, he was there.”

Mister Spock, he was corrected. Bankowsky noted that Leonard Nimoy is an enthusiast for contemporary art. “He’s supposed to be, like, a really elegant older man.”

Marks gave this some thought. “If you’re talking about for an L.A. collector, maybe.” Late in the afternoon, after Marks and Bankowsky had returned to their hotel to get ready for the dinner at the Walker, they stopped off at the home of Judy Dayton. The collection that she amassed with her late husband, Kenneth Dayton, is the best in town. Kenneth came from the family that founded Dayton’s, an enormous midwestern department-store empire—now the Target Corporation.

Bankowsky recalled that there had once been a person named Dayton who worked at Artforum. “I think she was from somewhere out here,” he said. “She must be related.”

“They’re all related,” Marks suggested.

“She has to be,” Bankowsky said. “Because the entire time she worked at the magazine, she didn’t cash a single paycheck. After she left, somebody opened her desk drawer, and there were all the paychecks stacked up.” He indicated an inch or so worth of checks with his thumb and forefinger.

Judy Dayton was in her backyard, showing Ellsworth Kelly where she had installed his aluminum three-piece abstract sculpture, off to the side of the lawn amid evenly planted rows of locust trees. Down a short slope is a Claes Oldenburg banana built of yellow metal. She was wearing a necklace of enormous pearls that played off her winter tan.

“Hey there, fellas,” she said when she saw Marks and Bankowsky.

She went inside and returned with a tray of champagne glasses. Marks asked for ice water, and when everybody was seated around a patio table, he proposed a toast.

“To Ellsworth,” he said.

“To Ellsworth,” Mrs. Dayton promptly echoed.

Kelly, a spry and impish man in his eighties, took a sip of his champagne. “Mmmm. I’m very thirsty,” he said. “Look at these gentlemen in ties. Matthew, you’re wearing a tie.”

“I own a tie,” Marks replied.

Kelly has been one of his artists almost since the Matthew Marks Gallery was launched, in the fall of 1991. Marks’s first show was an exhibit of artists’ sketchbooks, which he’d procured simply by writing to every artist whose work he liked.

Almost everybody he contacted—including Johns, Kelly, Marden, Freud, Robert Ryman, Julian Schnabel, Andy Warhol, and Gerhard Richter—was happy to let him show their old doodlings and rough sketches. “Louise Bourgeois”—whose name Marks pronounces boo-geois—“didn’t say yes, she just sent an assistant over with a sketchbook right away,” he said.

“That was a real moment,” Kelly recalled. “The notebooks were all in glass cases. And a lot of the artists came in and wanted to see my sketchbook. It was a 1950 sketchbook.”

“It was fantastic,” Marks said.

“Richard Serra, he wanted to see the sketchbook,” Kelly said. “Matthew told me he wanted to see all 60 pages.”

“It was Cy, actually—he wanted to see everything.”

Marks did not put any of the sketchbooks up for sale. In asking to exhibit the artists’ work, he made no demands on their ongoing relationships with their respective dealers, and a handful of them eventually decided to have him represent and sell them on a full-time basis. It was an astute marketing strategy for a fledgling gallerist—but more than that, it was an idea that only somebody in love with the process of how artists make art could have thought up.

A more recent such labor of love from Marks is A Robert Gober Lexicon, a detailed paperback book he commissioned to accompany his recent Gober installation on 22nd Street. Two years in the making, the book, by Brenda Richardson, intricately translates and explains the influences of what many would consider a difficult roomful of sculpture, complete with diaper packages, a torso giving birth to an adult’s leg, and a headless figure on a cross spouting water from its nipples. This is, one has to admit, a far cry from the Damien Hirst T-shirts that Gagosian is currently selling at his gallery two blocks away.

As the Minneapolis junket made clear, Marks’s genius is his recognition that artists are ultimately more important than collectors. The informal business model of the Marks gallery is that where artists will go, collectors will follow, and this is what has positioned him as a successor to Leo Castelli. “He’s really interested in finding the best home for a picture,” Terry Winters says. “There have been cases where he’s held a painting rather than sell it because he thought the buyer was looking to turn around and sell it for a profit somewhere down the road.” Marks prefers to sell to museums, or to collectors who he knows will eventually donate the works to a museum. “Museums are where I want my artists’ work to be going,” he says.