Perls Galleries
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Perls Galleries Perls Galleries was a New York City art dealership and exhibition space active from the mid-20th century that specialized in modern and avant-garde painting, sculpture, and works on paper. It played a significant role in introducing European modernists and promoting American Abstract Expressionists, Pop artists, and Minimalists to collectors, curators, and institutions. Through exhibitions, catalogue essays, and sales, the gallery intersected with major figures, museums, and private collections across the United States and Europe.
History
Perls Galleries was founded in the late 1930s and expanded during the 1940s and 1950s amid shifts driven by collectors, dealers, and émigré intellectuals such as Peggy Guggenheim, Alfred Stieglitz, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Pierre Matisse, Paul Rosenberg, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, André Breton, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Dore Ashton, John Rewald, Leo Stein, John Russell, Douglas Cooper, Waldo Frank, Lionel Trilling, Harvard Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Princeton University Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Seattle Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, National Gallery, London, Vatican Museums influencing exchange of works. The gallery navigated wartime displacement, postwar reconstructions, and the rise of American art markets alongside auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's and galleries such as Gagosian Gallery, Pace Gallery, Leo Castelli Gallery, Kootz Gallery, Peridot Gallery, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Kunsthalle Bern, and Galerie Maeght.
Founders and Key Personnel
Founders and principals were active interlocutors with collectors, critics, and artists including Hugo Perls, Klaus Perls, and later directors and advisors who corresponded with figures such as Peggy Guggenheim, Philip Johnson, Alfred Barr, Thomas Hoving, Henry Geldzahler, James S. Brown III, Ambroise Vollard, Boris Pasternak, Ernst Beyeler, Ira Spanierman, Samuel Kootz, Betty Parsons, Sidney Janis, Rudolf Arnheim, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Isamu Noguchi, Louise Nevelson, Mary Miss, Nicholas Serota, Thomas Messer, Arnold Lehman, Eli Broad, Paul Mellon, Peggy Guggenheim, Gerald L. B. Smith, Marcel Duchamp, Edwin Denby, Ralph Coburn.
Locations and Architecture
Perls Galleries operated in multiple Manhattan addresses and occasionally in European venues, situating itself among cultural nodes like SoHo, Manhattan, Chelsea, Manhattan, Upper East Side, Greenwich Village, Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, Eighth Street, and proximate institutions such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Columbia University, New York University, Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, Fashion Institute of Technology, New School for Social Research, American Academy in Rome, British Museum, Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and National Portrait Gallery (London). Gallery interiors reflected midcentury display practices influenced by architects and designers like Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, I. M. Pei, Denys Lasdun, and Philip Johnson's Glass House conversations about light, proportion, and circulation.
Exhibitions and Artists Represented
Perls staged monographic and group exhibitions of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Max Beckmann, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brâncuși, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, Jean Arp, Yves Tanguy, Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, Philip Guston, David Smith, John Chamberlain, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Joseph Cornell, Ellsworth Kelly, Georgia O'Keeffe and others, and promoted estates and ateliers tied to Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Kunstmuseum Basel, Centre Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne, National Gallery of Art acquisitions. Exhibition catalogues referenced critics and historians such as Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Rosalind Krauss, T. J. Clark, Griselda Pollock, Michael Fried, Robert Hughes, Linda Nochlin, John Elderfield, Nicholas Serota, Richard Dorment.
Collections and Notable Sales
The gallery acted as intermediary for private collectors and institutions including Eli Broad, Paul Mellon, Peggy Guggenheim, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Samuel Kress, Florence Blumenthal, Albert C. Barnes, G. David Thompson, Joseph Hirshhorn, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Marcel Duchamp Collection, I. M. Pei Collection, Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection, Leon Levy Foundation, Fred and Mary Koch Collection, Isabel and Marcel Duchamp Collection, Nelson Rockefeller, David Rockefeller, Phillip Johnson Collection, E. G. Bührle Collection, Axel Vervoordt Collection, Gerald L. B. Smith Collection, and sales that entered public collections at Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, National Gallery of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art and international institutions such as Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Rijksmuseum, Hermitage Museum.
Influence and Critical Reception
Critics and curators discussed Perls Galleries in venues and journals alongside personalities like Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Robert Hughes, Rosalind Krauss, Michael Fried, T. J. Clark, John Berger, Leonard Bernstein, Susan Sontag, Arthur Danto, Linda Nochlin, Paule Vezelay, and in publications connected to The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, The Burlington Magazine, Apollo (magazine), The Guardian, The Telegraph (London), Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Zeit, Corriere della Sera, La Stampa, El País, Der Spiegel, Vogue (magazine), Harper's Bazaar, and institutional exhibition programs at Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou.
Legacy and Succession
Perls Galleries' operations, archives, and sales histories influenced later dealers, auction practices, and institutional collecting strategies connected to Sotheby's, Christie's, Phillips de Pury, Bonhams, Gagosian Gallery, Pace Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, Skarstedt Gallery, Acquavella Galleries, Sperone Westwater, Barbara Gladstone, Gladstone Gallery, Paul Kasmin Gallery, Marian Goodman Gallery, Matthew Marks Gallery, Michael Werner Gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, Lisson Gallery, White Cube, Saatchi Gallery, Zabludowicz Collection, Rubell Family Collection, Menil Collection, Dia Art Foundation, Kasper Konig, Walter Hopps, Harold Rosenberg, Richard Avedon, Clement Greenberg and influenced university galleries at Yale University Art Gallery, Princeton University Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums, Columbia University Art Galleries, Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Category:Art galleries in New York City