50 Artists, 50 Years: Marian Goodman Gallery Opens a New Chapter

One of the biggest small galleries tips its hat to its conceptual history, while bringing new artists and their market-friendly work into view.

In 1977, when Marian Goodman opened her gallery in Manhattan with a show by the Belgian poet turned conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers, the asset managers hadn’t yet taken notice of the art world. There was some money around, of course. There certainly is now, as management of the Goodman Gallery has passed from the nonagenarian dealer to her five designated successors in waiting, and as it moves to an entire building in TriBeCa from its longtime home on West 57th Street.

The inaugural show of works by 50 artists over nearly 50 years, too, which opens Saturday, includes every one of the boldface names still on her art-history-heavy roster. But for Goodman, the money’s never been the point.

Since the 1960s, when she first entered the art world as a dealer of prints, Goodman has been attracted to — and has adeptly husbanded and promoted — austere, often conceptually motivated Europeans like Gerhard Richter, Broodthaers and Joseph Beuys.

It’s often grouped with the megas because of Goodman’s longevity, her importance and those boldface names, but the institution she built remains, as the lead partner, Philipp Kaiser, puts it, “one of the biggest small galleries” because it has resisted the kind of relentless global expansion that even many of its midsize competitors have found to be a business imperative in the last few years. Goodman now has locations in Los Angeles and Paris, but it took a while, and even this move within Manhattan was years in the making. (It never branched out to Chelsea and SoHo.) Rose Lord, a partner with the Goodman Gallery for 22 years, says that during her first decade on 57th Street they discussed moving somewhere with higher foot traffic potential every week.

That comparatively unworldly attitude, which feels like a throwback to the old days of ratty artists’ lofts and potluck dinners, makes the new exhibition, “Your Patience Is Appreciated,” as elegiac as it is celebratory. There’s minimal sculpture from the 1960s by the likes of Giovanni Anselmo (1934-2023), but now it’s rubbing shoulders with more obviously market-friendly conceptual work like a shiny abstract painting by Bernard Frize. The curation, a team effort under Kaiser’s direction, is thorough but spare, with art works given plenty of space. It’s at once a fingers-crossed birthday party for the gallery’s next phase and a death knell for the scene that gave it its start. But that’s OK, because that’s exactly the sort of dissonance that artists like Anselmo and Frize have in common.