Tibor de Nagy Gallery

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The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is an art gallery in New York City, USA. It is was involved in the discovery of many of the Second Generation Abstract Expressionist Movement’s most important artists and also representational artists of the era including Grace Hartigan, Alfred Leslie, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Red Grooms, Kenneth Noland, Fairfield Porter and Larry Rivers.

[edit] History

The start of the gallery came in the unlikely form in 1949 of the “Tibor de Nagy Marionette Company” which was the brainchild of John Bernard Myers who was an avid collector of the arts, author and puppeteer and also Tibor de Nagy who was a former Hungarian Banker. Despite the fact that the first company was a financial failure it laid the path for the start of the fine art gallery that was to come as a result of the marionette companies strong support from members of the First Generation Abstract Expressionist Movement including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock who urged Mr de Nagy and Mr Myers to open a commercial art business bearing the name “Tibor de Nagy Gallery.” With the agreement of financial backing of the galleries exhibition space on East 53rd Street in New York for a period six years from the English art collector Dwight Ripley the gallery was formed with Tibor de Nagy and John B. Myers as Co-Directors.

The formation of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery would lead to two other art related businesses associated with the gallery including the Watson-de Nagy Gallery in Houston, Texas and Tibor de Nagy Editions which became noted for bringing about collaborations between visual artists and poets including John Ashbery, James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara of which Tibor de Nagy Editions would become their first New York Publisher.

In the 1960s, the Tibor de Nagy Gallery relocated to its present location at 41 West 57th Street in New York City and begin to shift its stables emphasis from abstraction to realism hosting the first New York solo exhibitions for now notable Realist artists including Rosemarie Castoro, Ian Hornak and Jonathan Lasker.

In 1993, Mr Tibor de Nagy died, although the Tibor de Nagy Gallery lived on under the direction of Andrew Arnot and Eric Brown. The Gallery remains open currently under the original Tibor de Nagy name at its 41 West 57th Street location with a stable of artists reflecting both the galleries early support of Abstract Expressionism and its later support of Realism and Representational Art.