The Whole Hantai Story: Why Galleries Are Doing Museum’s Work

The New York Times’s story about private galleries employing museum curators to mount selling shows tells the story of Sukanya Rajaratnam’s Mnuchin Gallery exhibition that was the subject of an Artelligence Podcast (above) where you can here more about the artist and the way the exhibition came together:

The Simon Hantaï exhibition on view at Mnuchin Gallery in New York through Friday has also paid off handsomely for the gallery. The co-curator is Alfred Pacquement, who retired as director of the Pompidou Center in Paris in 2013 shortly after organizing a large retrospective of Mr. Hantaï, a Hungarian-born artist. “Hantaï’s one of the most important abstract painters in postwar Europe, and I want to help make his work better known in the States,” said Mr. Pacquement, who has worked with the artist’s family since his death in 2008. He added, “I gave the gallery my contacts so they could do the best possible show.”

The exhibition includes 14 canvases from the 1960s (when Mr. Hantaï developed his signature “pliage” method of painting folded canvases on the floor), drawn from private collections and the artist’s estate. Of the four paintings on consignment, two have sold for over $1 million. (One was bought by a private donor as a gift to the Metropolitan, the museum’s first Hantaï painting.)

“Having Alfred involved has lent real credibility to the project and gives our American clients, who may think of Hantaï as a relatively new artist, a sense of confidence and security,” said Sukanya Rajaratnam, a partner in the gallery.

Blurring the Museum-Gallery Divide (NYTimes.com)