History’s 10 Dealers Who Changed the Way Art Is Shown and Sold

Paul Durand-Ruel

In his memoirs, Paul Durand-Ruel labeled himself the first Impressionist art dealer. That wasn’t quite the truth, but he was certainly key in cementing the 19th-century movement’s place within art history. Born in 1831 in Paris, Durand-Ruel took a big gamble on artists like Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro, putting his full weight behind their then-scandalizing portrayals of nature and French society. In the end, even though the art he showed was lambasted, especially by critics in Paris, he found success, mostly abroad, in selling his artists’ works.

Durand-Ruel inherited his gallery from his parents, but it wasn’t until the late 19th century that he put the business on the international art world’s radar. In 1871, having departed Paris for London amid the Franco-Prussian War, Durand-Ruel was tipped off to the work of Monet and Pissarro. He began buying up their paintings en masse and, not too long after, also began purchasing works by Édouard Manet and others in his cohort.

One of Durand-Ruel’s game-changing approaches to art dealing was to find innovative ways of puffing up the reputations of those in his stable. He frequently staged one-person shows, making sure that his presentations stood out amid the staid group shows that were in vogue at the time. He also bid up the prices of works by the Impressionists at auction, ensuring that he would set new records for them. And when he opened up shop in New York, he was able to tap a market that was more receptive to Impressionism than France ever was. “We would have died of hunger without Durand-Ruel, all we Impressionists,” Monet once remarked.

Joseph Duveen

Long before there were the Larry Gagosians and David Zwirners of the world, there was Joseph Duveen, whom some consider to be the world’s first mega-dealer. A cunning businessman who worked with art historian Bernard Berenson to locate top-notch works, Duveen assembled a collector network that included Andrew Mellon, Calouste S. Gulbenkian, and John D. Rockefeller Jr., and was able to make his New York and London galleries a destination for anyone with even a passing interest in Old Masters. He found success by tapping a resource that was long ignored by European dealers: U.S. collectors, whose purchases allowed him to thrive, even during the Great Depression. “Europe has a great deal of art,” Duveen once said, “and America has a great deal of money.”

The son of what biographer Meryle Secrest called “the most sought-after decorator in London,” Duveen grabbed attention early on, when, in 1905, he paid $4 million—about $121.4 million in 2021—for the collection of Rodolphe Kann. He made back his money and then some by selling works from Kann’s holdings—including Rembrandt’s 1653 painting Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art—to collectors. Such high-profile purchases would continue to define his career, right up until his death in 1939. In the early ’20s, for example, he sold Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy (ca. 1770) to the Huntingtons, a Californian-based collector couple, for $778,000. At the time, it was the most expensive painting ever sold, and it has since become a cornerstone of the museum they established in San Marino, California.

Periodically, Duveen courted controversy. Henry Clay Frick sued Duveen after the dealer wrongfully claimed he had purchased fakes from another dealer, forcing Duveen to pay him $575,000. (Frick later continued to be one of Duveen’s clients.) Meanwhile, he generated a scandal in London, where, at the British Museum, in a gallery bearing his name, he had the Elgin Marbles scrubbed clean of traces of color left on them. No matter, however: In a famed 1951 profile, the New Yorker labeled him “the most spectacular art dealer of all time.”

Peggy Guggenheim

An influential collector in her own right, Peggy Guggenheim established an offbeat New York gallery, Art of This Century, that differed from other enterprises on this list for several reasons. For one, Art of This Century was not entirely commercial—it also hosted presentations of Guggenheim’s collection rich in modernist art, although notable sales did take place there. For another, Art of This Century was extremely short-lived, with just five years in business during the 1940s. But even during that time, it became a go-to gallery and a watering hole for the art-world elite of the era, and has been credited with upholding women artists at a time when the field was dominated almost exclusively by men.

Art of This Century wasn’t Guggenheim’s first gallery. In 1938, she opened Guggenheim Jeune Gallery in London and staged notable presentations of works by Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, and others there. Fearing the violence and upheaval of World War II, she soon shuttered it and relocated to the U.S. There, her Art of This Century gallery staged quirky presentations continuing that avant-garde lineage. There were distinct rooms for kinetic art, Surrealism, and abstraction, and shows such as “Exhibition by 31 Women,” featuring work by Dorothea Tanning, Hedda Sterne, and Frida Kahlo, charted new terrain.

Indirectly, Art of This Century also contributed to the growth of Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock got his first solo show there in 1943, and from it, the Museum of Modern Art bought his painting She-Wolf, made that same year. When Guggenheim relocated to Venice in 1947, she closed her gallery and helped her artists get representation at Betty Parsons Gallery, which would become known worldwide for its Abstract Expressionism shows during the 1950s.

Edith Halpert

When Edith Halpert opened her New York gallery in 1926 in Greenwich Village, there were few other enterprises of its kind. (Initially titled Our Gallery, it was later rechristened the Downtown Gallery.) By the time the gallery closed in 1973, the art scene in the U.S. looked very different, and it was in part thanks to Halpert’s hard-won success. Born in 1900 in Odessa, Russia, Halpert made a point of supporting the growth of American artists, who at the time were sidelined, even by New York gallerists, in favor of European modernism.

Under her aegis, artists such as Ben Shahn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and William Zorach thrived, and a collector base for U.S. contemporary art grew, with Abby Aldrich Rockefeller among her clients. “She set out to promote American art because she believed in it and realized that if this country was ever to have an American art, it had to come out of American artists,” Zorach once said. “American art owes her a great debt.”

Halpert championed work that was given short shrift by the country’s biggest institutions: folk art, paintings by artists of color, overtly political pieces. Crucially, she supported Black artists, most notably with the 1941 exhibition “American Negro Art.” She also helped form the Negro Art Fund, which aimed to place works by Black artists in museum collections. The Downtown Gallery went on to show Jacob Lawrence’s famed “Migration” series in its entirety; Lawrence praised Halpert for fighting to keep the series together, rather than selling it in pieces. A businesswoman who focused on those outside the mainstream, Halpert acts as a model for “generations of women dealers, curators, and art world figures,” as her biographer Lindsay Pollock wrote in the 2006 book The Girl with the Gallery.

Julien Levy

In the postwar era, the New York scene stole Paris’s thunder and became the art capital of the world. As curator Ingrid Schaffner wrote in a 2003 essay, Julien Levy Gallery aided in that shift with its presentations of avant-garde art in the 1930s and ’40s. At Julien Levy’s New York space, Surrealist art abounded, and photography and film—two mediums whose artistic status was not yet cemented—were given prominence. Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Frida Kahlo (with whom Levy was romantically involved) were mainstays there, and pop cultural objects were shown alongside high-concept art. “The activities of the Julien Levy Gallery spark electric,” Schaffner wrote.

Levy opened his gallery in 1931, after having worked in the rare books business. Its first show was a tribute to Alfred Stieglitz (who also appears on this list), a prime influence on Levy and the driving force behind the dealer’s interest in photography. That same year, it opened what has sometimes been considered the first exhibition of Surrealist art in the U.S. In the years that followed, Joseph Cornell, Lee Miller, René Magritte, and Henri Cartier-Bresson got some of their first major New York solo shows there.

In 1948, artist Arshile Gorky, a giant in New York, died by suicide. In response to his friend’s death and the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Levy shuttered his gallery. “I was against those oversize paintings that took up a whole wall, and I disliked the chauvinism that said American painting was the best,” he once said. He announced his retirement, headed to Connecticut, and never returned to art dealing.

Pierre Matisse

The son of Henri Matisse, Pierre Matisse also got his start as an artist, even studying with the Fauvist painter André Derain. Then he decided to focus on the market instead and become an art dealer. The New York gallery that he founded went on to become legendary, boosting artists like Balthus, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, and Yves Tanguy. But Pierre did so largely independently of his father, whose work was never the subject of a solo show at his New York gallery, which opened in 1932.

Unlike many gallerists throughout history, Pierre Matisse was timid—he initially did not make himself much of a presence at his gallery, and he lacked the bravado of figures like Joseph Duveen and Ambroise Vollard. Yet his reputation far exceeded his persona, and by the end of his life, he had amassed a significant collection. He also transformed the Museum of Modern Art’s holdings, helping the institution acquire some of the prime works in its collection by Henri Matisse.

When Pierre Matisse died in 1989, dealer Eugene V. Thaw told the New York Times, “It may be a cliche, but this is truly the end of an era, both in art dealing and in taste. Matisse personified the best of the judgment that brought great European modernist art to the States, and his name stood for a standard of quality that is now a thing of the past.”

Paul Rosenberg

Having gotten his start buying art for his father’s business at 18 years old, Paul Rosenberg ascended to the top of Paris’s art scene in the early 20th century, signing exclusive deals with Picasso, Braque, and Léger, the day’s leading Cubist artists. (He took over representation of these artists from fellow Paris dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who had previously signed exclusive deals with those artists.) But to gain such success, he did something somewhat unconventional—he made sure to sell work by the giants of art history alongside new art. This ensured that he would turn a profit, even if the more experimental art went unsold. At his gallery, paintings by Théodore Géricault and Gustave Courbet mingled with fresh works by Marie Laurencin and Amedeo Modigliani.

Critics of the era recognized the space’s importance. Pierre Nahon once called Rosenberg’s Paris gallery “an essential meeting place for everyone who wants to follow the development and the work of the innovative painters.” Yet Rosenberg’s taste-making only went so far. He was famously opposed to Surrealism, and when Salvador Dalí approached him about the prospect of having a show there, Rosenberg denied him, saying that he did not “exhibit work by clowns.”

In 1940, Rosenberg’s gallery was changed forever. Because Rosenberg was a Jewish dealer, the Nazis sought to disenfranchise him and his gallery, taking 400 paintings from his inventory in the span of two years and seizing control of his Paris venue, where the Nazis began mounting anti-Semitic shows. After World War II ended, Rosenberg got his gallery up and running in New York, and devoted himself to getting back his looted art—a task that his family is still involved in today.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

During the early 20th century, if you wanted to buy the finest Cubist artworks, there was nowhere else to get them other than Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s Paris gallery. Born in 1884 in Mannheim, Germany, Kahnweiler almost singlehandedly shaped the history of Cubism, thanks, in part, to the exclusive deals he had inked with four of the movement’s key artists: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger. Though critics at the time were mainly confused by these artists’ quasi-abstractions, which fracture people, places, and things into crisscrossing planes and shapes, Kahnweiler saw something special in them, and passionately advocated for these works up until his death in 1979.

Kahnweiler was most deeply connected to Picasso, whose studio he first visited in 1907. Bowled over by the just-finished painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Kahnweiler struck up a working with relationship with the artist and included him in the gallery’s inaugural show later that year. Alongside his work, he showed paintings by Fauvist artists such as Maurice Vlaminck and André Derain. With the Thannhausers, Gertrude Stein, and Sergeï Shchukin among its clients, his gallery prospered until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when Kahnweiler was declared an enemy of the state and forced to shut down operations. His vast holdings were also dispersed by the French government. After a period working as a translator and a critic, Kahnweiler reopened his gallery in Paris in 1920. In 1941, his wife’s sister purchased his gallery to avoid it being shuttered amid an anti-Semitic crackdown in Nazi-occupied France.

Alfred Stieglitz

Unlike almost everyone else on this list, Alfred Stieglitz’s primary occupation was not as a dealer—he was a photographer first and foremost, and a pioneering one, too, at that. At the same time as Stieglitz was revolutionizing his medium, though, he was also showing his work and that of his colleagues in his own gallery. That space, 291, was opened in New York at the behest of artist Edward Steichen, and it became a destination for avant-garde art. Virtually no other gallery in the city had the same focus at the time. Although modernist art was imported from abroad for its presentations—Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse got their first New York solo shows there—291’s programming acted as proof of a rich scene cropping up in the United States.

As might be expected of Stieglitz, 291 devoted itself to photography, particularly the work of the Photo-Secessionists, who broke new ground by translating modernist painting and sculptural techniques into photographic images. The shows mounted at 291 may have been groundbreaking, but they didn’t necessarily lead to sales—especially because, in Stieglitz’s eyes, good business was less important than good art. As the American scene caught up to Stieglitz, and as the gallery’s financial situation came to seem increasingly untenable, Stieglitz shuttered 291 in 1917. Its final exhibition was a solo show by Georgia O’Keeffe, whom Stieglitz later married.

Yet it was not the end of Stieglitz’s time as a gallerist: in 1925, he opened what he called the Intimate Gallery, another New York venue focusing on American art, with O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and John Marin as its mainstays. That space was later renamed An American Place, and it remained in operation until 1945, the year before Stieglitz’s death.

Ambroise Vollard

“It was probably [Ambroise] Vollard, more than any other single figure, who set the pattern of artist-dealer-patron relations in the halcyon age of the avant-garde,” New York Times critic Hilton Kramer once wrote, describing a dealer who, alongside Paul Durand-Ruel, shaped the French art scene during the late 19th century. In some ways, Vollard picked up where Durand-Ruel left off, specializing in Post-Impressionists like Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. But unlike Durand-Ruel, Vollard was not a nurturing force—he was a businessman first, keen to sell work and make a fortune.

Gauguin was among the artists who fell prey to Vollard’s business acumen. In 1895, the dealer refused to buy Gauguin’s paintings of Tahiti, enraging the artist. Then Vollard went on to buy up major works by Gauguin that were on the market at record-breaking prices. Having effectively made the Post-Impressionist famous, Vollard sent the artist a modest stipend when he made sales of Gauguin’s art—a small price to pay, considering the money the Paris gallery was raking in.

Without Vollard, art history would look very different. Cézanne, by no means a successful artist when Vollard began showing his paintings, became a smash hit with collectors, and Georges Rouault, who signed an exclusive deal with the gallery and was given a studio by Vollard, went on to become one of Europe’s top modernists by the time he died in 1958. Artists recognized Vollard’s importance: Picasso, whose 1910 painting of the dealer is one of the most famous images of him, once said that “the most beautiful woman who ever lived never had her portrait painted, drawn or engraved any oftener than Vollard.”