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Oral history interview with Arne Glimcher, 2015

Creator: Glimcher, Arnold B.
Project: Robert Rauschenberg Foundation oral history collection.
(see all project interviews)
Phys. Desc. :Transcript: 28 pages
Location: Columbia Center for Oral History
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Biographical Note

Arne Glimcher, born in 1938 in Duluth, Minnesota, is an art dealer, gallerist, film producer, and film director. In 1960, Glimcher founded the Pace Gallery in Boston. In 1963, he moved the gallery to New York City. In 1980, he sold Jasper Johns's Three Flags to the Whitney Museum of American Art for $1 million, the first time a work by a living artist had ever commanded seven figures. Glimcher has produced and directed several films, including The Mambo Kings, which earned him an Academy Award nomination

Scope and Contents

Glimcher gives an account of the small size of the art community in the 1960s, a time when everyone knew everyone else, and it was hard to get by as a dealer because there were so few collectors. Glimcher speaks about meeting Rauschenberg and his peers, his involvement in Experiments in Art and Technology and 9 Evenings, and his early encounters with Rauschenberg at exhibitions. Glimcher describes the change for Rauschenberg in the marketplace in the late 1980s and 1990s and recalls how he made a beeline for Rauschenberg as Bob's relationship with Knoedler was ending. Glimcher reminisces about Rauschenberg's relationship with Castelli and Sonnabend, reflects upon the responsibility of dealers to their artists, on the innocence in the narrative that existed in NYC in the 1960s, and on how the emergence of a serious market changed the energy in NYC and the energy in artists themselves. Glimcher details the moment Rauschenberg comes to Pace, his travels to Captiva to select work for the shows, and the Rauschenberg sales he negotiated to museums and public institutions

Subjects

Access Conditions

Copyright by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, 2015

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