Veteran Dealer Betty Cuningham Mounts Her ‘Last Picture Show’

She has dealt in Modernist masterpieces for 50 years, but it’s a tough market for gallerists.

A couple of weeks ago I saw A Foreigner Called Picasso, an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, a commercial dealer, that was so good I wrote two stories about it. The art was fantastic. The exhibition was provocative, succinct, intellectually sound, and empowering, and by “empowering,” I mean it promoted a one-on-one experience with art unburdened by curatorial blather.

Why, I thought, haven’t I written more about dealer exhibitions? I certainly write plenty about art fairs and auctions. I adore dealers, who shepherd careers and collections and influence public taste. They’re often connoisseurs. They suffer fools, some grudgingly but almost all diplomatically. With the exception of big corporate dealers, or a dealer who grabs a booming artist’s secondary market, they don’t strike oil every day. Dealers sell art, but they deal with artists, who are often fun and entrancing but sometimes not.

This brings me to Betty Cuningham, who is closing her gallery on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side at the end of April. Her farewell exhibition, The Last Picture Show, opened last week. After the gallery closes, Cuningham will have an online presence.

Cuningham has been a presence and a paradigm on the New York gallery scene since the 1970s. She’s dogged in her advocacy of her artists, in awe of their talent, accommodating of their eccentricities, and honest and generous with her peers. She’s the gold standard.

Cuningham’s gallery is comfortable and classy, with a long gallery on the street level and a big, square gallery down an L-shaped platform staircase. Distressed wood floors are warm and cozy. Art is hanging in the office, which is open to the gallery. Cuningham is a warm, open person with the softest of selling techniques. Everything about her gallery space is warm and open. The rent is $20,000 a month, her lease expiring, and it’s pegged to rise further into the ether. Cuningham has been a gallerist since the early ’70s. She thinks it’s time.

The Last Picture Show isn’t a blockbuster exhibition, though all the art is very, very good. It’s more of a memoir or a diary composed not of words but works of art by almost 20 artists she has represented, advanced, and stewarded. The art in the long, street-level gallery is small and quietly elegant. There’s Tavernacci, a signature still life by William Bailey (1930–2020), painted in 2014. Bailey is known for his quiet still lifes of ceramic vases arranged on shelves and his palette of muted rose, white, and different blues and browns. He’s a representational and also an abstract artist. His subject is pottery but, more to the point, it’s contrasting shapes, curves, and tones. Bailey didn’t pose his subjects. He imagined what he painted, which augmented the dreaminess of his pictures.

Next to it is Stanley Lewis’s Yard in Summer, from 2015. Lewis (b. 1941) studied with Bailey but paints in an entirely different and zaftig, yarny style. His work looks like a relief map pumped with steroids producing not muscles but a muscular paint surface. By the front door are two drawings from 2023 by Rackstraw Downes (b. 1939), a brilliant painter of landscapes and cityscapes. He’s best known for panoramic views, but these are drawings of the interior of his studio, with his art-making equipment and the wheelchair and walker he needs now. Then there’s a watercolor by Andrew Forge (1923–2002), a pointillist.

Four artists, four styles. Each is an intellect. Downes, in his day, was a renowned art critic, as was Fairfield Porter (1907–1975), whose work isn’t in the show but linked to Cuningham through secondary market sales. She doesn’t have a narrow aesthetic. She doesn’t specialize in Minimalism or Photorealism or Arte Povera. She likes art with brains, not cerebral art necessarily but art that’s slow food, beautiful and thoughtful.

John Lees’s Bathtub, from 1972–2010, and Joan Snyder’s Woodstock, from 1990, are calmly audacious. Lees (b. 1943) reminds me of Albert Pinkham Ryder’s spooky subjects and dense, fuzzy paint surfaces. Snyder (b. 1940) does the wildest art in the exhibition. She uses paint, seeds, twigs, dirt, and pieces of burlap or silk or wool to create, among other subjects, abstract garden scenes. Woodstock is 60 by 72 inches, not quite life-size but big. It depicts a standing group, probably outdoors and probably at a cocktail party.

Next to her work is Greg Drasler’s Primary #1, from 2023. It depicts a group of faceless men, seen from their backs, wearing shaped felt hats, which were once ubiquitous. Drasler paints enigmatic motifs as metaphors, but for what? Jostling shoulders provide movement. Hats provide pattern. There’s difference in uniformity. Drasler calls his hat paintings “a pickpocket’s dreamscape,” a sardonic take, but it’s one of many.

I love the work of Elizabeth Enders (b. 1939). Her Freighter, from 2018, is in the exhibition. Enders paints lots of different subjects. Her paintings are serene and lessons in mindfulness. Like Bailey, she depicts Apollo’s vision of harmony. Her motifs seem to have the power of levitation.

Mia Westerlund Roosen’s Maquette for Columns, from 2023, is a small but august thing. It’s a smaller version of an 8-foot-tall Columns shown at the gallery in 2021.

Cuningham has represented lots of sculptors over the years, one more sign of her variousness. Westerlund Roosen (b. 1942) does lots of different work. She has made big outdoor trenches, small wax sculptures, concrete monoliths, and biomorphic objects, making her hard to categorize. Columns are as old as religious and palace architecture. They propose fixity, and so do her Columns in the exhibition. Columns are riffs on human forms, too, stable, upright, firm, and assertive in opposition to nature. Her Columns are asymmetrically fluted as if they’re moving ever so gracefully. They’re made from cotton soaked in polyester resin, a medium new to me.

Cuningham’s career hasn’t been linear. No dealer’s is. Her first gallery was on Prince Street from 1972 to 1982. She worked for Hirschl & Adler from 1982 to 1998 and for Robert Miller Gallery from 1998 to 2004. Betty Cuningham Gallery started at 541 W. 25th Street in 2004. She moved to Rivington Street in 2014.

In the mid ’60s, fresh from college, she worked alongside the art historian David Huntington and Harper’s Magazine editor Russell Lynes on the Save Olana campaign. Olana, the magnificent home of Frederic Church in the Hudson Valley, faced the bulldozer after the death of the last Church descendant to live there. Huntington and Lynes rallied support for New York State to save the property, enlisting the key intervention of Nelson Rockefeller, then the governor, in getting an appropriation through the legislature. She then worked on the main American committee raising money and awareness after the disastrous 1966 flood in Florence, Italy.

For the aspiring arts professional, these were two causes made in both Hell and Heaven, with hellish weather in Florence, looming subdivision for Olana, and the heavenly chance to work with great people on great causes. When Cuningham decided that selling art and working with artists were a calling, she was well prepared. Along the way, she got an M.A. in art history from Hunter College. Among her teachers were Leo Steinberg, William Rubin, Ad Reinhardt, and Howard Davis, each a visionary in ways so different they together prove that Cuningham, who came out alive, is a rigorous thinker.

In the world of dealers, artists come and go. Most of the artists in The Last Picture Show had other dealers in their careers, but all settled on Cuningham. Before I was the director of the Addison Gallery, I was a 19th-century-American-art specialist working at the Clark, whose artists were all dead by 1900. Then, as a casual observer of the post-war art scene, I would have said that the Bill Traylor estate, Bailey, Downes, Philip Pearlstein, and Porter were the names most associated with Cuningham.

And then there’s Graham Nickson (b. 1946), who starts The Last Picture Show with Et in Arcadia, painted this year. Et in Arcadia Ego is Nicolas Poussin’s famous 1637 painting of idyllic bliss, so it’s safe to say that Nickson references the picture, which depicts three shepherds and a shepherdess in a lovely rural setting — Arcadia — studying the epitaph “Et in Arcadia Ego” on an old tomb. “And in Arcadia, I am” it translates literally but, more to the point, it means “even in Arcadia,” a flawless world, “I am,” implying “no more,” or gone for good. One of the shepherds casts a shadow on the tomb as he points to the words.

Cuningham’s last exhibition begins with new work. I love it. Good things are timeless. Nickson’s painting is a beach scene with a figure of a woman raising her beach blanket on the left, another woman stretching against a big rock on the right, and, in the middle, a man doing a headstand. There’s no tomb, no epitaph, and no “ego.” We’re left with an enigma, as are art and life. Nickson’s picture starts the exhibition rather than ends it. I’d say the contemplation of good art is an arcadian thing to do. Nickson’s painting is sensual and it’s wacky. It raises questions for us to puzzle.

As a metaphor for endings, Et in Arcadia isn’t a bad one. All of the artists in The Last Picture Show are old, and some are dead. Cuningham’s taste is timeless, but a question is put on the table. Is her last exhibition one more sign of an era ending? Being a dealer, especially doing it alone and with a handful of artists, is a hellacious proposition. Rent is one thing, but then there’s the big corporate galleries, which take a lot of the air out of the market. More and more artists sell on their own, thinking they’ll cut the middleman — the dealer — out of the storyline. Auction houses are competition, too.

In ye olden days, there was a class of educated, experienced theatergoers who saw lots of the new things and also revivals. They lived in Manhattan or the suburbs or, like my parents, saw shows in New York and also at the Shubert Theater in New Haven, the last tryout stop before Broadway and near where we lived. This class is mostly gone, as is the class of educated, experienced art buyers, buyers who weren’t exactly connoisseurs but had good taste. They’re a diminished class along with owners and users of good silver. “I have to polish it,” cries the loser who is content to eat like the philistines of yore. Cuningham’s artists have no single look or style. Uniting them is mystery, finesse, and resonance. Her artists all stand for something, as does Cuningham.