As far as reputations for civic-mindedness go, art dealers probably rank alongside schoolyard bullies. Then there's Michael Findlay. In his photo-rich memoir, Portrait of the Art Dealer as a Young Man: New York in the Sixties, Findlay documents art's grooviest era with wit and uncommon egolessness.
Findlay (The Value of Art; Seeing Slowly) was born in Scotland in 1945 and raised in London, where his interest in visual art was seeded. Long enamored of the United States, he used a pit stop at a Canadian university to reach New York in 1964, when the city's art world was "a far cry from the monetized, high-stakes glamor swamp it would morph into in the twenty-first century." Findlay landed at the Richard Feigen Gallery, where "I would learn the profession that has kept three fairly hot meals a day on my table... for, so far, sixty years."
A scenester before the word was coined, Findlay effortlessly paired work and play, as when he commissioned actor Dennis Hopper's portrait from Andy Warhol, a friend who sidelined as a matchmaker: Warhol convinced Findlay to date Factory superstar Jane Forth. (The author didn't need Warhol's encouragement to date Carly Simon.) Findlay largely reserves any peevishness for the commercialization of Manhattan's SoHo, a gritty, undiscovered neighborhood when he arrived and his professional base until the late 1970s. When he was starting out, Findlay explains with characteristic snap, "Anyone in the art world using the word 'market' would have been directed to Gristede's grocery store on Lexington Avenue." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer