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Listen to our latest podcast episode featuring Michael Findlay, influential art dealer, director at Acquavella Galleries, and author of Portrait of the Art Dealer as a Young Man, published by Prestel.
His memoir offers a captivating, firsthand account of New York's vibrant downtown art scene in the 1960s and '70s, when Findlay directed one of SoHo's first galleries. Through personal stories and vivid anecdotes, he shares his encounters with Andy Warhol, John Baldessari, Hannah Wilke, and numerous creative figures who defined this transformative era in American art.
Throughout our conversation, Findlay shares previously untold stories about the birth of SoHo's gallery scene and offers rare insights into how today's art market evolved from those experimental beginnings. For collectors, artists, and anyone interested in cultural history, Findlay's perspective on what made this era so distinctive is invaluable.
“The memoir is actually not so very different from [my other books, The Value of Art and Seeing Slowly]. It's perhaps telling the story of how I got to have the opinions or the feelings, or to put it pretentiously, the philosophy, that I expressed in the first two books.
That comes from active seeing, not from an academic background.”
– Michael Findlay
About the Author
Michael Findlay is a leading art dealer who has directed Acquavella Galleries in New York since 2000. Previously, he was International Director of Fine Arts at Christie's and ran his own influential SoHo gallery. He introduced American audiences to Joseph Beuys and Sean Scully while launching the careers of numerous contemporary artists.