Andre Emmerich, an influential Manhattan art dealer whose gallery was an early champion of the 1950s and ’60s school of Color Field painting and who also mounted important shows of pre-Columbian art, has died at his home in Manhattan. He was 82
His wife, Susanne, who confirmed her husband died Tuesday, said he had had a stroke early this month.
Suave, erudite and faultlessly tailored, Mr. Emmerich presided over an extensive stable of American and European contemporary artists from 1954 to 1998, showing elegant presentations in his pristine, understated uptown galleries.
In addition to Color Field painters including Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler, he represented, among others, David Hockney, Sam Francis, Anthony Caro, Al Held, Herbert Ferber, Karel Appel, Pierre Alechinsky and John Hoyland.
And in an era when top galleries still held to quotas for female artists, Mr. Emmerich didn’t play along. He mounted the work of a number of women besides Frankenthaler, among them Beverly Pepper, Anne Truitt, Miriam Schapiro and Judy Pfaff.
He also handled many artists’ estates, including those of Milton Avery, John Graham and Hans Hofmann. In its heyday, Mr. Emmerich’s gallery had branches in SoHo and Zurich.
In 1982 he took an unpromising site in Pawling, N.Y., and fashioned it into a 150-acre sculpture park called Top Gallant. He ran it until 1996 and displayed large-scale works by Caro, Alexander Liberman, Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero and George Rickey as well as the work of emerging younger artists like Keith Haring. A swimming pool had its inside painted with mock waves by Hockney.
In 1996, Mr. Emmerich sold his gallery to Sotheby’s. After a run of 45 years, it was closed in 1998.
Andre Emmerich was born Oct. 11, 1924, in Frankfurt, Germany, to Hugo and Lily Emmerich. Feeling the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany, they took Andre, at age 7, and his younger sister, Nicole, to Amsterdam. In 1940, when he was 15, the family emigrated to the U.S.
For 10 years he lived in Paris, where he was a writer and editor, working at Realites and Connaissance des Arts magazines, the Paris edition of The New York Herald Tribune and Time-Life International. But, interested in art and following the example of his mother’s father, an art dealer in Paris, he left publishing to return to New York and represent artists.
His early choices were much influenced by the critic Clement Greenberg, who favored the Color Field painters and Caro sculptures. In an excerpt from his autobiography published in The New Criterion in December 2004, Mr. Emmerich acknowledged Greenberg’s influence but pointed out that the gallery also showed work by artists who did not have that critic’s support, like Hockney, Francis and Held.
Although some of his artists were what might be called hot properties, Mr. Emmerich did not approve of buying art for investment. “Art has much more to do with the gut than with anything else,” he once told an interviewer.
A meticulous man, Mr. Emmerich did not hesitate to show his displeasure when a staff member left the top off a marking pen. On the other hand, Caro said, speaking by telephone from his studio in England, Mr. Emmerich showed great aplomb when dealing with his sometimes-trying stable.
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“It was amazing how he got on all of our wavelengths,” Caro said. He added: “He was loyal. He tried to do a hard thing, bringing difficult art to the public and never worrying how it was received. If it didn’t go, he stuck with it.”