ART DEALERS

Cork Street

London s principal art dealing season is from May through to October. In the 1990s there was a view that, on the whole, Britons were not big buyers of art and that dealers made their money from London being one of the great international cities.

Standard Life was the landlord of Cork Street. In the 2000s the insurance company sought to redevelop the street.

Location: Cork Street, W1S 3LW (orange, grey)

Website: http://corkstgalleries.com

Crane Kalman Gallery

In 1957 Andras Kalman (1919-2007), a Hungarian exile, opened at No. 178 Brompton Road a London branch of the previously Manchester-based Crane Kalman Gallery. The business was subsequently located on the King's Road and Sloane Street. Kalman represented Graham Sutherland, Ben Nicholson, and L.S. Lowry. a period working in the leather industry in Bolton had given him an appreciation of the beauty that could be found within the north-west's industrial environments. On one occasion he offered to take Lowry to The Ritz for lunch. The artist replied, D you think they d do me egg and chips?

Location: 178 Brompton Road, SW3 1HQ (purple, orange)

Website: www.cranekalman.com

Flowers

Angela Flowers opened the Angela Flowers Gallery in Lisle Street in 1970. The first exhibition was of works by the Surrealist Patrick Hughes. She opened Flowers East in Hackney in 1988.

Location: 82 Kingsland Road, E2 8DP (red, white)

21 Cork Street, W1S 3LZ (orange, white)

Website: www.flowersgallery.com

The Gagosian Gallery

In 2004 The Gagosian Gallery of the U.S. opened a gallery in London's King s Cross. The company had opened a smaller one four years earlier. In 2006 Gagosian opened another gallery in Mayfair.

Location: 6-24 Britannia Street, WC1X 9JD (red, yellow)

20 Grosvenor Hill, W1K 3QD (orange, turquoise)

Website: www.gagosian.com/locations/london-britannia-street www.gagosian.com/locations/london-grosvenor-hill

Gimpel fils

The Gimpels were a Franco-Jewish family from Alsace. They became art dealers and acquired kinship to the Wildensteins. In 1923 the two families dissolved their business relationship. Ren Gimpel married Florence Duveen, Lord Duveen's (d.1939) youngest sister.

During the Second World War the Gimpels placed the whole of their London gallery s stock in a lock-up. It survived the conflict unscathed. Ren's sons, Charles (d.1973) and Peter Gimpel, reopened their London premises in 1946. The artists whom the gallery has represented have included: Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and Ben Nicholson.

Location: 32 Davies Street, W1K 4NB (orange, red)

Website: www.gimpels.com

Lisson Gallery

The Lisson Gallery was founded in 1967 by Nicholas Logsdail. The artists whom he represented initially were regarded as being difficult , the likes of the conceptualist Sol LeWitt and the minimalists Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. His customers were mostly Europeans. With time he started showing work by British sculptors such as Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, and Bill Woodrow. In 1987 the advertising tycoon Charles Saatchi took to buying British art. He proved to be partial to their work.

In 1980 Anish Kapoor joined the Lisson's roster.

Location: 52-54 Bell Street, NW1 5AW

Website: www.lissongallery.com

Marlborough Fine Art

Frank Lloyd was born in Vienna. Prior to the Second World War, he made a fortune in the oil business and then started to collect art. Following the fall of France, he escaped to London. He served in the British Army. After he was demobbed, he and Harry Fischer, who had been an antiquarian book dealer, set themselves up as art dealers. Their business became Marlborough Fine Art. David Somerset (subsequently the 11^th Duke of Beaufort) joined the gallery as a partner. John Kasmin spent a period managing the gallery's contemporary art business.

Initially, the firm traded in modern classics such as the Impressionists. Fischer introduced to the U.K. the major Expressionists of the Brucke and Blaue Reiter variety, as well as Oskar Kokoschka. Subsequently, its emphasis shifted to Contemporary Art. Under Lloyd, the Marlborough did not develop artists. Rather, the gallery poached them once others had nurtured them. Its roster grew to include Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Nicholson, and John Piper. In 1958 the Marlborough Gallery started to represent Francis Bacon. It continued to do so until his death.

Historically, the big international art dealing families had divided their businesses between family members. In 1963 Marlborough opened a gallery in Manhattan. It became was the first art dealing firm to develop as an international business where all of the operations remained under the control of one office. As a result, Lloyd generated considerable suspicion about himself. Additionally so because he was open about the reason why he was involved in art was - he saw it as a good business for himself to be in rather than because he believed in art for art's sake.

In the mid-1980s Lloyd began to withdraw from the business, although he continued to make lightning visits to its premises until he suffered a stroke in 1992.

In 2002 the estate of Francis Bacon and Marlborough Fine Art settled an action that related to accounting details. John Edwards, the estate's sole beneficiary, had been told that he had lung cancer.

Location: 6 Albemarle Street, W1S 4BY (purple, red)

Website: www.marlboroughgallery.com

Waddington Custot

Victor Waddington was a Jew who moved from London to Dublin. In 1927 he opened a gallery that promoted modern Irish art. He represented Jack Butler Yeats. The artist died in 1957. Waddington then returned to London. He opened a gallery on Cork Street with his eldest son Leslie Waddington. In early 1960s the gallery mounted one person shows for members of the St Ives School.

Leslie was influenced by the works that were displayed in the Whitechapel Gallery's The New Generation: 1964 show. Two years later he opened his own gallery The Waddington Gallery. He was backed by a 25,000 loan from Alex Bernstein, the head of Granada Television. There was a rift between father and son but they were subsequently reconciled. Leslie represented the likes of Peter Blake and Andy Warhol.

In the early 1970s the collector Frank Cohen saw a work by Jim Dine that cost more than he could afford at the time. He offered Waddington an Elizabeth Frink he owned in part exchange. The dealer told to have it and pay for it when he could afford to.

In 1976 Leslie Waddington merged his gallery with Arthur Tooth & Sons. In the 1970s and 1980s British art did not sell as well as it had previously. Waddington opted to stay heavily involved with the sector. By the end of the 1980s he had five galleries on Cork Street. For many years, if Waddington shivered other dealers worried about catching colds. His 1994 announcement that he was scaling down the size of his British operations and opening a new gallery in Paris caused consternation in the British art world. His decision seems to have been a partial redeployment of his resources in response to the increasing internationalisation of the European art market in the wake of the abolition of the European Union's internal customs barriers two years later.

Waddington help to generate interest in the Young British Artists movement. During the second half of the 1990s Waddington chose to scale back the size of his operation. He shifted the character of his shows from contemporary art to classic modern art. In May 2004 the Momart warehouse in East London burned down. Waddington lost 150 works of art in the fire. Lord Bernstein died the following year. His 50% interest in the business was acquired by St phane Custot, a London-based art dealer. In 2010 the gallery was renamed Waddington Custot.

Location: 11-12 Cork Street, W1S 3LT (orange, turquoise)

Website: www.waddingtoncustot.com

White Cube

The White Cube gallery was set up in 1993 by Jay Jopling. The artists that the gallery has represented have included: Jake & Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Marc Quinn, and Gavin Turk. In 1993 White Cube acquired premises at No. 44 Duke Street, St James s. In 2000 White Cube2 opened at No. 48 Hoxton Square, east London. In 2006 White Cube opened a gallery in Mason's Yard, St James s.

In 2008 Hirst sold a large number of recent works through the auction house Sotheby s rather than through White Cube. At the sale Mr Jopling is reputed to have been one of the principal purchasers.

Location: 144-152 Bermondsey Street, SE1 3TQ

48 Hoxton Square, N1 6PB (blue, red)

25-26 Mason's Yard, SW1Y 6BU (purple, brown)

Website: https://whitecube.com

David Backhouse 2024