To say Allan Schwartzman is one of the art world’s most successful working advisors would be missing the point. He is among the architects of his field, helping to pioneer a holistic style that most top-end advisors strive to embody today. To his clients, Schwartzman is equal parts consultant, critic, curator, and friend.
The Baer Faxt’s own Josh Baer is also an old friend. The two men, whose relationship goes back four-and-a-half decades now, recently caught up for a long chat about Schwartzman’s path to becoming an advisor and the many lessons he’s learned since. See an edited version of that conversation below.
Courtesy of Schwartzman&
Most art advisors are capable of envy and jealousy when it comes to others in the field. Allan Schwartzman has had the kind of success that would typically leave me, a fellow advisor, copping to those emotions. But in his case I have to defer to an even greater and more prominent feeling of admiration.
I first met the slightly-younger-than-me Allan around 1980, when he was at the New Museum, which he helped create in 1977—he was the first employee—under the legendary director and founder Marcia Tucker. She wasn’t the only woman to have a profound effect on Schwartzman’s life and career.
“My two mentors were Linda Nochlin, who was my advisor in college, and Marcia Tucker—two of the greatest figures at the juncture of art and feminism. Both of them had a spirit of adventure and valued collectivity and collaboration. At the same time as being great nurturers, both Linda and Marcia had a rigor and discipline I continue to aspire to.
In the ‘70s, there was no market for the work of young artists, so there was nothing to lose. (And I was a kid at the time — I became a curator when I was 19). With this came a sense of great freedom of thought and of being. The me-ism that set today’s art market on its course in the 1980s was alien to me—even as it has informed my work and given me a vivid backdrop around which to learn and to write.”
In 1980, Schwartzman went on to work as a gallery director for another legendary woman: Barbara Gladstone.
“While we were nearly 20 years apart in age, Barbara and I began in the art world around the same time in the late 1970s. For most of the years that followed we were the closest of friends. The art world was still pretty small then. You would go to an opening and it felt like half the art world was there. That world centered on artists, and their centrality formed my value system.
Working with Barbara, I quickly learned that I wasn’t an art dealer. I am told that I can be very effective in encouraging a client to buy a work of art—but that’s because I only do so when I believe in the work. A great art dealer has to be convincing about everything they offer, whether or not they personally believe in it.”
As I was getting set to open my own gallery in 1985, I realized that I wasn’t aware of even the most basic business strategies beyond knowing artists and wanting to sell their work. So I hired my friend Allan for 1 day and $100 to teach me some of the ins and outs.
“I don’t remember this! Was I helpful? What I remember most about you and I at that time was that my apartment on 10th Street was across from what had once been your mother’s home and studio. A few years later, you and I were on the board of Franklin Furnace together. That was a complicated board to serve on, but I formed some of my strongest relationships on it, including with the late art dealer Marian Goodman, who did some wonderful things on my behalf, and the artist Lawrence Weiner, who I miss greatly. He had remarkable passion and conviction.”
While I went commercial, Schwartzman went another direction: art market journalism. He wrote for the New York Times and The New Yorker while authoring “Street Art,” a key 1985 book about graffiti artists and others. But we soon came together again, when he asked me to help sell artworks owned by his family.
More than a decade later, Schwartzman pivoted again, setting off en route to becoming the star art advisor we know him as today. His first big break came in Dallas with collector Howard Rachofsky—a unique situation, given the client’s commitment to donate works to the Dallas Museum of Art.
“I was writing full time from 1984 until 1997, when Howard invited me to work with him on evolving what was then a nascent art collection. He had just finished building his house in Dallas, designed by Richard Meier, and had been working with the brilliant press strategist Andrea Schwan, who had taken me on one of my most memorable art trips in 1995—the opening of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
Howard had known my writing and said he liked my perspective. He invited me to Dallas to see the house, and asked me to walk through the collection with him and share my thoughts. I asked if he wanted my frank response, even if it wasn’t supportive, and he said he did. We went through the collection work by work. In many instances he had bought lesser works by name-brand artists. Most collectors want you to tell them how perfect their choices are but I didn’t do that. Howard was more interested in learning why I thought some of his choices were off than in having his vanity indulged. That was the beginning of an amazing relationship between me and Howard—and, eventually, his wife Cindy—that continues through today.
With Howard, we wandered into collecting in areas that were greatly undervalued at the time, such as postwar Italian art; postwar Japanese art, including Gutai and Mono-ha; and Korean Dansaekhwa. We were the only Americans pursuing these areas at the time, which meant that we were able to assemble museum-quality collections. Experts have told me that the Gutai collection we built is the finest outside of Japan and the Mono-ha collection is the finest anywhere in the world.”
Schwartzman’s agency grew and went on to work with great museums—we did big Chris Burden business with my favorite global art institution, Brazil’s Inhotim—then added representing artists—including, for a period, my mom, Jo Baer.
“In 2004, Bernardo Paz invited me to visit him at the former farm on which he lived outside the rural town of Brumadinho in Minas Gerais, the mining region of Brazil. He lived in a modest house beside a garden designed by the great landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, and a few small buildings he had built for the display of contemporary art, including one designed for a single piece by Tunga, and another for the work of Cildo Meireles. Bernardo had a great ambition to create a legacy museum that would combine contemporary art with a botanical garden he was in the process of planting and he wasn’t quite sure how to achieve this.
In the mid-2010s, Schwartzman co-founded the advisory firm Art Agency Partners. By 2016, when he and his partners Amy Cappellazzo and Adam Chinn sold the agency to Sotheby’s for $85 million, Schwartzman had shown the market just how much art advisory was in demand.
“I built my advisory practice one client at a time. In 2014, Amy Cappellazzo, who had been one of the heads of the contemporary art department at Christie’s, asked me if I would be interested in forming a partnership with her. The result was Art Agency Partners. Less than two years later, Amy and Adam Chinn, who had subsequently joined us, arranged the sale to Sotheby’s.
In another pioneering move, Allan was an early player in Saudi Arabia, working on projects like AlUla. What’s next?
