Art: One for the Show

To all outward appearances, the owner of Manhattan’s Artists’ Gallery was behaving last week like the Madman Muntz of the art dealers’ world. On the walls of his Lexington Avenue walkup were hanging drawings by 204 artists. Side by side with relative unknowns were works by such top U.S. moderns as Lyonel Feininger, William Baziotes, William Cropper, Philip Evergood and Josef Albers worth up to $250. Each drawing was marked at a flat $25. The only hitch: on none of the drawings was the artist’s signature visible, and the gallery refused to say who had drawn what. The bargain show was just another way for the gallery’s businessman-founder, Hugh Stix, 48, a former Harvard Fine Arts honor graduate and now a full-time wholesale grocer, to underline his credo: “Somebody has to like art for what it is, not just for the artist’s name.”

Undrunk Martinis. Among New York City’s 150-odd art galleries, Hugh Stix’s Artists’ Gallery is unique. Running it as a nonprofit venture, Stix reverses the traditional art dealer’s one-for-the-money, two-for-the-show policy, hangs pictures and takes no commission, shows mainly unknowns, and does everything in his power to pass along his discoveries to other dealers. All the drawings in the current show were donated by grateful alumni or well-wishers to celebrate the opening of the gallery’s 20th season.

Stix started his gallery in a Greenwich Village loft during the Depression. His aim was to help out artists who, then as now, were galleryless. The opening was a shock: with 500 invitations out and 72 chilled martinis and Manhattans ordered up from the bar downstairs, Stix sweated through 2½ hours before his first—and only—guest showed up. The guest turned out to be an artist wanting a show for his watercolors. But today the gallery is a must for art critics and gallery owners on the hunt for dark horses.

Successful Blizzard. Over the years, Stix has started more than 100 artists, including Adolph Gottleib, Ben-Zion, Ad Reinhardt, James Lechay and Richard Pousette-Dart, on their ways to regular dealers. One day in 1947, a one-time clown turned waiter, Walter Philipp, showed up with armfuls of clown paintings. Stix decided to give him a try, found himself with a hit on his hands.

Collectors struggled through New York City’s worst blizzard to buy out the show on the first day, in the next two days came back to buy every painting Philipp could dredge out of his studio.

But even a show that sells nothing is not a washout for Stix. Says he: “A show is a necessary part of the development of any artist. He needs to communicate.” Last week Stix was developing a lot of artists: on the first day of his new show, 75 drawings were sold; by week’s end only 77 were left. And to Hugh Stix’s great delight, the relative unknowns were selling as well as the anonymous bignames.