“The Legacy of Jill Kornblee, Woman Art Dealer from the 1960s” Exhibition
David Nolan Gallery
This event has ended.
Jill Kornblee was born in New York City in 1920. She studied at Bryn Mawr College and later took art history courses at the Institute of Fine Art at New York University. In 1961, with two partners, she bought the Barone Gallery on Madison Avenue near 79th Street. She soon took over her partners’ interests and began operating the gallery under her own name.
With an eclectic taste and a keen eye for new talent, Kornblee gave shows throughout the 1960s and 1970s to a number of artists whose work is now well known. Among them was the British painter Howard Hodgkin, whose first solo exhibition in this country sold out at the gallery in 1973. Others included Dan Flavin, Malcolm Morley, Rosalyn Drexler, Al Hansen, Janet Fish, Nina Yankowitz, Alex Hay, Richard Smith, Robert Graham, Rackstraw Downes, Mon Levinson, and Michael Mazur. Kornblee had close friendships with other dealers whom she also worked with, among them Leo Castelli, Ivan Karp, and Betty Parsons.
In the mid-1960s, the gallery moved to 58 East 79th Street, and then later in the 1970s to 20 West 57th Street, where it remained until Kornblee’s retirement in 1986.
One innovative exhibition at Kornblee Gallery in 1966 was Hybrid, a collaboration with Richard Feigen Gallery, then located at 24 East 81st Street, in the same building occupied by David Nolan Gallery today. Conceived by English artists Peter Philips (b. 1939) and Gerald Laing (1936-2011), represented by Kornblee and Feigen, respectively, Hybrid was the first consumer research project related to art.
In 1965, Laing and Phillips put together a basic kit of colors, textures, and sample geometrical forms, with possible configurations, as the ‘questionnaire’ - in the form of a Duchampian box. Over a one-year period, they queried over 100 ‘art-literates’, including the leading contemporary gallery owners, critics, collectors and curators on all sorts of preferences they had for art. The computers of Bell Telephones in New Jersey handled the analysis of the responses and Laing and Phillips built an art-object from those averaged-out desires and expectations which they solicited. The final product was a sculpture with diagonal colored stripes and a wavy, clear perspex top; generically it was instantly recognizable as an English ‘New Generation sculpture’. The items used in the process, together with two full-steel Hybrids and 25 desk models, “conversation pieces” as Laing called it, were shown at the Kornblee Gallery in 1966.
Laing and Philips first considered producing a painting together but decided instead to form a market research company, ‘Hybrid Enterprises’, with the aim of producing an art object determined by the demands of the informed consumer. They constructed two kits containing samples of colors, patterns, shapes, and materials - from canvas, paint, wood, and fabrics through to modern synthetic and industrial materials such as plastics and metals - and devised a questionnaire with which they conducted interviews in various cities, including New York, London, Chicago and Los Angeles. The interviewees were offered, for example, the choice between ‘abstract’ or ‘figurative’. While their main interest was in seeing the concept through, the resulting editioned sculpture (1966) was, as Laing himself later acknowledged, ‘an assemblage of trendy 60s notions’. It incorporated aluminum, plexiglass and a fluorescent tube within a wedge shape, the striped pattern at the side producing a chevron image with the aid of its reflective metal surface. Phillips saw it as an amusing gesture about the art world but Laing went much farther in acknowledging it as a satirical attack on the manipulativeness of the art market.
“In 1964 you wore a lightweight suit and it was all get-up-and-go. The artist had a role in society and he sprang up carrying his zipper bag full of slides and photos, wearing short hair and a pair of droopy sunglasses, and humming ‘He’s a rebel’… If there was a problem, then technology and money could solve it. Sure, after all, we’d just started to conquer Outer Space… Hybrid was a pure expression of that time.”
“Hybrid was a precursor of much activity in the area of conceptual and process art which followed. It was indeed intended as a satirical attack on business methods, market research, and hard sell. The gesture, the fact of doing it, was to us the important part. At first we did not even intend to make an end product at all. The manufacture of the Hybrid art object was simply a final flourish, almost an afterthought. The manner of operation, however, was carefully presented. We assessed two immaculate boxes containing samples of material, color, shape, texture, pattern, and fluorescent light, had answer forms printed and, snappily dressed and wearing blue and white Hybrid buttons, went around asking people to describe the components of dimensions of their ideal art object… the point was to describe the components, not a finished item.”
“At the end of our research period we had the following information: 1. Choice of 2 or 3 dimensions; 2. Average dimensions; 3. Number and choice of materials; 4. Number and choice of colors; 5. Number and choice of textures; 6. Amount and type of pattern; 7. About 140 drawings.”
“All the results of the survey together with plans for the finished Hybrid were assembled on a blueprint by Terry Stewart [a British architect and friend of Laing who was also living in New York at the time], and it is fascinating to study because it is, at the very least, a description of taste and aspiration in New York in the mid sixties. For instance, the choice was overwhelmingly in favor of a three dimensional object; and yet the survey was conducted well before the Jewish Museum Minimal Art exhibition of 1966, which was the first major sculpture show of the period. Similarly, the choice of materials was fairly exotic, and yet most galleries at that time were showing oil paintings on canvas.”
- Gerald Laing, Hybrid, unpublished manuscript, date unknown
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from September 08, 2022 to October 22, 2022