From Central Park to the Global Art Stage – Exclusive Interview with Michael Klein
- Brainz Magazine
- May 20
- 7 min read
Michael Klein's expertise lies in his role as a private art dealer and freelance, independent curator for individuals, institutions, and arts organizations. Today, Michael Klein Arts works with a diverse group of artists, estates, galleries, and non-profit institutions, providing management, curatorial, and other consulting services. At the same time, the company serves institutional as well as private collectors, focusing on developing collections of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. The company also organizes traveling exhibitions both in the United States and abroad.
Michael Klein, Owner & Director
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
I grew up in NYC on the Upper West Side when subways were your school bus and Woolworth’s lunch counter was your school cafeteria. My parents, both refugees to this country, worked six days a week, but on Sundays, our family day, my mother would prepare lunch, and afterward, they would walk me and my brother across to Central Park and into the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue. There, my brother would race to see the Medieval armor, but I just wanted to wander and look at paintings. At a very young age, I could tell Monet from Manet and why. Art became a love of mine, never thinking that in later years it would become a career. (According to my European-born parents, the two career paths for me were either medicine or law.)
Eventually, the family grew, another brother arrived, and so we moved first to Queens and then to Long Island. In 1961, they bought a ten-room home on a quarter acre for $21,000.00, a small fortune then. Always concerned for our education, one winter they announced plans for a trip, a cruise, they explained. They took us from our suburban school and put us on an ocean liner across the Atlantic Ocean for a three-week voyage to the Mediterranean. The route took us to ports of call in North Africa and southern Europe. The experience was extraordinary and changed me forever. We visited Casablanca, Barcelona, Monte Carlo, Genoa, Naples, and then Pompeii. A short drive from Monte Carlo to Nice, my mother took us to the park where the Gestapo tried but failed to kill her. At each stop on the cruise my father found a car and driver and we would see the sites from the perspective of a local who would explain the city and culture to us and then find for us a neighborhood eatery where we would enjoy the food of the region: I was introduced to smelts in France and espresso in Italy and palleja in Spain. The images from that trip have never left me, burned into my memory, even decades later. Then, in 1963, the year my sister was born and my grandfather died, we went again. Our house was filled with purchases made abroad: linens, glassware, carvings, and a large round brass tray from Morocco that served as a coffee table in our den.
Ten years later, I was off to university in Washington, DC, having been rejected by the art schools I applied to. It was there at George Washington University that I was formally introduced to art history. After my first class, which met on a Friday afternoon taught by a young graduate teaching assistant. Taught using slides in a dark classroom where you could smoke, I was immediately hooked. The topic became my major. I took as many art history classes as I could. The next year, I transferred to an art school, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After a year, I decided art making was not my forte rather reading about it and writing about it. Determined to study art history, yet I couldn’t decide where to go to school. The options were to go back to George Washington University or apply to NYU. Trying to decide, I stood on the subway platform and decided to leave the decision to fate: if the downtown train came first, it was NYU, and if the uptown train came first, then back to Washington, DC. The downtown arrived, and off I went to NYU, applied to NYU, was accepted, and began to study there with a fantastic group of professors: Robert Rosenblum, Lucy Sandler, Dore Ashton, and Carol Krinsky. NYU allowed me to take classes at other local schools, and I spent a year studying with the brilliant scholar Leo Steinberg.
In my ambitious way, I also joined the ISP program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. There, I got my first taste of organizing an exhibition, Frank O’Hara, A Poet Among Painters, and also working at the new Downtown Branch Museum in the Wall Street area. And my introduction to many contemporary working artists began with lectures by Richard Artschwager, Alfred Leslie, and Malcolm Morley. Later, I would be a tour guide on the weekends at the museum. The year I was to graduate, I was nominated for a Danforth Prize, representing NYU in the national competition. I asked my advisor why me, not having a perfect 4.0 average. She replied, “You ask the best questions.”
In 1975, I began my studies for my Master’s degree at Williams College in their relatively new graduate art history program. My parents were stunned by this decision of mine since they still insisted on my attending law school. I had received a full fellowship from the college, which meant no tuition and a yearly living stipend. The program, headed by George Heard Hamilton, a Manet scholar, was one of my first instructors. In my second year of graduate school, I organized my first exhibition for the Williams College Museum of Art entitled FOUR ARTISTS. It was the first exhibition to bring together these four emerging artists: Alice Adams, Alice Aycock, Jackie Ferrara, and Mary Miss. Later, I also studied modern art with Sam Hunter and 18th-century art with Anthony Clark. Hunter offered me a place at Princeton to finish my PhD, and sadly, I turned him down and instead went to New York in 1977 to begin my professional career as the Director of a relatively new gallery on 57th Street, Max Protetch Gallery. I had also managed, in between school, to intern at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, mentored there by Martin Friedman, Director, and it was there I met the sculptor Siah Armajani, whom I write about and later worked with at Protetch Gallery. The gallery job introduced many in the New York art world, and beyond, collectors, critics, and curators.
By 1982, I was on my own at 30, starting as an agent for artists, working first from home, then opening an office at 611 Broadway in Soho. I had an apartment on the Upper West Side. The rent for the two-bedroom place was then $400 a month, hard to believe in today’s market. Opening an office at 611 Broadway in Soho: Fortunately sold a sculpture by Paul Thek to a trustee of the Des Moines Art Center and a work on paper by Robin Winters to a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, Agnes Gund, and my business began. I initially worked with Pat Steir, James Casebere, Robin Winters, and the performance team of Ulay and Marina Abramovic. As the business grew and my work was being recognized, I was featured in the New York Times and Sculpture Magazine, both about this new role of agent in the art world.
What initially drew you to the world of fine art?
Two high school art teachers, Ed Katz and Saul Rosenblum, allowed me to be engaged with art making and studying art. They arranged museum visits like the one in 1969 to the Whitney Museum, where I was overwhelmed by the work of Dan Flavin and Robert Morris. Then, on my travels to Europe in the summer of 1970, Venice blew my mind, then in Paris the Picasso Museum, and in Vienna the Kunsthistorisches audits room of Bruegel paintings. But it was a studio visit with one of Rosenblum’s colleagues that most impressed me, the life and work of a living artist. I was intrigued, and that fascination with people who make art has never left me.
Tell us about your greatest career achievement so far.
Two events that are key to who I am today. First, opening and running my own gallery in New York's Soho area for nearly 20 years. Building and promoting a group of remarkable emerging artists, discovering talent, creating exhibitions, developing both commissions and sales of their work, collaborating on museum exhibitions for them, and receiving critical attention from the press. I very much invited myself and built a significant business and following. Before it became popular, I represented and promoted many women artists: Rita McBride, Beverly Semmes. Elaine Reichek, Dona Nelson, Kathryn Lynch, and Jackie Ferrara.
In 1999, I became the first in-house curator for Microsoft, building their corporate art collection, affectionately referred to on the company’s Redmond campus as “the art guy”. We focused on acquiring works by emerging and mid-career artists. I also initiated, developed, and managed a rigorous education program for employees and their guests, including tours of the collection, lectures by artists, and symposiums on collecting.
Tell us about you now.
Today, I wear multiple hats: I function as a private dealer working directly with some artists and slowly putting together a new stable of painters and sculptors to represent online. I write for several magazines and also work as an independent curator. My two big projects are books: All About Town, The Art Scene in New York in the 70s, and The Women Who Made Modern Art Modern. The first is a survey of my work in the 70s and the artists I championed, who charted new territories. The second is based on an exhibition I organized in 2016, focusing on several women art dealers whose enterprising work and impressive careers had been overlooked. I’m also working on a monograph of the career of a sculptor, Robert Mallary.
Art was never just a career for me, it was the language I used to find myself and to help others do the same.
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