Emmerich, André 1924–2007

(Andre Emmerich)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born October 11, 1924, in Frankfurt, Germany; died after a stroke, September 25, 2007, in New York, NY. Art dealer and author. Emmerich was one of the only Manhattan art dealers of the 1950s and 1960s who accorded female artists equal footing with their male counterparts. A specialist in the genre of "color field painting," an abstract form that favored large, flat "fields" of color over specific shapes and detail, he showed the work of women like Helen Frankenthaler equally with that of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and others. He also exhibited the work of many other contemporary artists, such as David Hockney, Karel Appel, and John Hoyland. In Top Gallant, his huge sculpture park in Pawling, New York, he displayed the work of Alexander Calder, Anthony Caro, and other sculptors. At the height of his career, Emmerich, the grandson of a Paris art dealer, also operated satellite galleries, including one in Zurich, Switzerland. His advice to collectors was to select art by instinct and never purely as an investment, but his own instincts reportedly led him consistently to works of great value or potential. He encouraged the work of developing artists, soothed the feelings of even the most temperamental stars of the contemporary art world (artists and collectors alike), and managed the estates that older artists had left behind. Emmerich sold his gallery in 1996 but continued to manage it until 1998. One of Emmerich's secondary specialties was pre-Columbian art. He mounted occasional exhibits of antique treasures until import-export regulations made them impractical, but he continued to lecture on the subject. Emmerich, who had begun his career as a magazine journalist in Paris, also wrote two books on the topic of early American antiquities:Art before Columbus: The Art of Ancient Mexico from the Archaic Villages of the Second Millennium to the Splendor of the Aztecs(1963) and The Sweat of the Sun and the Tears of the Moon: Gold and Silver in Pre-Columbian Art(1964). Toward the end of his life he dabbled in autobiography, but only fragments appeared in print, in such periodicals as Art News and the Wall Street Journal.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, September 26, 2007, p. C14.

Times(London, England), September 29, 2007, p. 68.