Daniel Lelong (1933–2025)
144June 12, 2025
Renowned French galleristDaniel Lelong, who forged lasting relationships with twentieth-century art world giants such as Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder, and Joan Miró, died in hospital on June 4 following an illness. He was ninety-two. His death was announced by Galerie Lelong & Co., which he cofounded. Lelong was working as a lawyer and a civil servant at the Conseil d’État in Paris when French art dealer Aimé Maeght asked him to help with the legal formation of the Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation, France’s inaugural contemporary art foundation and museum. Following its establishment, he left his job and joined Galerie Maeght. “[Aimé] needed someone to handle his private administration, to arrange the transportation of works, the insurance costs, etc. To take care of financial matters, really, which nobody was properly doing,” Lelong toldFlash Art’s Donatien Grau in 2014. “And during that time when I was working full-time with him, he proposed that I started collaborating with artists. Then, he first introduced me to Calder, and told him: ‘This is Daniel Lelong, I trust him fully.’ And Calder, with his unmistakable accent, replied: ‘The more you trust him, the less I trust him.’ That’s how it all started.”
Daniel Lelong was born in 1933 in Nancy, France, and trained as an attorney. The Conseil d’État was his first job out of law school. “I was quite passionate about what I was doing there: intellectually, it was very fulfilling,” he told Grau, but the task of helping Maeght establish his foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence proved to be a “thrilling adventure,” and Lelong never returned to his legal career. Among the artists he worked with at Galerie Maeght were Marc Chagall, Eduardo Chillida, Alberto Giacometti, Antoni Tàpies, and Bacon, Calder, and Miró. Though Miró was well known for his quiet, modest mien, Lelong saw in the artist a passion and a delight in the nuances of life that mirrored his own perennially positive outlook. “Miró kept taking risks, enormous risks, all his life. He took risks insofar as he used all kinds of materials and all kinds of forms, and also insofar as he considered chance as a blessing,” Lelong told Grau. “One day we went to his studio and there were sheets of paper on a table and, on the first sheet, they were traces of the cat’s feet. Most people would have been upset about wasting a sheet of paper; he was just extremely happy about it and said, ‘That’s amazing!’”
Following Maeght’s death in 1981, Lelong became the director of Galerie Maeght, now called Galerie Maeght-Lelong, in Paris alongside Jacques Dupin (who died in 2012) and Jean Frémon. “I did not want it to carry my name, but Dupin and Frémon told me: ‘The clients, people know your name. The gallery must carry your name,’” he told Grau. The gallery launched under its new moniker with an exhibition by Bacon and opened an outpost in New York in 1985. In 1987, the operation was christened Galerie Lelong & Co.; the gallery also operated a Zürich outpost for a time. Among the artists who showed with Lelong beginning in the 1980s were Pierre Alechinsky, Louise Bourgeois (whose 1985 retrospective, opening at the gallery’s Paris flagship and traveling to its Zürich branch, marked her first-ever European exhibition), Gunther Förg, Jannis Kounellis, and Kiki Smith. Through his sales acumen, Lelong helped numerous private patrons build their art collections; some of the works contained therein later found their way to museums including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; and Museo Sofia Imber in Caracas.
Apart from his long career as a gallerist, Lelong sat on the board of the Calder Foundation and authored the book Avec Calder; as well, he published several volumes of Miró’s catalogue raisonné cowritten by his daughter, Ariane Lelong-Mainaud. Lelong additionally initiated a partnership between the French Tennis Federation, the Roland Garros Committee, and Galerie Lelong, in which a contemporary artist is chosen each year to design the official poster for the French Open tournament. Among those selected to date are Eduardo Arroyo, Nalini Malani, Miró, and Tàpies.
Artnews’s Karen K. Ho reported that Lelong had stepped back from his namesake gallery’s day-to-day operations about fifteen years ago but remained close with Frémon until the end. “He lived a long, good life,” Mary Sabbatino, vice president and partner at Galerie Lelong & Co., who began working with the gallerist in 1990, told Ho. “It’s always sad, you know, but it’s not a tragedy. It really was a big life. He enjoyed his life. You could feel that all the time. He always had a smile. He was really happy being an art dealer.”