Transformative Gallerist Marian Goodman Dead at 97
41Jan. 28, 2026
GalleristMarian Goodman, who reshaped the New York contemporary art scene and by extension that of the US, died of natural causes in Los Angeles on January 22. She was ninety-seven. Her death was announced by her eponymous gallery, which she founded nearly fifty years ago. An early champion of giants such asJoseph Beuys,Marcel Broodthaers,Pierre Huyghe,Anselm Kiefer, andGerhard Richter, Goodman played a crucial role in introducing these and other European artists to America at a time when “everyone was looking in the wrong direction,” as she toldArtnewsin 2000. For years one of only a handful of women dealers in the male-dominated gallery business, she was a tireless, loyal, and passionate advocate for cutting-edge artists, including those whose work many others deemed too challenging to show. Among these wereGiuseppe Penone, who treats human breath as a sculptural object;Tino Sehgal, known for his so-called constructed situations; andMaurizo Cattelan, who made headlines in 2024 when hisComedian, a banana duct-taped to a wall,fetched $6.2 million at auction.
“It’s her bravery which allowed her to succeed,” Turner Prize–winning British artistSteve McQueen, who joined Goodman’s gallery in 1997, told theNew York Times.“This is a woman in an environment where there weren’t a lot of women doing what she did. She was 5-foot-1. She had to put on a lot of armor, and I imagine there were some times when it was difficult to take it off. But she would die for artists. She was a warrior.”
Marian Goodman was born Marian Ruth Geller on June 15, 1928. Her father, an accountant and a first-generation Hungarian accountant, was an avid collector of the work of Milton Avery. Because of this, “I grew up understanding the power of art to profoundly touch one’s being,” Goodman later said. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree from Emerson College, Goodman married and started a family (she would divorce her husband in 1968). In 1963, she enrolled in Columbia University’s graduate art history program, where she was the only woman in her class. Two years later, she sold an Avery print gifted to her by her father and used the proceeds to found Multiples, a publisher of limited edition artists’ prints, books, and objects.
Originally publishing the work of American artists including Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, and Andy Warhol, Goodman in the late ’60s expanded Multiples’ purview to encompass European artists such as Beuys, Broodthaers, Richter, and Blinky Palermo, introducing American audiences to their work. Though some artists were brought to her attention by friends, she discovered many on her own. Diminutive and unassuming physically, she was an indefatigable investigator of new talent, her genuine interest in artists drawing them to her. She was unafraid to meet them on their own turf, for example zipping around downtown 1960s Manhattan on the back of Pop bad boy Larry Rivers’s motorcycle.
In 1978, exasperated by her inability to secure gallery representation for Broodthaers, Goodman launched Marian Goodman Gallery at 38 East Fifty-Seventh Street. Broodthaers died before the inaugural exhibition featuring his work opened. In 1984, Goodman moved her gallery to 27 West Fifty-Seventh Street, where it remained a beacon for decades, even as the New York art scene moved downtown, first to Chelsea and then to SoHo. She retained the address in part, she said, because her European artists liked the location. Though Goodman remained resolutely more interested in discovering new and interesting artists than in expanding her gallery’s global footprint, she opened a space in a tiny pied-a-terre in Paris in 1995, moving into a larger space in the Marais in 1999. She opened a London outpost in 2014, which shuttered in 2020 amid the ripple effects of Brexit and the Covid-19 crisis. Though the gallery garnered sustained interest from wealthy collectors, Goodman made it her mission to get her artists’ work seen by as many members of the public as possible, and to that end placed numerous works in major institutions.
Goodman’s eye for new artists never faltered, and she continued to sign new talent into the 2010s. “I take a long time to decide to add an artist to the gallery because it is a very serious commitment, maybe even more so for the artist,” she told SFAQ in 2014. “I don’t want to grab artists because they are hot. I have always added artists to the gallery before they were well known, or while they were in a more quiescent phase.” Among the rising artists who joined Goodman’s stable in later years were Adrián Villar Rojas and Julie Mehretu.
Goodman in 2021 implemented a succession plan, and shortly thereafter stepped away from the daily business of running the gallery, which inaugurated an LA outpost 2023 and moved its New York headquarters to TriBeCa the following year.
“It is among the artists whose work I like that I have found the qualities I value from my own experience,” said Goodman. “A humanistic concern, a culture-critical sense of our way of life, a dialectical approach to reality, and an artistic vision about civic life.”
Goodman is survived by her children, Michael Goodman and Amy Kiefer Goodman.