Daniel Weinberg (1933–2022) – Artforum International
California vendor Daniel Weinberg, whose sharp eye for contemporary and enduring expertise led him to provide Robert Gober his very first present and who launched to the West Coast the work of such now-renowned artists as Dan Flavin, Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt, and Bruce Nauman, died February 25 of pure causes on the age of eighty-eight. The information was introduced by his youngsters, Jonathan, Kate, and Nick Weinberg. A canny salesperson and a staunch supporter of his artists—one consumer recalled being advised he might solely purchase a Christopher Wool work if he additionally bought a Dan Flavin piece—Weinberg opened his gallery at a time when the West Coast was thought-about a relative art-world backwater. He was instrumental in shaping not solely the careers of the various artists he confirmed, but in addition the Los Angeles artwork market that right now is taken into account a lodestar of the artwork world.
Born in Chicago in 1933, Weinberg attended New York’s Trend Institute of Know-how. After commencement, he took a job with Levi Strauss & Co., working his approach up from gross sales trainee to designer. Within the early Nineteen Seventies, influenced by the work he noticed at New York’s tiny Bykert Gallery, extant from 1966 to 1975 and run by Jeff Byers and Klaus Kertess, he determined to open his personal gallery. “I might have walked away with a pension and inventory choices,” he advised LA Weekly in 2013, however he needed to introduce the artists he’d seen at Bykert to an viewers on the opposite facet of the nation.
Weinberg established his first gallery in San Francisco in 1973, displaying work by Carl Andre, Richard Artschwager, Jo Baer, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Barry Le Va, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Bruce Nauman, David Navros, Dorothea Rockburne, Richard Tuttle, and Joe Zucker. After a decade, he moved to Los Angeles. “Inside just a few months,” he stated later, “I spotted that is the place I ought to have began.” In LA, the at all times prescient Weinberg started displaying Koons, whose 1986 exhibition there, “Luxurious and Degradation” included a seven-piece stainless-steel mannequin practice whose vehicles have been full of Jim Beam whiskey; an artist’s proof of the work would promote for roughly $34 million lower than thirty years later.
In 1993, following a stint operating his gallery in Santa Monica, Weinberg, together with his three younger youngsters in tow, returned to San Francisco. The artwork marketplace for the kind of work through which he was remained comfortable—“You couldn’t have offered a Han Dynasty pot,” he joked—and he returned to Los Angeles, first occupying an area in West Hollywood that had hosted a department of Gagosian Gallery, because it was then identified, and later shifting to an handle on Wilshire Boulevard. Among the many different well-known artists whose work he confirmed earlier than closing up store in 2012 have been Lee Bontecou, Peter Cain, Carroll Dunham, Charles Gaines, Mary Heilmann, John McLaughlin, and John Wesley. Weinberg was by no means involved in attaining fame for himself and in the course of his profession appeared to make use of the identical starkly easy criterion in deciding on artists to which he’d hewed when he based his first gallery in 1973. “I used to be lean and I used to be hungry,” he stated, “and I went after everybody I assumed was attention-grabbing.”
