Sylvan Cole; Dealer in Fine-Art Prints
Hyfler/Rosner
Sylvan Cole Is Dead at 87; a Dealer in Fine-Art Prints
By MARGALIT FOX NY Times
Sylvan Cole, an internationally recognized art dealer who
helped foster the explosion of printmaking and print
collecting in the United States in the decades after World
War II, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87
and also had a Fire Island home on Long Island.
The cause was lung cancer, his daughter, Nancy Cole Kelly,
said.
Mr. Cole, whom The New York Times once called "the doyen of
dealers in American prints," specialized in American prints
and drawings of the 19th and 20th centuries. At his death,
he was the director of the Sylvan Cole Gallery on West 57th
Street in Manhattan.
Among the artists Mr. Cole represented over the years were
Milton Avery, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Childe
Hassam, Edward Hopper, Raphael Soyer, James McNeill Whistler
and Grant Wood.
When Mr. Cole entered the profession just after World War
II, prints were widely disdained as the art world's poor
stepchildren. Generally small and black-and-white, they were
most notable for being amazingly inexpensive. But if prints
lacked the cachet of painting, they made up for it in their
potential to reach a much wider range of collectors, a
possibility that artists, and dealers like Mr. Cole, were
just starting to explore.
"The business transformed during his tenure to this
mass-appeal business of major artists producing large-scale
colorful prints in all kinds of mediums," Richard Solomon,
the director of Pace Prints in New York, said in a telephone
interview on Tuesday.
Early on Mr. Cole sold many prints - including those by
major artists like Benton, Wood and John Steuart Curry - by
mail, starting at $5. By the 1960's he was selling the work
of a young upstart named David Hockney for about $40.
Fine-art prints, which include lithographs, etchings, screen
prints, woodcuts and now digital imagery, can be produced
relatively inexpensively in large numbers, making it
possible for ordinary people to afford the work of a
significant artist. Even today, prints by up-and-coming
American artists can sell for as little as a few hundred
dollars, Mr. Solomon said.
A vigorous champion of printmaking as a democratic medium,
Mr. Cole encouraged museums and private collectors around
the world to build their collections. He developed long-term
relationships with artists, often publishing their new
prints himself.
For Mr. Cole, prints made for the Works Progress
Administration, beginning in the late 1930's, had a
particular resonance.
"I started the 30's at the age of 12," Mr. Cole said in a
1983 interview with The Times. "When the decade was over, I
had graduated from high school, graduated from college and
was one year away from serving in World War II. The 30's had
a tremendous impact on my life."
Sylvan Cole Jr. was born in Manhattan on Jan. 10, 1918. His
father, Sylvan Sr., was a founder and chairman of National
Shirt Shops, a men's apparel chain. Sylvan Jr. earned a
bachelor's degree in English literature, with a minor in art
history, from Cornell in 1939. He spent the next two years
as an executive trainee with Sears, Roebuck & Co. while
doing graduate work in art history at Rutgers. During World
War II Mr. Cole was an officer in the United States Army.
In 1946 he joined the Associated American Artists Gallery in
New York, whose roster included Robert Motherwell and
Alexander Calder. He was the gallery's director and
president from 1958 to 1983, then established his own
gallery in 1984. In 1987 Mr. Cole helped found the
International Fine Print Dealers Association; he was its
president from 1994 to 1997.
Mr. Cole's first marriage, to the former Vivian Vanderpool,
ended in divorce. His second marriage, which lasted more
than 30 years, ended with the death of his wife, Lilyan, in
1988.
Mr. Cole is survived by his third wife, Mary Myers Cole,
whom he married in 1998; a brother, Charles, of Fort Worth;
three children from his first marriage: Ms. Kelly, of
Rochester; Robert, of New Smyrna Beach, Fla.; and James, of
Fleury-en-Bière, France; two grandchildren; and one
great-grandchild.
Mr. Cole wrote several books and catalogues raisonnés,
including "Will Barnet: Etchings, Lithographs, Woodcuts,
Serigraphs, 1932-1972" (Associated American Artists, 1972);
"Grant Wood: The Lithographs" (Associated American Artists,
1984, edited by Susan Teller); and "Raphael Soyer: 50 Years
of Printmaking" (Da Capo, 1978).