Paul Kantor, Art Dealer, 83
DGH
Paul Kantor, a pioneering Los Angeles, California, art dealer whose
galleries provided a sophisticated showcase for leading modern and
contemporary artists in the 1950s and '60s, died December 23, 2002, at
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, in the metorpolitan Los Angeles area, of
complications from Parkinson's disease, at the age of 83.
The son of a shoe salesman, Kantor was born in Brooklyn, New York, in
1919, but spent his adult life in Southern California, where he
developed a sharp eye for artistic excellence. He presented the first
Los Angeles exhibitions of works by many artists who would become
internationally renowned, including California painter Richard
Diebenkorn and Abstract Expressionists Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko,
Adolph Gottlieb and Willem de Kooning.
Kantor often complained about the difficulties of selling fine art in
a town steeped in popular culture. "The whole art community here
operates at such a low level, they deserve galleries where they can
pay a dollar down and a dollar a month for art," he told a Times
interviewer in 1975. But he built a clientele of high-profile
Hollywood figures who appreciated his taste, including producer
William Goetz, director Billy Wilder, MCA chief Lew Wasserman and
playwright Clifford Odets.
"Paul was a very important dealer for Los Angeles," said Manny
Silverman, whose West Hollywood gallery presents exhibitions by some
of the artists Kantor represented. "He always had a fine eye for
quality and a great acumen for business."
Kantor studied philosophy, psychology and art at Brooklyn College,
then served in the Navy during World War II. In 1946, while visiting
relatives in San Francisco and looking for a place to settle, he took
a fateful bus trip to Los Angeles. He soon married a fellow passenger,
painter Josephine Morris, and made Southern California his home.
Kantor said that he got into the art business by accident in the late
1940s, when he loaned money to artists who ran the Fraymart Gallery on
La Brea Avenue. He took over the gallery when he discovered that he
was liable for their debts. To make ends meet, he turned part of the
space into a frame shop and supplemented his income by writing a
newsletter for the Seafarers Union.
But Kantor was onto something, and as his knowledge of art grew, he
developed a business that commanded attention. He moved the Fraymart
Gallery to a tonier neighborhood on Beverly Boulevard in 1950 -- the
same year he discovered Diebenkorn's work, at an annual juried
exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science and
Art in Exposition Park. Diebenkorn's painting didn't win the big
prize, as Kantor thought it should, but he tracked down the artist,
who was teaching at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, and
bought three paintings for $300.
"It was all the money I had," Kantor said.
He changed the gallery's name to Kantor Gallery in 1952. Five years
later, he relocated his business to Camden Drive in Beverly Hills,
near the gallery run by his friend Frank Perls.
In 1959, after Kantor's first marriage had ended in divorce, a young
German woman, Ulrike Wegener, came into his gallery to see whether he
would buy a Joan Miro watercolor she was trying to sell. They didn't
agree on a price, but met by chance at a restaurant a year later and
married soon thereafter.
Kantor closed his gallery in 1966 and began doing business from his
house. "I didn't want to be a shopkeeper in Beverly Hills anymore, but
I've never wanted to stop dealing," he told The Times in 1995. "I love
the subject, and I love having the work around. I just don't like
having to deal with people."
In his later years, he cultivated a gruff manner and recounted
frustrations with Los Angeles collectors. One favorite story featured
Marcia Simon Weisman, who asked Kantor when he was going to take down
an exhibition of Georges Rouault's prints and graphics and put up
something new.
"I'll change the show when someone buys one," he responded.
Kantor also criticized Weisman's brother, industrialist Norton Simon,
who became notorious for grilling experts about potential art
purchases and then making his own decisions while building the
collection housed at his museum in Pasadena. Simon could have had an
even better collection if he had listened to the experts, Kantor said.
But almost in the next breath, he dismissed Simon as a collector who
"bought by consensus."
Despite such laments, Kantor built a lucrative business, mainly by
buying multimillion-dollar artworks by Pablo Picasso and other major
artists in partnership with other dealers and selling them privately
in Los Angeles. He also inspired his wife and a son to become art
dealers.