Eye of the Sixties, Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art

In celebration of the publication of Judith E. Stein’s Eye of the Sixties, Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art, the first-ever biography of one of the twentieth century’s most influential and enigmatic art dealers, and of Miles Bellamy’s Serious Bidness, a selection of his dad’s hitherto unpublished letters, artists Mark di Suvero, Alfred Leslie, Richard Nonas, and Rosalyn Drexler join the authors in a conversation about the legacy of Dick Bellamy. Born to an American father and a Chinese mother, Dick Bellamy (1927-1998) was a poetry-loving beatnik when he arrived in New York in 1950. With the covert support of America’s first celebrity art collectors, Robert and Ethel Scull, he gained his footing just as pop art, minimalism, and conceptual art were taking hold and the art market mushroomed around him. At the fabled Green Gallery (1960-65) on Fifty-Seventh Street, Bellamy launched the careers of Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, George Segal, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Lucas Samaras, Robert Morris and Larry Poons among others. A man uninterested in profiting from the sale of art, Bellamy was the first to show Andy Warhol’s pop art, and was a pioneer of “off-site” exhibitions and the new genre of installation art. Based on decades of research and on hundreds of interviews with Bellamy’s artists, friends, colleagues, and lovers, Judith E. Stein’s Eye of the Sixties recovers the lost history of the elusive art dealer.

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