Marian Goodman, Art’s Quiet Matriarch, Hopes the Market Cools

If you had been around a particular part of the downtown Manhattan art world at a particular time in the 1960s, you might have spotted the bohemian-playboy painter Larry Rivers roaring down the crumbling streets on his motorcycle. Clinging to him was a small, conservatively dressed woman who didn’t remotely seem to belong there.

To see that woman now — Marian Goodman, one of the most revered art dealers in the world — makes the motorcycle story, one she tells bashfully, all the more impossible to conjure. “It gave me a very good education on how not to get killed,” she recalled.

At 88, Ms. Goodman carries herself with a quiet, unassailable authority that makes you think she could be a retired banker or New York City schools chancellor or a high-level diplomat, a job she aspired to before falling under art’s spell as a young, Upper West Side mother in the early ’60s.

Her gallery enters its 40th year next month as one of the most powerful in the business, despite having operated in few of the ways other galleries have as the contemporary art world morphed into the sleek financial behemoth it is now. Long on West 57th Street, it never branched out to SoHo or Chelsea. It never became a player in the auction market. And while largely rejecting the footprint-in-every-city expansionism of its peers — it set up a permanent space in Paris in 1999 and just added a new space there, after opening a London gallery only two years ago — it has still been able to attract sought-after young artists like Julie Mehretu and Adrián Villar Rojas.

The gallery became one of the most influential of its generation for a reason that might sound strange in today’s aggressively global commercial art world, fueled by fairs in every time zone. But when Ms. Goodman began, American galleries and museums, still basking in Abstract Expressionism’s ascendancy, were stubbornly provincial and resolutely nationalist. (“The only sense we had of Europe,” Philip Leider, the founding editor of Artforum magazine, once said, “was that it was a nightmare and nothing French was good.”)

Ms. Goodman, who grew up in a liberal, intellectual Manhattan household surrounded by art, loved Europe and saw in its studios and galleries immensely talented but vastly underappreciated artists and a largely untapped market, in that order. Many artists she went on to champion — the German painter Gerhard Richter; the British filmmaker Steve McQueen; the French conceptualist Pierre Huyghe; the Belgian poet-provocateur Marcel Broodthaers — have become critical stars.

Throughout all of her proselytizing, during many early lean years in which she was barely able to support herself, and later, as she gained esteem and wealth, Ms. Goodman has always operated resolutely in the background. She declines most interview requests, which she chalks up to intense introversion and to a general philosophy that art dealers — she prefers the less commercial-sounding “gallerist” — should never usurp attention from their artists.

In the last few years, Ms. Goodman has started to relent, lowering her guard. In a wide-ranging interview at her gallery, initiated at her request, she said she’s stepping out from behind the curtain mostly because “I think I’m not as shy as I used to be.” But the motivation seems to be as much a desire to impart some cautionary advice to a business she views in almost moral terms.

“I think money speaks more than it ever has before,” she said. “The auctions have been good for business, but I’m not sure it’s been so good for the art world.” Last month alone, 18 older works by Mr. Richter, one of the most admired living painters, changed hands at auction in New York for well over $100 million. Mr. Richter has called such prices “hopelessly excessive” and was known for years to sell sizable new works for less than $1 million. Even now, Ms. Goodman says, he has increased his prices, at her urging, only so much to make up for that disparity and discourage speculation; new paintings that would probably go for $20 million at auction are priced at well under half that, closer to $5 million.

Ms. Goodman said disdainfully: “There are people who buy and sell art as if it were shares in ranches or something like that.” And one of her most important jobs now, she said, is “to keep the work out of auction so that it’s dealt with by responsible people and by museums.”

If she leaves any legacy, she said, she hoped it would be her success in placing her artists’ work in public collections, a job she has done so well that it has occasioned criticism that she and four other prominent galleries — Gagosian, Pace, David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth — are overly represented in major museum exhibition programs. (The Art Newspaper found that artists from these galleries accounted for nearly a third of solo museum shows in the United States between 2007 and 2013.)

For Ms. Goodman’s part, a remarkable talent at choosing artists with critical staying power has played a role in that success. But so has her insistence on selling art mostly to collectors who pledge to donate their works to museums. Such sales sometimes make her gallery less money than other collectors would have been willing to pay.

“Few galleries, either in Europe or America, have the degree of commitment to museums that she has,” said Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate galleries in England. Mr. Serota has known Ms. Goodman since the 1970s and said he was aware of situations in which she had sold works to museum-friendly collectors for less money than she could have made otherwise, taking a smaller percentage for her gallery, sometimes very little, so that the artist would receive as much as he or she would have made from the bigger sale. (The gallery, as most do, usually splits sales 50-50 with artists.)

Asked for an example of steering works to museums, Ms. Goodman demurred, as she does on most questions involving the specifics of her business. But then she made a call and referred to a recent sale, to the financier and collector Donald B. Marron, of 20 Richter drawings that curators at the Museum of Modern Art badly wanted but did not have the money to purchase immediately. Mr. Marron, a former president of the museum, bought them and donated them “and MoMA has them in the building already.” She added: “There are a lot of people who want drawings by Gerhard. And we try to be fair. But museums are losing ground against collectors as prices get so high, so we work even harder to help museums get the pieces they want.”

In October, Independent Curators International, a highly respected contemporary art organization, gave Ms. Goodman its highest honor. Presenting her the prize, the collector Agnes Gund, another former president of the Museum of Modern Art, said: “I treat her gallery really as I treat a museum. I go to be educated, to grasp ideas, to see what she sees.”

Ms. Goodman, whose father was an accountant and a collector of the painter Milton Avery, did not see her destiny as selling art until she was well into her 30s. She went to Emerson College in Boston with thoughts of journalism and also of working for the United Nations. Married at 21, she quickly had a son and a daughter and worked mostly volunteering for their school.

“I didn’t even have my own checkbook until I opened the gallery,” she said, smiling, speaking in a deferential sotto voce that belies an uncompromising tenacity. “I was from another generation.”

But she came to know the painter Franz Kline through a fund-raising drive for the children’s school. (She still has a small work on paper that Kline gave her.) He took her to the Cedar Tavern, the fabled Greenwich Village painters’ hangout. And partly because of that encounter, she decided that her amateur interest in art needed to become professional if she was ever going to be serious about anything; she went to graduate school in art history at Columbia University and, as her marriage was faltering, she opened a small business selling inexpensive editions, including one by Mr. Rivers, whose terrifying motorcycle became the fastest way to downtown fabricators.

Her business might have remained at that level had she not decided, against grave reservations as a Jew, to travel to Germany in 1968 for the influential Documenta art exhibition. Through that experience, she came to meet Mr. Broodthaers, whose unsettling, poetic, acidly funny work was a hard sell even in Europe. But she was besotted and became determined to sell it in the United States, even if she had to open her own gallery to do so.

Which she did. And promptly found out how hard it was to bang her head against American parochialism. Business was terrible. She supported herself mostly with sales of inexpensive editions, had only one employee for many years and put up her visiting artists in her own apartment.

But it was a kind of dedication that drew artists to her. And it has kept them loyal over decades, in a way increasingly rare in a business where, as Ms. Goodman said, too many galleries “are busy chasing each other’s young artists and then just casting them off and ruining them.”

Lawrence Weiner, who has shown with the gallery since the mid-1980s, said that if an artist of Ms. Goodman’s didn’t like the work of a fellow gallery mate “and you ranted and raved about him to Marian, she’d just smile and nod and then turn around and figure out a way to give that artist the best show he ever had.”

He added: “We’ve argued, of course, sometimes ferociously. But it’s not as if you can’t argue with Marian, because she’s emotionally involved and intellectually involved and she wants to get into it.”

I came across a few who had felt her wrath, and they didn’t forget the encounter. “I think it was more something one of her artists did,” a curator told me about a particular dispute. “But she wasn’t going to yell at her artist, so she yelled at me.”

Coming up on the end of her ninth decade, she shows few signs of ramping down. In the three weeks before our interview, she crossed the Atlantic four times for art fairs and artist visits. She said she was still jet-lagged and nursing a cold, but it was hard to tell. I asked if she ever thought about what her gallery would do after her.

“I would like it to carry on, and I am in the process of thinking about that,” she said. “But I think I’ll carry on until I can’t.” She paused, smiling tersely. “So far, so good.”