Mr. John W. Weber

American, 1932 - 2008

BiographyWhen art dealer John Weber died on May 23, at the age of 75, from pulmonary problems, he was living in a modest apartment in the small upstate city of Hudson, N.Y. As his artist friend Lucio Pozzi wrote in an e-mail eulogy, Weber ended his days "practically a pauper, supported by family and charitable friends." This may seem surprising to those who recall that in its heyday of the 1970s and '80s, Weber's New York gallery represented many major European artists (in particular, some of the leading figures of Arte Povera), acted as a showcase for important American conceptualists such as Adrian Piper and Hans Haacke, and handled the estate of Robert Smithson. Despite his impressive stable, for many years Weber found little interest among collectors and museums for the art he was showing. In the early 1980s, he confessed that he had yet to sell a single work by Alighiero e Boetti, Giovanni Anselmo or Daniel Buren, and that after giving three or four solo shows to Marie Merz, he had only been able to sell one piece.

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What Weber lacked in financial sense, he made up for in his passionate commitment to the artists he showed and his deep understanding of their work. For Weber, owning a gallery was more a calling than a business. While lecturing on Smithson's work, he would still choke up with tears some 25 years after the artist's death. His commitment to artists was nearly always long-term: he was willing to keep exhibiting them and help support them with stipends, whether or not their work sold. Unlike many other gallery owners, Weber didn't have private backers or personal wealth to rely on, which makes his 30 years of activity even more impressive.

Born in Los Angeles in 1932, Weber served in the U.S. Navy as a radio operator (in later life he remained a ham radio enthusiast). A graduate of Antioch College, he began his art career at the nearby Dayton Art Institute. Prior to opening his own gallery in 1971, in what was the first gallery building in SoHo, Weber was director of Martha Jackson Gallery in New York and Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles and New York. At Jackson he helped introduce Pop art and Happenings; at Dwan he focused on Minimalism and Earthworks.

This interest in Earthworks continued at John Weber Gallery with regular posthumous shows of Smithson and exhibitions of new work by Alice Aycock and Nancy Holt. Besides the Arte Povera artists, the gallery also was the New York venue for Art & Language, Roman Opalka, Victor Burgin and Franz Erhard Walter. Among the pioneering shows at Weber's SoHo space, which for many years he ran with his wife and partner Joyce Nereaux (Weber was married five times, including once to art dealer Annina Nosei), was a line of striped banners by Buren that ran from inside the gallery, through an open window, to a building across the street; a series of confrontational political works by Haacke; Piper's memorable 1989 video installation Cornered; and Alan McCollum's shows of thronging "surrogate" paintings and sculptures.

In the 1990s, Weber brought a number of talented younger artists into the gallery, including Miguel Angel Rios and Luca Buvoli. In 1997, he moved to Chelsea, where he continued to mount shows until the gallery closed in 2000. After relocating to upstate New York, he organized a pair of exhibitions titled "Manhattan Transfer" featuring artists who had made similar moves from New York City to Columbia County. Weber's passing is a reminder that today's flush art world was built on the efforts of a generation of daring, idealistic figures (many of them art dealers) for whom money-making was never the issue.

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