Samuel M. Kootz

Samuel M. Kootz (23 August 1898 – 7 August 1982) was a New York City art dealer and author whose Kootz Gallery was one of the first to champion Abstract Expressionist painting.^[1]

Between 1945 and 1966, in galleries on 57th Street or Madison Avenue, this "tall, genial southerner"^[2] represented avant-garde American and European artists. In the 1930s and early forties, while working in advertising and the fabric industry, Kootz had found time to write about modern art. In two books and letters to the New York Times he decried realistic American regionalism and European-inspired abstraction while urging American artists to create a new form of expressive abstract art. His gallery became a proving ground for his aesthetic ideas. In 1947 he gained renown by holding the first American exhibition of wartime Picassos. He purchased the Picassos by flying to Paris in late 1946, introducing himself to Picasso and convincing him that sales of his work would help to support the Kootz Gallery's inventive young artists : William Baziotes, Romare Bearden, Byron Browne, Adolph Gottlieb, Carl Holty, and Robert Motherwell. Over the years Kootz continued to buy paintings directly from Picasso. Kootz also exhibited work by Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, James Brooks, Giorgio Cavallon, Arshile Gorky, David Hare, Hans Hofmann, Ibram Lassaw, Herbert Ferber, Raymond Parker, William Ronald, Tony Rosenthal, Conrad Marca-Relli, Georges Mathieu, Emil Schumacher, Pierre Soulages, Kumi Sugaï, Zao Wou Ki, and others. In 1962, the eminent critic Clement Greenberg praised Kootz by comparing him favorably to other dealers. While Greenberg considered some dealers to be successful "financially and artistically" and a few others to be "dedicated and creative," Kootz was the only one to whom he could ascribe all of those attributes.^[3]