IVAN KARP (1926–2012)
Ivan Karp, once touted as the “chief salesman of the Pop art movement” by Newsweek, died today at the age of eight-six, reports the Art Newspaper. Karp worked as codirector of the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York from 1959 to 1969—a decade that marked the gallery’s explosion into an artistic powerhouse—and was instrumental in launching the careers of artists including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, and John Chamberlain. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he served in the US Air Force during World War II, and later graduated from the New School and the New Institute for Film, after which he became the first art critic for the Village Voice. Before his role at Castelli, he worked as a dealer for the Martha Jackson Gallery. Karp notably sold an early Chamberlain sculpture in the late 1950s for $275, a sale he said was “based on my own fervor and my own conviction . . . that it was really something interesting.” The transaction ensured Chamberlain’s continued representation with Jackson, who, according to Karp, found the artist’s work “pretty strange and pretty difficult.”
Karp left Castelli to found OK Harris, which championed Photorealism and was one of the first spaces to show work by Robert Bechtle. Of photography, Karp once noted: “The camera is only a tool. The creation of a masterpiece is always ineffable, a kind of miracle no matter what the process of equipage.” He went on to add that there was “no equation” that could account or measure quality: “A successful work of painting or sculpture results from the unification of elements and is detectable only to those with a surpassing degree of visual perception, which is present in about 5 percent of the population.” OK Harris stated that a memorial service will be held this coming fall.
