KLAUS KERTESS (1940–2016)
The curator, writer, and art dealer Klaus Kertess has died, according to a report by Andrew Russeth in Artnews. Curator of the 1995 Whitney Biennial and founder of the gallery Bykert, Kertess worked with artists such as Brice Marden, David Novros, Barry Le Va, Alan Saret, Chuck Close, Bill Bollinger, and Dorothea Rockburne, among many others. Bykert was named gallery of the year in 1968, two years after its opening, by critic Rosalind Constable in New York magazine.
Kertess was born in New York in 1940 and grew up in Westchester County. He studied art history at Yale, graduating in 1962, and then studied at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn, in Germany. While in Cologne, he worked at the Lempertz auction house, and, after returning to the US, he completed a master’s in art history at Yale in 1964. After moving to New York City, Kertess entered into a business partnership with a classmate from Yale, Jeff Byers, to open Bykert in the space formerly occupied by Green Gallery. Along with the illustrious artist roster, Bykert also at one time employed Lynda Benglis as a secretary as well as Mary Boone, Benglis’s student at Hunter College.
After leaving Bykert in 1975, Kertess was a curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, from 1983 until 1989, when he became adjunct curator of drawing at the Whitney. At the Parrish, he curated shows featuring Carroll Dunham, April Gornik, Albert York, Jane Freilicher, and Alfonso Ossorio. He also organized the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit’s inaugural exhibition in 2007; “Willem de Kooning: Drawing Seeing/Seeing Drawing” at the Drawing Center in New York in 1998; and “John O’Reilly: Assemblies of Magic” at the Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Academy—where he attended high school. In 2009, he received the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Kertess was a widely published writer and authored many monographs, in addition to writing for Artforum, Art in America, and other publications. In 2011, Gregory R. Miller & Co. published his collected writings in the book Seen, Written.
