PATRICIA FAURE (1928–2008)

According to Suzanne Muchnic in the Los Angeles Times, the “eternally glamorous” art dealer Patricia Faure has died. Muchnic writes that Faure’s teenage dreams of movie stardom gave way to careers in modeling, fashion photography and, finally, the art business. Relative newcomers to Los Angeles’s art scene know the late dealer through exhibitions at the Patricia Faure Gallery in the Bergamot Station complex in Santa Monica. But she established her presence as director of the highly regarded Nicholas Wilder Gallery in 1972 and formed a partnership with the late Betty Asher in Asher/Faure Gallery before opening her space at Bergamot in 1994.

Through the years, she championed the work of dozens of artists, including sculptors Joel Shapiro, Richard Artschwager, and Gwynn Murrill and painters John M. Miller, Joe Goode, and Margaret Nielsen. She also helped to launch the careers of Salomon Huerta, the Reverend Ethan Acres, and Mark Bradford. “She was a terrible businesswoman, but that made her interesting as a dealer,” her daughter, Zazu Faure, said. “She loved the work she showed, but she could never really sell it.” Just before Faure’s seventy-fifth birthday party, which drew a huge crowd of admirers to Bergamot, she repeated her stock declaration about the art business: “You can’t sell art. It sells itself.” All you can do at a gallery, she said, is “keep the place kind of tidy and get the information out. People come in. If they like it, they buy it.”