A bond of steel: di Suvero and Bellamy: the prescient art dealer Richard Bellamy was singularly devoted to the work of Mark di Suvero. An exhibition at Storm King of di Suvero's sculptures and Bellamy's photographs of them chronicles this productive partnership

Art in America, Nov, 2005 by Judith E. Stein

"You've been (springboard?) (wings?) (slingshot?) to my art," Mark di Suvero wrote to his long-time friend Richard Bellamy, searching for the best kinetic metaphor to describe the dealer's role in his career, in the course of a heartfelt letter in the late 1970s. (1) It is well-known that Bellamy, whose sobriquet was "the eye of the Sixties," launched not only di Suvero, but also George Segal, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Donald Judd, Lucas Samaras and many others we have come to regard as the canonical artists of that time.

But it is not common knowledge that from 1975 until his death in 1998, Bellamy set himself the task of photographically documenting di Suvero's outdoor installations in the United States and abroad. "Richard Bellamy and Mark di Suvero," a two-year exhibition at the Storm King Art Center, introduces us to this unexpected dimension of the New York dealer's activities. Organized by Storm King's director and curator David R. Collens, the show includes a retrospective of di Suvero's sculptures and drawings and more than 80 of Bellamy's color and black-and-white photographs, which are on view for the first time. In the second year, the sculpture selection will change slightly when the 70-foot Joie de Vivre (1997) leaves for a permanent home in Lower Manhattan at Liberty Plaza next to Ground Zero; a new work by di Suvero will likely take its place.

The pair met in 1960, when Bellamy was looking for an uptown location to house his first enterprise, the Green Gallery. Di Suvero's art captivated him immediately. He later told an interviewer: "After I saw di Suvero's work I knew it would be my opening show and that the space that I had to find would be space that would accommodate showing his sculptures." (2) Di Suvero and Green Gallery debuted together on West 57th Street in October of that year. When the gallery began presenting Pop art, the sculptor showed elsewhere. In the decades after Green Gallery closed in 1965, Bellamy represented him privately and then through the Oil & Steel Gallery, which opened in Tribeca in 1980. Such was Bellamy's commitment to di Suvero in his last years that gallery owner Carl Solway jokingly referred to his friend as "a monogamous dealer."

Bellamy relocated Oil & Steel to the Long Island City waterfront in 1985, on a section of a pier he had helped find for di Suvero's studio a few years earlier. In a majestically scaled space with a steel door that slid back to let in light and reveal the river view, Bellamy always had a largescale di Suvero on hand. The back room contained hundreds of his favorite photos of di Suvero's work push-pinned to the walls. It was here that he would deliberate for hours about the esthetic merits of one print over another, evaluating variously angled shots of the same sculpture, or a single work he had documented at different locations. Dissatisfied with the existing photography of di Suvero's work, Bellamy had bought a Nikon in 1975 and by trial and error taught himself to use it; besides, it was cheaper for the cash-strapped dealer to take his own pictures than to pay professionals.

All artists dream of having a dedicated advisor who knows them better than they know themselves, who can identify their finest work and install it to best advantage. Bellamy proved to be just this person for di Suvero. The sculptor put his complete trust in his dealer's esthetic judgments. Yet there were aspects of their complex, four-decade association that gave truth to the old saw, "Be careful what you wish for, you may get it."

Bellamy's un-businesslike business sense could be exasperating. Billing it impishly as "good news," he once told a low-on-funds di Suvero, "I just refused a commission for $250,000 because I don't think it's the right place for your piece." (3) Even as he turned away sales because he held the buyer or the site in low regard, Bellamy attempted to kindle desirable commissions by writing brazen, poetic letters to curators and collectors.

It galled him that important museums with advantageous sites might be unwilling or unable to acquire a di Suvero. For example, he tried to cajole Leon Arkus, the director of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum, into finding the money from area patrons to buy a major sculpture in 1979. With fey histrionics, he wrote: "Leon! Scrap Iron Kings! Waiting! Unleash yourself on those magnates of the prime product in your princedom.... Your Golden Triangle's image glows in the very fibers of my vocational being: it is the best site in a major city I have seen." (4) But the audacious strategy failed. To this day, the only art by di Suvero in the Carnegie's collection is a suite of prints.

Bellamy was a connoisseur of space. An exceedingly polite yet profoundly unconventional man, he might enter a party like a cat, treading the periphery of a room before coming to rest under a coffee table. When preparing to help site a di Suvero--a collaborative process with the sculptor and his crew--he would walk all around the location, learning it from every angle, the better to predict what placement might work best. He thought nothing of scuttling up one of di Suvero's 40-foot I-beams in a hard hat to gain a better view of a sculpture's surroundings.