Two Dealers on West Broadway: A History

October 2, 2026 / Sophie Clearwater /

Larry Gagosian and Leo Castelli in 1999. Photo by Rose Hartman/Getty Images

Twelve years ago, I opened a gallery on West Broadway. Everyone told me I’d fail. The space was too big. The neighborhood was too expensive. I had no experience. Passion and a dream, they said, can’t sustain a business. Turns out, they were right about the risks. They were wrong about the rest.

Joseph Campbell said: follow your bliss, and doors will open where there were only walls. I took him at his word. The early years were brutal. I remember sitting alone after midnight, the walls full of work I believed in and couldn’t yet sell, wondering how I’d survive. I can’t tell you exactly how I did. I didn’t plan my way through it. I felt my way through it. I have always been led by the heart, not the head, and the art world, whatever it tells you about itself, is not a rational place. It is brutal and romantic, transactional and meaningful. One day you’re planning its conquest; the next you’re fighting to survive.

When the nights got long, I thought about the two men who taught this street what a gallery could be.

The first was Leo Castelli. He came from Trieste, a European who had lost one world to war and came to New York to build another. He opened his first gallery in his Upper East Side apartment in 1957, in his fifties, an age when most men are protecting what they have. He staked it on artists nobody wanted: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol. He paid his artists monthly stipends whether their work sold or not. It wasn’t charity but conviction. Castelli believed a dealer’s job wasn’t to sell what the market wanted, but to stand behind an artist until the market caught up.

In 1971 he moved downtown to 420 West Broadway, into a neighborhood of empty lofts and cast iron. Where Castelli went, the art world followed. SoHo became SoHo because a dealer bet on it.

The second was Larry Gagosian, who also had no particular pedigree. He studied English at UCLA, worked in the mailroom tier of Hollywood and started out selling posters near campus in Westwood. No connections, no collection, no patrons. Just instinct and nerve. He called a photographer he admired, flew to New York to meet him and learned that the man was represented by Castelli. That introduction changed his life.

Gagosian secured a loft on West Broadway, right across from Castelli’s gallery. The older man was aristocratic and patient. The younger man was hungry and fast. (Gagosian later said his bluntness appealed to Castelli: “I did not do a lot of blah-blah-blah.”) Castelli opened doors, introduced him to collectors and eventually partnered with him. The poster seller from Westwood went on to build the most powerful gallery on earth.

People like to cast these two as opposites: the patron saint of artists and the king of the deal. I think that misses what they had in common. Both were outsiders. Both were dreamers. Gagosian understood what every great dealer eventually learns. We don’t just sell art; we sell a dream. And only a dreamer can sell a dream. Castelli understood the other half: the dream is worthless if you don’t build it with the artist, year after year, when nobody is buying.

Somewhere along the way, the art world lost both halves. The industry went corporate. Galleries became brands. Artists became inventory. People began talking about a “stable” of artists, as if they were horses. The fairs multiplied, the spreadsheets took over, and we forgot the adventure. The fear. The leap of faith that art demands. Castelli’s stipends would look like bad business to a modern board. Gagosian’s poster stand would never get past a modern investor. And yet that is where everything we now call the art market came from: two men who were told, in one form or another, that they would fail.

I never wanted a stable. I wanted partners. When I believe in an artist, my gallery puts everything behind them: our name, our walls, our relationships, our reputation. What 12 years have taught me is simple. The artists who rise are the ones who build it with you. It has never been a one-way street, and it never should be. Castelli knew that. It’s the part of his legacy the market forgot first.

I have also learned that the art world is too small a stage for art. We spend enormous energy performing for one another, for the critics, the fairs, the insiders, and we forget who art is actually for. It is for everyone. It belongs in the rooms where decisions get made. I have stood before Congress to defend an artist’s right to speak, and I would do it again. When artists are pushed to the margins, the whole culture gets poorer, and the market eventually does too.

That’s why the gallery still matters. Not as a store, but as a salon. A place where a collector, a painter and a stranger off the street can stand in front of the same canvas and feel something at the same moment. That doesn’t happen online. It doesn’t happen in a portfolio. It happens in a room.

A gallery is a sacred space. It’s where dreams bloom or fail. It’s where outsiders have always found a home: a refugee from Trieste, a poster seller from Westwood and, a few doors up the street, me. The business side keeps the lights on. But the art is why the lights matter. People ask me what keeps me going. It’s simple. I don’t want to live in a world where a gallery like mine, imperfect, broken and with soul, doesn’t exist.

Georges Bergès is the founder and owner of Georges Bergès Gallery. He believes art is not a luxury but a necessity in life.