NO ADMITTANCE TO THE BLIND MAN
Dimitri Petrov, Hugo Gallery
Dimitri Petrov: NO ADMITTANCE TO THE BLIND MAN. New York: Hugo Gallery, n. d [circa 1945]. Original impression. Announcement on light cream stock with black offset printing recto and verso. Exceptional period typography and printing. Lightly handled with two clean, straight creases, otherwise a fine example.
7.75 x 11 announcement for a show possibly titled “No Admittance to the Blind Man” held at the Hugo Gallery’s first location at 26 East 55th Street (East 55th Street and Madison Avenue).
Dimitri Petrov (Russian-American, 1919 – 1986) was born in Philadelphia in 1919. He was a DaDa and Surrealist painter, a member of the Woodstock Artists Association, and editor/publisher of publications including the Prospero series of poet-artist books and Instead, a surrealist newspaper. Growing up in an anarchist colony in New Jersey, Petrov later studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and printmaking with Stanley Hayter at Ateleier 17 Workshop. Petrov exhibited at Hugo Gallery in New York City, Stravinsky Gallery, and Maeght Gallery. His work was also exhibited at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art Annual (1944), Iris Clert, the Corocoran Gallery Biennial, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In 1967 the painter, writer, gallerist, art patron, publisher, and art entrepreneur William N. Copley met Dmitri Petrov. After much drinking and talking the two decided to publish a portfolio of multiples produced exactly to artists’ specifications and with the highest quality standards. The company they founded was called The Letter Edged in Black Press and they called the venture S.M.S. (“Shit Must Stop”). The Letter Edged in Black Press published six volumes featuring artwork by wellknown and emerging artists and provided them the exciting experience of participating in a serial art subscription service.
“Well, there was Dmitri Petrov who was an awfully good painter in the forties and never really painted enough. But he had a very good background in Surrealism and a mentality that was rather close to mine. So that we were able to work together terribly well. And he had spent a lot of time on Madison Avenue so that he knew the techniques which I of course had no knowledge of whatsoever. And then I got a lot of help from the Sherwood Press. And then sometimes we'd just have to shop around till we could find somebody who would do the impossible. We were always looking for the impossible at that point.... And the S.M.S. really had no particular meaning except between the two of us, which was supposed to mean Shit Must Stop. It was a terribly foolhardy venture. I was between marriages and unable to paint, and looking for something to do. And I enjoyed it. The worst thing I feel about it is that I lost a good job. Because I liked it and I liked doing it. ... but I did see a lot of very good young work by young people just through having the magazine. I was quite surprised.” — William N. Copley
Petrov's paintings are in the collections of the Woodstock Artists Association, Indiana University, Rutgers University, Swarthmore, Brandeis, Pace, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Penn. State, Reading Museum, the William Penn Museum in Harrisburg, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Print Club, the Pasadena Museum in California, the Oklahoma Museum, the Bridgeport University Museum in Connecticut, the Container Corp. Collection, AVX Corp. Collection, Lake Placid Art Club, St. Peters College, Syracuse University, Cornell, Grand Rapids Museum in Michigan, Norfolk Museum in Virginia, New Jersey State, State University of New York at New Paltz, and the New Britain Museum of American Art.
Alexander Iolas was born in born Constantine Koutsoudis in Alexandria, but nobody knows precisely when. “He changed the date of birth in his passports continually,” said [Mr.] Dannatt. “He was probably really born in the 1890s. Or 1900. And he changed it to 1907.” (Iolas’s archives, Mr. Dannatt added, are “complete chaos.”)
Iolas went to Berlin as a pianist, and took off for Paris when the Nazis came to power. In Paris, he became a ballet dancer, joining the Marquis de Cuevas’s company. He was soon a recognizable figure in a landscape that featured Picasso and Jean Cocteau, Rene Magritte and Max Ernst. He did well enough as a dancer to go on tours of Europe and both North and South America, but an injury in the early ’40s—and, one assumes, his advancing years—put an end to that.
His years as a dancer developed his eye for art. He made a seamless transition into a second career as director of the Hugo Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side. The Hugo Gallery had been opened in 1944 by Robert Rothschild, Elisabeth Arden and Princess Maria Ruspoli, who had been married to a French grandee, the Duc de Gramont, and who was then married to a grandson of Victor Hugo, from whom the gallery got its name. That’s how the art world was, pre-professionalism. It was not terra incognita to Iolas. “He saw a de Chirico in a gallery window when he was 17, 18,” Mr. Dannatt said. “That was a moment which he always said saved his life. He plucked up his courage in the end and bought it.”
At the beginning of his art-dealing career, Iolas was best known for working with Surrealists like Magritte and Ernst—but their less popular later work. Indeed one thing that seems truly Old Europe about Iolas was his affection for artists’ well ripened work. “That stuff was so unfashionable,” Mr. Dannatt said, “especially with the institutions and the museums when he was peddling it.” Surrealism may be wildly popular with collectors now, but in the middle of the last century it was a tough sell. “There was nothing that was more démodé than Surrealist painting.”
But Iolas was eclectic in the art he handled. “I had always thought of him as a great Surrealist dealer,” said Mr. Dannatt. “And Warhol. But then he had Arte Povera. You suddenly realize he had people like Paul Thek, [Pino] Pascali, [Jannis] Kounnellis – people you don’t see as being part of this story. And Joseph Beuys who he didn’t actually work with, but who he was obsessed by.”
It was only a matter of time before Iolas outgrew the Hugo Gallery. In 1955 he teamed up with former dancer Brooks Jackson to found the Jackson-Iolas Gallery in New York. But before he left, the Hugo gave Andy Warhol his first gallery show, “Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote,” in 1952. And the two became close. “Homosexuality was illegal,” said Vincent Fremont, a onetime assistant at the Factory, “Iolas had been a ballet dancer. Andy was very interested in that. There were all those links.”
Iolas’s relationship with Warhol was an important, and long-lasting one. When the two met, Warhol was still a commercial artist. “Andy was trying to get shows in galleries,” Mr. Fremont said. “He was creating fine art but he was also very successful as a commercial artist. Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, they all did it. But Andy was the only one that used his real name.”
Warhol made several portraits of Iolas before the dealer died of AIDS in 1987. “He was terribly vain,” Mr. Dannatt said. “He had so many facelifts that [artist] Bill Copley said you don’t know what planet he’s from, let alone what age he is. … He sent [the portrait] back. He said ‘This is terrible! You have to make me look younger.’” Warhol did. [Anthony Haden Guest]