Julie Saul, Effervescent Manhattan Gallerist, Is Dead at 67

Julie Saul, an energetic and outspoken longtime Manhattan gallerist who championed, frequently fiercely, photographers like Sally Gall, Andrew Bush and Arne Svenson, as effectively as multimedia artists like Sarah Anne Johnson, Maira Kalman and Roz Chast, died on Feb. 4 at her family’s residence in Tampa, Fla. She was 67.

The bring about was acute myeloid leukemia, said her sister, and only quick survivor, Linda Saul-Sena.

Ms. Saul, who was educated as an art historian, experienced been operating at the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork in the early 1980s when she teamed with Nancy Lieberman, an artwork director functioning in promotion, to sell photography out of Ms. Lieberman’s Higher West Facet condominium. They had been youthful and entrepreneurial, and, as Ms. Lieberman pointed out in an job interview, in people days you could commence a gallery on a shoestring.

Their 1st artists had been Ms. Gall, who tends to make sensuous investigations of the normal world, from clouds to caves to bugs Zeke Berman, whose surrealist tableaus tread a line involving sculpture and pictures and Mr. Bush, who would become identified for a vast-ranging human body of do the job.

A windfall from an estate gave the pair the seed dollars to open up a gallery in SoHo. Five incredible prints they observed in an attic — by the early-20th-century greats Paul Outerbridge, Tina Modotti and Edward Weston — bought rapidly.

Their initial clearly show, in May possibly 1986, was of Mr. Bush’s do the job, lush and evocative domestic interiors from a crumbling Irish state residence.

In 2013, a clearly show by Mr. Svenson drew a storm of controversy. (By then Ms. Saul was on her own as a gallerist, possessing shifted, alongside with the relaxation of the artwork world in the 1990s, from SoHo to Chelsea.) Encouraged by the Hitchcock motion picture “Rear Window,” Mr. Svenson experienced taken a series of photos from his condominium of the inhabitants of the new glass-walled developing that experienced gone up throughout the street from him in TriBeCa. Referred to as “The Neighbors,” the portraits have been personal and tender — the curve of a man’s back again, a child’s hand, a smaller puppy gazing up at his proprietor — but there had been no faces or determining aspects.

Just in advance of the present opened, the household of a single of the subjects, alerted by an short article in a modest downtown newspaper that determined their setting up, filed a stop-and-desist buy towards the demonstrate and a lawsuit towards Mr. Svenson proclaiming invasion of privacy.

What followed, as Mr. Svenson set it, was tabloid bedlam. Television crews parked outside the house the gallery and his apartment, and he was pilloried as a villain and a creep (he was also held up as a hero of Very first Modification legal rights).

Ms. Saul turned his vociferous defender.

“Let’s demand ahead,” he recalled her telling him. She appeared on morning tv demonstrates on his behalf, inviting audiences to arrive see, as he remembered in an interview, “these stunning photographs” and delivering her gallery’s hours.

“She had been so strident in defending my legal rights to just take these pictures and her proper to demonstrate them,” Mr. Svenson claimed. “And then to surface on television and invite everybody to Chelsea just normalized it all.”

The situation was fixed in Mr. Svenson’s favor in 2015.

Ms. Saul was also a vocal critic and could be jaw-droppingly frank, as Ms. Gall — who exhibited with Ms. Saul for 33 yrs, more time than any other artist — recalled by cell phone: “I had been photographing water and waves for years, and Julie at 1 place stated, ‘You acquired to give up you’ve observed 1 wave, you’ve observed them all.’ Sometimes I’d say to her, ‘I just can’t believe that you just reported that out loud!’”

By the early 2000s, Ms. Saul had broadened her gallery’s scope from images. She scooped up Ms. Kalman, the mischievous artist, illustrator and creator, in late 2001 soon after Ms. Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz’s “Newyorkistan” map — a delirious sendup of the city’s tribalism — appeared on the deal with of The New Yorker. Ms. Kalman had by no means demonstrated in a gallery ahead of.

“I experienced hardly ever needed to be in the artwork entire world,” she said. “I considered it was a complicated spot. But Julie took me in and shielded me like a hen with her chick.”

The operate Ms. Kalman exhibited with Ms. Saul was largely her paintings. Even so, they normally strayed from regular gallery procedures. In 2005, Ms. Kalman, Ms. Saul and Isaac Mizrahi, the manner designer and cabaret singer, executed together at the New York Community Library in a song cycle written by the composer Nico Muhly and dependent on Strunk & White’s “The Aspects of Style,” the beloved grammar primer, which Ms. Kalman illustrated that identical 12 months.

“For all the years I was accomplishing fashion shows,” Mr. Mizrahi stated, “I was hoping to explain to a tale about a self-created girl, who was wily and good and wickedly humorous, and in the end what I realized is that it was Julie.”

Julie Meredith Saul was born on Dec. 31, 1954, in Tampa, Fla. Her mom, Joan (Perlman) Saul, was a homemaker, and her father, Marvin William Saul, was a garment maker.

She gained a bachelor’s degree in art history from Newcomb Higher education, the coordinate women’s school of Tulane College in New Orleans, in 1976, and a master’s in artwork heritage and archaeology from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1982. In involving levels, she was assistant director and then director of the Tampa Bay Art Middle.

Ms. Saul shut her Chelsea gallery in 2019 when she missing her lease.

At her demise, she was performing on a challenge she experienced begun 20 a long time previously to market the existence and legacy of Berthe Weill, an early-20th-century Parisian artwork seller. Ms. Weill called her gallery a “place aux jeunes” for the young artists she showed — amid them Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera and, notably, Picasso. But by the conclude of the century Ms. Weill seemed to have been prepared out of art record, help you save for a point out here and there.

Ms. Saul had been on Ms. Weill’s path considering the fact that she came on a reference to her in Michael C. FitzGerald’s 1994 ebook, “Making Modernism: Picasso and the Development of the Market place for Twentieth-Century Art.”

Ms. Weill was the child of a seamstress and a rag picker, Ms. Saul acquired she experienced an unerring eye for fantastic function, and a sharp tongue to match her sharp eye. In 1933 she had self-printed a dishy and eccentric memoir, “Pan! Dans l’Oeil!” or “Pow! Suitable in the Eye!” And in 2001, Ms. Saul was delighted to explore, a French artwork historian named Marianne Le Morvan experienced revealed a scholarly biography.

Ms. Saul was decided to get Ms. Weill’s memoir in print.

The forthcoming e book “Pow! Proper in the Eye! 30 Yrs Guiding the Scenes of Modern-day French Portray,” was done in collaboration with a few individuals: Lynn Gumpert, director of the Gray Art Gallery at New York College Ms. Le Morvan and William Rodarmor, a translator. It will be adopted by an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Wonderful Arts in the summertime of 2024, and at the Grey gallery the future 12 months.

Ms. Saul identified with Ms. Weill’s grit and her streak of independence, as she said in a chat she sent by Zoom for a convention at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in December. Wrapping up her speech, Ms. Saul quoted from Ms. Weill’s memoir:

“I’ve experienced disappointments, but also numerous joys, and despite the hurdles, have designed an occupation for myself that I completely delight in. On balance, I must look at myself fortunate … and I do.”