By John Seed
johnseed@gmail.com

All contents copyright 2007 by John Seed
Please do not copy or excerpt without the author's permission

The last time I saw Larry "Go-Go" Gagosian was at a Museum of Contemporary Los Angeles fundraiser in 1985. The event, which featured a contemporary art auction, was chaired by television producer Douglas Cramer, who had secured the "Love Boat" for the evening. As the auction was winding down I was standing on the deck taking it all in when Larry streaked towards me: a silver blur in a black tuxedo.

I hadn't seen Larry for more than a year, but I recognized him instantly. His grey-flecked hair made him at first appear older than he was -- I think in his mid-thirties -- but the wary intensity of his eyes reminded me of an edgy teenager. He had a way of looking at you that made you feel looked through and looked past at the same time. Somehow what I remember most isn't what he looked like, but instead I remember his charisma. He was a man who could never be ignored, even at high speed.

"Hey John," he announced, "I bought the Eric Fischl." Moments later he vanished, another fish in a sea of Armani clad Angelenos and minor television stars. The museum accountant later told me that he never paid for the piece, and that didn't surprise me a bit. After all, I hadworked for Larry for nine intense months in 1982 and 83 before coming to work at MOCA, and Larry's pragmatic approach to money was very familiar to me. When I recently read that Larry, now the most powerful art dealer in the world, was earning thirty million dollars a year, I had to ask myself "Is this the same man? The guy who kept avoiding paying the invoice from Wally's Liquor now has galleries in New York, London and Rome?"

Larry had once told me that he had decided, after thinking about it quite a bit, that being rich in America meant having a net worth of twenty million dollars. Larry's remark took me by surprise, since I was twenty-five at the time, just out of graduate school, and totally naïve about money, and power. I was making $1,000 a month as a gallery gopher, and I couldn't wrap my brain around such a big number. After spending more than five years in college, I was about to discover that most of what I knew was just theory.

Larry Gagosian was the most driven, ambitious person I have ever met, and the mixture of jealousy, contempt and awe he aroused in me has never faded. Honestly, I never thought he would find himself at the pinnacle of the art world or anywhere close – he seemed too deeply flawed – but time has shown that I underestimated him. Clearly, he has also become far more successful than anyone, including himself, would have ever imagined. His success tells me quite a bit about what has happened in the art world since I had a crash course in the art world's inner workings during my semester at the "School of Go-Go."

Gagosian, when I began to work for him, was certainly already in the thick of things. After graduating from UCLA in the early 70's he had launched himself by selling two dollar posters for fifteen dollars. By the early 80's he was re-selling blue chip art to almost every major collector in Los Angeles and bringing the next generation of raw talent in from New York.

After reading about a David Salle show at his gallery in "Artweek" I got my job working for him by walking into his space on North Almont and mentioning that I had just graduated from Berkeley, was a painter, and had a Toyota truck that could be used for gallery errands. He hired me on the spot, and I remember my first week as being a hazing in which I tried to locate a new office chair to help Larry with his back problems. All the different chairs ended up being returned but I certainly got to know a lot of the furniture sales staff at the Pacific Design Center.

Shortly after I was hired Larry inaugurated a new, larger vaulted gallery gallery space on North Robertson Boulevard behind Trump's restaurant. I was one three young gallery staffers who watched the goings-on from behind a low counter. Behind us was a private office, a kind of chilly concrete cube where Gagosian met clients behind a frosted glass door. Although the gallery staff would hear his BMW pull into the lot in the mornings with some anticipation – sometimes his mood was vile at the beginning of the day – Larry could also be extremely personable and funny, and the gallery was a vivid, exciting place to work.

A client of Larry's once told me that "Larry does not have a great eye for art, but he has a great ear." and I have had to think that through. It is very true that he had an instant feeling for what was "next" in the art world, but I also think he needs to be given credit for having a very quick, open intellect. He would sound out all of his staff on what we thought of the work that was coming into the gallery, and he seemed to process it all instantly. I imagine that in New York he took it all in and picked the brains of Mary Boone's staff with the same intensity. As it turned out, listening was one of his strengths.

His beach home in Venice was full of art books – I still have have his copy of "Postminmalism" by Robert Pincus-Witten and ought to return it – and you could see that each time a show was mounted he worked closely with the artist and educated himself that way.

Although Larry did not yet have a dedicated gallery space in New York, he spent quite a bit of time at his apartment there, and the result was that he was in contact with artists who were gaining notice, and who he brought to Los Angeles. Jean Michel-Basquiat, Eric Fischl, Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Serra had shows at Gagosian while I worked there, and others, including David Salle had been there just before. Kenny Scharf dropped by in his wackily tricked-out 1961 Cadillac and brought in a stack of his recent Jetson/Flintstone paintings. One of Larry's smartest moves was to bring the excitement of the New York art scene of the early 80's to a new generation of Los Angeles collectors rich with profits from the entertainment industry and real estate development.

My truck came in handy for gallery errands, and just making deliveries was a fantastic education. I saw Stéphane Janssen's home in Beverly Hills with its precious collection of COBRA paintings. At Douglas Cramer's place in Bel-Air I contemplated the broken shards of crockery projecting from the surface of an amazing Julian Schnabel portrait. Visiting the late Barry Lowen's home in the Hollywood Hills was almost claustrophobic: I had never seen so much contemporary art packed into a small private home. One of Ed Broida's daughters was working for Gagosian and she took me home to see the shaggy late Guston paintings that lined his walls. Eli and Edye Broad's home in Brentwood was alive with a rapidly growing collection that had outgrown the main areas of the house so that a Basquiat I delivered one day had to be stashed in an upstairs hallway.

Although I had sought my job to be around art and artists, working for Gagosian was providing me with a crash course in people, power and money. Larry's clients were also looking for more than just art: they craved the excitement of working with a "bad boy" art dealer. Working with him meant not only being around a brash, audacious young dealer, but also that you might be offered an unexpected treasure at a price that took your breath away.

Among the realizations I was beginning to make was that Larry didn't really treat his clients simply as clients, but as partners. Although he has said in interviews that he has "never had a partner" Gagosian certainly had very tight relationships with a powerful circle of collectors and no dealer had ever worked harder to drive up the prices of the art they already owned. He sucked people into his favorite form of intimacy -- the business deal -- and gave them the ride of their lives.

Larry understood that everything is for sale when the price is right, and that he didn't need exclusive contracts with artists, but rather he needed relationships with collectors. What I have heard said about Frank Lloyd Wright's relationship with his clients – that at first he worked for them, then they worked together, and finally the clients were working for Wright – also describes how things worked at Gagosian Gallery. Larry held the view that other people's money belonged to him, and this view served him shockingly well.

The veteran Los Angeles dealer Esther Robles had once told me when she really wanted to sell something she would hang it in her dining room and mention to her guests that it was "not for sale." Larry took this idea to its extreme. His genius was that he considered every collector's dining room – not to mention their living rooms, hallways and even bathrooms – as extensions of Gagosian Gallery, all ripe with inventory when the price was high enough. When I first started working for Larry another employee told me that he had just sold a Diebenkorn "Ocean Park" painting right off the wall of Norman Lear's Brentwood home.

Larry had a brilliant way of keep the cost of his inventory low. He decided that even he didn't own a highly saleable work of art he could at least try to broker the hell out of it. Who was stopping him? Even if something was hanging on the wall of another dealer's space it was "fair game" for Go-Go.

I remember one audacious deal that was alive for less than twenty-four hours. One morning Larry came in and mentioned that he needed to quickly get hold of a precious early Russian modern painting that was being exhibited in San Francisco and show it to the Swiss dealer Thomas Amman who was in town just until the end of the day. I volunteered to get on the next PSA flight and by lunchtime I was in San Francisco unscrewing the painting from the wall while the very sullen owner of "Modernism" gallery looked on. I bought the painting a seat on the next flight home and by the afternoon I was rushing though the lobby of the Beverly Hills hotel, nearly knocking over Elizabeth Taylor in my haste. Mr. Amman, who was just packing to leave his bungalow looked at the painting carefully, and with exquisite manners let me know that the painting "seemed to have been varnished" so he decided to pass on it. When I got back to the gallery I found out that the owner of the painting, a doctor in some financial distress, had been calling every half hour from the bar at Trader Vic's, increasingly smashed every time he called.

That is not to say that things didn't often turn out well. Shows at the Robertson gallery were usually sold out by the day of the opening, and Larry used the old Almont gallery as a private showroom to make the side deals happen. Something "hot" like a Frank Stella relief could be sold in a day. Speaking of hot merchandise, a dealer from New York stole a Basquiat drawing from the storeroom on North Almont one day, apparently stuffing it into her purse while I was busy in front. Larry was actually pretty amused and I appreciated that he didn't accuse me of stealing it.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that Larry could be quite rude. That in itself was not shocking, but what stunned me was that his rudeness was tolerated and even embraced by some bored clients. Once an LA socialite came in and asked the price of an Ed Ruscha painting. We called Larry in New York and he answered the phone in a nasty mood and proceeded to let loose with a string of foul language and insults aimed at the woman She could hear the phone conversation and didn't even flinch: in fact she smiled. The only way I could make sense of this was to speculate that the very rich sometimes feel a sense of relief when people around them don't act obsequious.

Tantrums were a regular occurrence at the gallery, and they weren't all thrown by Larry. I remember Jean-Michel Basquiat laying into a graduate student who interviewed him on the phone and asked him "Do you think of yourself as a graffiti artist? Richard Serra had some choice words for a photographer that didn't follow his instructions in photographing the two nine inch steel slabs he had installed in the floor of the gallery. When the screaming was over, the photographer peeled out of the parking lot in his vintage Mustang, and Richard turned to the gallery staff and asked "Was I too hard on him?"

Larry had a trenchant sense of humor and he could break the tension with a dark remark. I couldn't help but laugh when he quipped that another local dealer "only knew about jerking off and white wine." A great deal of laughter came from behind the glass door of Gagosian's office as he worked his charm on clients. He was, among other things, a great entertainer.

Larry's friends – or should I say "business associates" – and staff seemed to form a kind of family for him, and I thought he treated his client and friend Scott Spiegel like a brother. Larry never mentioned his parents, although another gallery staffer told me that his mother worked as a sales clerk at a nearby Robinson's department store. Maybe it was misplaced, but Larry could be fatherly towards his staff and I appreciated it when he once bought me a new set of tires for my truck. A young D. J. named Matt Dike was often living at Larry's beach place and I thought of him, and Jean-Michel Basquiat who also stayed there as Larry's "troubled sons." Melissa Lazarov, who was intensely loyal to Larry and who is now the director of his New York gallery was teased by other gallery staff who called her "Mrs. Gagosian." Larry's girlfriends were generally invisible, and the only woman who I remember seeing more than once was an actor's wife who would pull up in a dented silver Ferrari with her young son in tow.

At times it seemed just great to be working for Larry Gagosian. Since I was living at my parent's home, my younger sisters were hearing my stories, and I remember they were very impressed to see my name appear in the Hollywood reporter after I attended a dinner Larry gave at Spago's for Roy Lichtenstein. What I didn't tell them was that I had spent most of the evening listening to the tedious boyfriend of a collector give a monologue, Edith Bunker style, on all the flooring that had been selected for their new place in Santa Barbara. It was certainly amazing to work in a place where Steve Martin might come in and joke about the nudity in Eric Fischl's paintings, but my nerves were becoming frayed knowing that to work for Larry meant going from tedium to tension every day.

Larry must have made some enemies with his fast dealing, and he was sometimes edgy and fearful. When I picked him up at LAX one night, he was nervous about entering his house alone. Once when a stranger, a young man with long hair, walked into his office by accident Larry turned ashen. I remember thinking "Larry must have thought this was a hit." When, I wondered was someone going to take Gagosian out?

One day I was in a hurry delivering a Basquiat painting to an executive at Paramount, and I threw the painting into the back of my truck without roping it down. I shouldn't have been surprised when a gust of wind lofted it into the air and I watched my rear view mirror with horror as it settled onto the double yellow line in the middle of La Cienega. I had seen many drawings on Basquiat's studio floor with footprints on them, but I think Larry would have minded tire tracks. I slammed on the brakes and rescued the painting from oncoming traffic, but I remember thinking that "maybe I shouldn't be driving in the fast lane."

There was no surprise when I told Larry that I would be leaving the gallery. He had already sensed that I was on my way out, and even before my last day he had interviewed and hired Andrew Fabricant who had been working for Dan Weinberg across the street. The day after I left Gagosian's I installed a show for Riko Mizuno, another local dealer, and she poured me tea and gave a me kind of sympathetic exit interview. After tea, she called a curator friend at the new Museum of Contemporary Art and got me a job on the installation crew.

I had dropped out of the "School of Go-Go."

In 1992 I was in New York, and I stopped in to see Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue. What a different world it was with temperature controls, security guards and museum quality paintings. I chatted with a receptionist after seeing the show, and mentioned that I had worked for Larry ten years before. She told me "He is here today, would you like to see him?" I thought about it for a moment and said "No."

Really I should have taken her up on the offer: maturity has made me see things a bit differently. All in all, Larry was decent to me personally, and there is no question that he showed me what can be accomplished with audacity and hustle.

Certainly, one can argue that he has contributed to the process of art becoming more of a commodity, but I doubt that the many artists and collectors he has made rich have too much bad to say about him. When I read references to Larry as being "colorful" I shake my head and think back about what it was like to be a part of his early years in Los Angeles.

Colorful? Sure, what else do you call a man who owns a home called "Toad Hall" and reportedly keeps Picasso's last painting in his bedroom? Colorful hardly begins to describe Larry, a flawed man who has outdone himself. He knew earlier than anyone that the super-rich of America would have an endless appetite for art, and he knew how to entertain them and whet that appetite. He was only wrong about one thing: it takes much more than twenty million dollars to be rich in America these days.

It amazes me to look back twenty-four years and think that the Basquiat painting that lofted out of my Toyota truck is now worth more than I will likely earn in my entire career as a college professor. If I had really learned what Larry was there to teach me, I should have strapped that painting into my truck, floored it and headed for the 10 eastbound, never looking back. That would have been the right way to graduate from the "School of Go-Go."

Or maybe not.