| Barbara Gladstone | |
| Birth Name: | Barbara Levitt |
| Birth Date: | 21 May 1935 |
| Birth Place: | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Death Place: | Paris, France |
| Children: | 3 |
Barbara Gladstone (née Levitt; May 21, 1935 – June 16, 2024) was an American art dealer and film producer.[1] [2] She was owner of Gladstone Gallery, a contemporary art gallery with locations in New York and Brussels.
Barbara Levitt was born in Philadelphia on May 21, 1935.[3] She began collecting in the 1970s, alongside a job teaching art history at Hofstra University.[3]
She was married twice, to Elliot Regen and Leonard Gladstone ; both marriages ended in divorce.[3] [4] She had two sons, David and Richard Regen; her third son, Stuart Regen, died in 1998 at USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.[5]
In 1980, Gladstone gave up her job at Hofstra to open an art gallery in Manhattan,[6] where she began showing Jenny Holzer.[7]
From 1989 to 1992, Gladstone Gallery collaborated with Christian Stein, an Italian art gallerist, on SteinGladstone. Located in a renovated firehouse at 99 Wooster Street in Soho, the gallery concentrated exclusively on rarely seen installaton works by both Italian and American artists.[8]
Gladstone Gallery staged Matthew Barney's first New York solo show in 1991 and has since introduced many international artists to an American audience.[9] Before moving to Chelsea in 1996, the gallery was located in Soho and on 57th Street in New York City. In 1996, the gallery teamed up with two other galleries – Metro Pictures and Matthew Marks Gallery – to acquire and divide up a 29000square feet warehouse at 515 West 24th Street.[10] In addition, Gladstone Gallery operates spaces at 530 West 21st Street and at 12 Rue du Grand Cerf in Brussels.[11]
The gallery is also a prominent participant in many major art fairs.[12]
In 2002, Gladstone brought Curt Marcus on as partner for several years.[13] In 2020, Gladstone Gallery merged with Gavin Brown's Enterprise and made Gavin Brown a partner.[14]
Beginning in 2018, Gladstone served on the board of the non-profit Artists Space.[15]
In 2008, Gladstone initiated the formation of the Stuart Regen Visionaries Fund at the New Museum, established in honor of her late son the art dealer Stuart Regen.[16] The gift is meant to support a series of public lectures and presentations by cultural visionaries and debuted in 2009 with choreographer Bill T. Jones.[17] It has featured prominent international thinkers in the fields of art, architecture, design and contemporary culture. Past speakers have included Jimmy Wales (2010),[18] Alice Waters (2011),[19] Maya Lin (2013),[20] Hilton Als (2015),[21] [22] and Fran Lebowitz (2016, in conversation with Martin Scorsese).[23]
From 2005 until 2012, Gladstone maintained a residence at 165 Charles Street, a residential tower designed by Richard Meier.[24] She later moved to a townhouse in Chelsea.[25]
Gladstone died from an apparent stroke on June 16, 2024, at a hospital in Paris; she had traveled to the city on a work trip. She was 89.[3] [26]