Nairy Baghramian on Marian Goodman, Who Sang Verdi in the Gallery

Nairy Baghramian wrote about Marian Goodman this week. The dealer died in May. The piece, filed to Artforum, is a sculptor's accounting of a gallerist who worked in whispers and then sang opera out loud.

Goodman ran her Paris and New York galleries for five decades. She showed Baghramian, Gerhard Richter, Steve McQueen, William Kentridge. The roster reads as a list of artists who don't need the gallery's name on the wall anymore. That was the point. Goodman built the kind of program where the work arrived first and the market followed later, sometimes years later.

Baghramian's memory is specific: Goodman whispering through logistics in the office, then singing Verdi between rooms. Nabucco, her favorite. The image works because it's the opposite of the gallerist-as-socialite register. No party photos, no collector dinners. Just a woman who knew the repertoire and sang it while the installers were still in the room.

The piece doesn't canonize. It reports a working relationship that lasted decades and ended this year. Baghramian describes a gift she made for Goodman, a sculptural object the dealer wouldn't keep in her own collection. Goodman's refusal reads as discipline, not sentiment. The gallery was the gallery. The collection was someone else's.

The obituary register in contemporary art tends toward hagiography or silence. This one lands between: a sculptor filing a memory of a dealer who worked quietly and then didn't. Verdi in the gallery. The room still holding the note.