[Prefatory note: In September 1944 I had the good fortune to be hired as the managing editor of View, a magazine devoted to European artists—particularly the Surrealists and neo-Romantics—then in exile in New York. Until the magazine folded in 19471 was acquainted with Miró, Ernst, Matta, Lam, Seligmann, Tchelitchew, Berman, and many of the other European expatriate artists, their dealers, and their surrounding circle. View was concerned with both art and literature, and numbered among its contributors Meyer Schapiro, Paul Goodman, Marius Bewley, Harold Rosenberg, Parker Tyler, Lionel Abel, and Edouard Roditi. It was probably the first American journal to publish in translation the poetry and prose of such writers as Francis Ponge, Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, André Breton, Jorge Luis Borges, and other contemporaries since become celebrated.

In 1951 I organized a gallery to exhibit new work by young American artists, the so-called “second generation” that followed in the wake of the Abstract Expressionists. I had been encouraged to do this by Clement Greenberg, Jackson Pollock, and Lee Krasner, and received further support from such artists as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, andAdolph Gottlieb, with all of whom I was friendly. At the time there were perhaps a half dozen galleries willing to gamble on unknown American artists.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the Tibor De Nagy Gallery (named after my partner) exhibited many painters who have since become well known: Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Goodnough, Jane Freilicher, and Red Grooms, to