The
Stable Gallery, originally located on West 58th Street in
New York City,
USA, was founded in
1953 by Eleanor Ward. The Stable Gallery hosted the first solo New York exhibitions for artists including
Robert Indiana and
Andy Warhol.
History
The Stable Gallery originally located in an old livery stable on West 58th Street in New York received its name from the origin of its location. Initially the gallery sold mannequins and exhibited photography that was fashion related. Ward had received much encouragement for her gallery from important figures such as
Christian Dior and by the mid 1950s the Stable Gallery would begin to annually host, , , , a homage exhibit to the “
9th Street Art Exhibition” of 1951 where Ward would bring forth notable Abstract Expressionist artists including
Willem de Kooning,
Phillip Guston,
Franz Kline,
Knox Martin,
Robert Motherwell,
Jackson Pollock,
Robert Rauschenberg,
Ad Reinhardt, and
Jack Tworkov to exhibit. Though this yearly event, which would come to be known as the “Stable Annual” was a great success for the gallery, as the first and second generation Abstract Expressionist artists would begin to go in their own directions and new art movements in the Pop era would become more currently fashionable, Ward would expand the gallery beyond having only a permanent stable of artists and bring forth artists of various movements to exhibit including
Joseph Cornell,
Edward Dugmore, John Ferren,
Ian Hornak,
Alex Katz,
Lowell Nesbitt,
Conrad Marca-Relli,
Marisol Escobar,
Joan Mitchell,
Isamu Noguchi,
Larry Rivers, Richard Stankiewicz,
Cy Twombly,
Jack Tworkov,
Andy Warhol, and Wilfred Zogbaum. By doing this Eleanor Ward established a reputation for the Stable Gallery as a meeting place for both great emerging and established artists of the time.
By 1960, the Stable Gallery had moved to 33 East 74th Street in New York, a location that possessed enough space for the gallery exhibition area and living quarters for Ward on the ground floor opening to the garden at the rear. 1970 would mark the closure of the Stable Gallery which came about very quickly and unexpectedly with Eleanor Ward stating that with evolving commercialization of Fine Art and her personal loss of interest in what was becoming contemporary in the art world that she would prefer to act as a private art consultant rather than operate a gallery which she considered to have evolved into simply a business and no longer a passion.
Nonetheless, Eleanor Ward and her Stable Gallery earned a place in history that changed the face of the art world by the introduction and exhibition of many artists who are now considered to be among the most important in art history.
