Diane Shamash, 1955-2006

Two art-world doyennes, Diane Shamash and Annely Juda, died last Sunday. I don't want to read too much into the coincidence, especially considering that although they died on the same day, they were born 41 years apart from each other. Diane died at 51: when Annely was that age, her best years were very much ahead of her and Annely Juda Fine Art wasn't even founded. It's a sobering reminder of how much Diane could have accomplished given more time.

Still, there are definite similarities between the two: both were physically small and temperamentally uncompromising, with a tendency towards perfectionism. Both, too, were intensely loyal to their artists: the art, always, came first, for both of them, and they had a rare ability to bend the art world to their will when they wanted something.

I never met Annely, although I spent many wonderful hours in her pristine Dering Street gallery, lost in her beautifully-curated shows of usually underrated abstract masters. I remember one constructivism show particularly well – there was a Malevich I returned to Saturday after Saturday on my weekly trips into town from Dulwich.

Diane I knew better, often meeting her in some kind of food-related context: she loved food almost as much as she loved art. Diane saw great chefs as artists in their own right, and was particularly interesting when she explored the intersection between fine art and food, as in the work of Christian Philipp Müller.

The biggest difference between Annely and Diane might be in the fate of their legacies. Annely Juda Fine Art is in the excellent hands of David Juda; Minetta Brook, on the other hand, has lost not only its founder but its very soul, and although I dearly hope that it will be able to continue, I fear that might not be possible.

Minetta Brook was a serious-minded public art organisation which refused ever to condescend to the public it served. Diane would find artists as serious-minded as she was, and would help them realise their vision with unquestioning faith that there would always be an audience for good art, no matter how superficially inaccessible it might be.

As part of a project called Watershed, Minetta Brook once rented out a storefront in Beacon, NY, where it exhibited a long silent black-and-white film of the Hudson River by Matthew Buckingham called Muhheakantuck. Christian Philipp Müller's piece in the same project consisted of a long steel trough in Annandale-on-Hudson planted with Hudson River flora. Neither was easily accessible in any sense of the word.

The audience for these pieces came largely from the art world: Minetta Brook was never scared to create "public art" which in practice was seen and appreciated by a very small audience. For Diane, public art was not a popularity contest. She always served her artists first, even when their projects might not receive much in the way of public acclaim.

If she refused to submit to the tyrannny of the popular, Diane also refused to be told what was art and what was not. Food could be art, as could be barbecue grills (designed by Pae White and installed in Bear Mountain State Park) or park benches (by Constance De Jong and installed at Hessian Lake). The most ambitious of all the Watershed projects was George Trakas's Beacon Landing: something that many art-world types would automatically consider architecture, or design, or in any case Not Art.

Diane, however, had the utmost faith in and respect for her artists and their art, and treated all of these projects with the same white-gloved respect that she would give to the films of Dan Graham or the sculptures of Lothar Baumgarten.

New York without Diane Shamash is certainly a poorer place, but it will be poorer still if it loses Minetta Brook as well. Public art is often thought of in terms of hits: big projects in Rockefeller Center or along Park Avenue or installed in subway stations. Diane had her own hits, too, foremost among them the realization of Robert Smithson's Floating Island from little more than a single sketched drawing. Predictably, that project takes up a large part of the NYT obituary.

But it's the smaller, quieter pieces which for me are her true legacy. If you went down to Pier 26 on the West Side Highway at any time before last November you might have seen an upside-down canoe-like structure on a couple of stilts. In fact the whole pier was an artwork by George Trakas called Curach and Bollard, one which wasn't often admired as art, but one which very many people enjoyed very much all the same. That was part of its beauty, and part of what made it such a classic Minetta Brook piece. Every so often someone would stop, and consider, and move on, and the world would be just a little bit better.

Posted by Felix at 9:43 EST

Comments

Thank you for writing this wonderful piece. I knew Diane Shamash a little, as she had begun the process of bringing art to the riverbank up here in Hudson, NY. We met on several occasions, and I took her on a tour of the prominent waterfront sites. Hopefully someone else will carry on with her vision.

Regards,

Posted by: peter jung at 20:40 EST, August 21, 2006