Dealer's Choice

Former gallery director Andrea Glimcher is making waves in New York City’s art world with her new advisory firm, Hyphen. And unsurprisingly, her own collection is simply marvelous. ROBERT SULLIVAN reports.

- Robert Sullivan

On a recent sun-drenched morning, Andrea Glimcher led me through the front screen door of a large, century-old house in Southampton into a living room that looked a lot like a painting by Fairfield Porter. Getting inside the work of an artist—for galleries and museums, for collectors and clients of all kinds—is a big part of what Glimcher does, though here she’s being quite literal. The house she’s renting, it turns out, was once the home of Porter and his wife, Anne, and a gathering spot for New York School painters and poets like Jane Freilicher and Frank O’Hara. To let me fully experience Porter’s The Living Room, Glimcher places me where Porter would have stood, then presents me with a copy of the 1952 painting—a languid interior, with fireplace, a table, chairs, windows to the summer outdoors—as if it were a map. For a moment I am in dialogue with the room’s past, with Porter, in that place between representational and abstract that the artist continually explored.

“I like to connect the dots when I can,” says Glimcher, who, tall and blonde in shorts and sneakers, looks as if she might have stepped off the court of The Tennis Game, another iconic Fairfield Porter painting.

Glimcher, 46, has been connecting the dots for two decades, first while running public relations and special projects for Pace Gallery and, more recently—since her marriage to Marc Glimcher, Pace’s president, ended in 2013—with her own company, Hyphen. An arts advisory firm, Hyphen acts as a link between artists and institutions, whether introducing writers and filmmakers or helping artists navigate the increasingly complicated world of dealers, galleries, international fairs, and exhibitions.