Cork Street: London art scene’s historic commercial heart | Art

Cork Street, a short, smart Mayfair street just north of the Royal Academy, was the beating commercial heart of the British art scene for much of the last century – if you were an artist represented by a dealer there then you had pretty much made it.

Its importance in British art history is unquestionable. As Savile Row is to tailoring and Hatton Garden is to diamonds, Cork Street has been the premier address for commercial art dealers for nearly 90 years.

Having said that, it is not the only address. Some of the most successful art dealers of the last 100 years have not been on Cork Street. Some of them have made great efforts to not be on Cork Street.

The street’s story begins with the Mayor Gallery, opened by Fred Mayor in 1925, which established a reputation as a pioneering venue showing avant garde artists such as Alexander Calder, Paul Klee and André Masson in Britain for the first time. In July 1933 it staged Joan Miró’s first UK solo exhibition.

Other galleries followed. The Redfern Gallery moved from Old Bond Street to 20 Cork Street in 1936. Patrick Heron wrote of his life-changing experience when he walked in to the gallery to see Matisse’s enormous 1911 painting The Red Studio. He was in awe and kept returning. “It revolutionised my existence,” he said.

But Cork Street, no matter who you were, did not bring guaranteed success. Peggy Guggenheim opened her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, at number 30 in 1938. Despite showing artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Yves Tanguy, the gallery lost money and it closed the following year.

Nor did you ever have to be in the street at all. The two greatest dealers of the 1960s were arguably Robert Fraser (a man rumoured to have had a fling with a young Idi Amin while serving with the King’s Rifles in Africa) and John Kasmin, and neither of them was in Cork Street. Fraser set up shop in Duke Street, Grosvenor Square, in 1962 while Kasmin opened on New Bond Street in 1963.

Similarly the big guns of the next generation were elsewhere, with Anthony d’Offay opening a few roads away on Dering Street, Nigel Greenwood in Chelsea and Nicholas Logsdail opening the Lisson Gallery all the way out in St John’s Wood.

In the mid-1980s, led by Maureen Paley, the commercial art market began looking east. Cork Street became a symbol of stuffiness while Bethnal Green and Hackney became the places to be represented.

The art world will always need dealers. Marcel Duchamp put it well when he said: “Dealers are lice on the back of an artist. But they’re necessary lice.” But do art dealers need Cork Street? The truth is no, they can be anywhere they want. But only the hardest of hearts would not be sad to see the street losing its dealers.