James Mayor’s Gallery Is 100 Years Old—and It’s Still Changing the Mold

In 1973, James Mayor mounted a presentation of Andy Warhol’s infamous “Mao” works in the U.K. for the first time. The Pop art legend was still gaining wide recognition across the pond, and “the English weren’t quite into it,” according to the gallerist. It was Mayor’s first exhibition at the helm of his father’s gallery, and this prescience would come to define his trailblazing career. In 2015, an auction record for a “Mao” portrait was set for $47.5 million.

This year, The Mayor Gallery, founded by James’s father, Fred, commemorates its centenary, a milestone that very few commercial galleries have reached. Artists like Paul Klee and Alexander Calder had their U.K. debuts at the gallery, and it was a major player in showing some of the biggest art movements of the 20th century, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop art, Group Zero, and Conceptual art.

A dealer who’s never lost his taste for discovery, Mayor is currently mounting a show of works by the late Slovakian Conceptualist Július Koller. Populated by pieces from across the artist’s subversive and variegated career, which draws on Fluxus and Nouveau Réalisme, the show is humorous, political, and a touch obscure. In other words, it’s of The Mayor Gallery itself: a place where discovery, passion, and open-mindedness are defining features.

“I have a Catholic taste: I only show what I believe in,” Mayor quipped. And he thinks what he believes in can change how people see the world. “If, by the time I die, I’ve changed 10 people’s outlook on life from what I’ve shown, then I’ve achieved something.”

Mayor met Artsy at his gallery on Bury Street. He wore a resplendent tailored suit and one of his many vibrant ties, this one depicting a frog. “I’ve got over 600 ties, and I haven’t bought one in years—they find me,” he joked. Also joining was Purdey, his impressively calm whippet curled up on the sofa beside him.

Surrounding us was a glittering array of Surrealist works by artists including Salvador Dalí, Emmy Bridgwater, Pablo Picasso, and Wifredo Lam, evidence of Mayor’s personal connection to some of the movement’s canonical names.

Mayor spent his formative years in 1960s London, a time he called “extraordinary.” In the art world, several now-storied names were well on the way to making their mark. Kasmin was showing David Hockney and Kenneth Noland on New Bond Street, “Groovy” Bob Fraser’s gallery was hosting parties for The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and Marlborough was well on its way to becoming the world’s first mega-gallery. Lisson Gallery and Annely Juda would open towards the end of the decade, but by that time, Mayor had moved to New York. He first worked at Perls Gallery, and then he joined Sotheby’s (then called Park-Bernet), where he would go on to set up its post-war and contemporary department, now one of its largest categories.

“There were basically 10 galleries selling contemporary art,” Mayor explained of the nascent New York art world at the time, a socially fluid milieu where you could run into several of the scene’s leading figures in the same bar. Mayor soon found himself rubbing shoulders with artists such as Cy Twombly and James Rosenquist, and dealers like Leo Castelli, whom he called the “king” of the scene.

It was with Warhol—arguably New York’s most famous artist at the time—whom Mayor chose to start with when he returned to London. Mayor himself has no shortage of stories about Warhol, an artist that he views as “about as misunderstood as Duchamp.” “[We’d be at a party] and he’d be sitting in the corner, and say, ‘come over here…Who are all these freaks?,’” he recalled of a typical Warhol interaction. Mayor wrote Warhol’s obituary for Vogue, and they traveled together to Kuwait under the invitation of the National Council of Arts, Culture, and Letters. “He came to that instead of going to [James] Carter’s inauguration,” he said.

The dealer quickly realized that other names he knew from his time in New York were practically unknown in London. “I was able to show artists that people really hadn’t been exposed to,” he recalled, pointing to figures such as Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, John Chamberlain, and Twombly. “My philosophy is always to look for artists who have been at the forefront of taste changes,” he said.

It’s that philosophy that has kept Mayor at the top of his game throughout his career. “In [art] dealing, you’re basically selling your confidence,” Mayor said. “You’ve got to believe in what you sell, and you’ve got to believe in what you collect.”

It’s in that joy of discovery, what Mayor calls the “passion and love” in seeking out art, that resonates, which is where we end up at the present moment. Mayor is “desperately worried” about the direction of the art market. “If people only buy with money in mind, this is what happens,” he noted of the current market slowdown. “The thing is, if you remove passion, you remove life,” Mayor added. “We’ve got to get back to passion, love, and have fun.”