Samuel M. Kootz
Samuel M. Kootz (23 August 1898 – 7 August 1982) was a New York City art dealer and author whose Kootz Gallery was one of the first to champion Abstract Expressionist Art. Between 1945 and 1966, in galleries on 57th Street or Madison Avenue, this "tall, genial southerner" represented avant-garde American and European artists. In the 1930s and early forties, while working in advertising and the fabric industry, Kootz had found time to write about modern art. In two books and letters to the New York Times he decried realistic American regionalism and European-inspired abstraction while urging American artists to create a new form of expressive abstract art. His gallery became a proving ground for his aesthetic ideas. In 1947 he gained renown by holding the first American exhibition of wartime Picassos. He purchased the Picassos by flying to Paris in late 1946, introducing himself to Picasso and convincing him that sales of his work would help to support the Kootz Gallery's inventive young artists : William Baziotes, Romare Bearden, Byron Browne, Adolph Gottlieb, Carl Holty, and Robert Motherwell. Over the years Kootz continued to buy paintings directly from Picasso. Kootz also exhibited work by Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, James