ARCHIVE

Charles Ruas in a 2012 conversation with dealer, a curator and critic Klaus Kertess who died in October 2016. The focus was Kertess’s collected essays about artists with whom he was associated, Seen, Written. Born in 1940 and Yale educated, Kertess founded the Bykert Gallery in 1966 where he first started to support the (mostly) minimalist and process art works of Chuck Close, Ralph Humphrey, Barry Le Va, Brice Marden, David Novros, Alan Saret, and Dorothea Rockburne among others. Kertess mentored Mary Boone and Lynda Benglis and others who worked for him. He left the gallery in 1975 to pursue his interest in curating and in writing. He became an adjunct curator of drawing at the Whitney Museum in 1989. In 1995 he was the curator of the Whitney Biennial. The accompanying photo, taken in 1976, is by his husband, Billy Sullivan. "Art is a platform for experience, not a lesson."