Dominique Lévy: ‘I grew up feeling that art was freedom and fresh air’

The art gallery industry is in flux and no one better encapsulates its unpredictability than Dominique Lévy, a 54-year-old, Swiss-born, New York-based dealer. In August, it was revealed that her business, Lévy Gorvy, already a collaboration between Lévy and the art market expert Brett Gorvy, was to join forces with two more seasoned dealers: Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Amalia Dayan. Together, they plan to be a one-stop-shop in a fluid, post-pandemic art world, offering gallery exhibitions, collection management and in-depth research, based on the changing needs of their artists and buyers. Lévy is conscious that there is no prescribed formula yet for the merged entity, which launches in January 2022 as LGDR, but she describes their outlook as having “an open hand not a closed fist.”

I have known Lévy for many years and have long had a sense of her need to change the status quo. “I constantly question,” she concurs, and traces this back to when she was a teenager, studying for her bat mitzvah. “My teacher asked if I had anything to ask, and when I said no, he told me to leave and come back next week,” Lévy recalls.

She started out as a currency trader — in the footsteps of her financier father — and says that her numerate background helped with art buyers who wanted to structure payment terms or hedge currencies, something that perhaps gets overlooked in the creative industries. Lévy has since applied her skills across the art market — at auction houses and galleries and as an independent art adviser. She had her own gallery between 2012 and 2017 but this was bookended by double acts — she made her mark running L&M Arts with Robert Mnuchin for seven years until 2012 and has partnered with Gorvy since 2017. She likens the shifting sands to dance, one of her great passions. “You have to be committed to what you do, but with agility,” she says.

The dance metaphor continues to the coronavirus pandemic, which was instrumental in her latest business decision. “When you break any rhythm, then there is a space for silence,” she says. She is philosophical about the impact of the pandemic but also open about what was clearly a frustrating time for the single mother of two. “There was all the beauty and all the challenges of working from home,” she says. Her experience was that “every professional challenge seemed to be exacerbated by Zoom,” something that the otherwise brilliant mind has yet to master (I never quite got a full face during our interview). 

The story goes that Lévy was in Aspen hiking with Rohatyn and Dayan, the latter a friend for 20 years, discussing how to stay relevant — a key adjective for Lévy. This walk and talk unearthed the seeds of LGDR. “I needed to call Brett straight away and we were all ‘yes, yes, yes, yes’,” Lévy says.

Bringing four dealers together might not be the most innovative strategy — “we are not reinventing the wheel” — but has immediate advantages. “Of course there are cost savings, but we are still in London, Paris, New York and Hong Kong, so we are not saving on real estate. It’s more about having the mindfulness not to waste. We don’t all need to travel to the same place at the same time,” she says, noting that Rohatyn in particular has an ecologically-friendly imperative embedded in her gallery programme.

They are facing what Lévy describes as a market that is becoming “international rather than global”. She explains: “It is going to be more about each individual place around the world being strong, rather than people jumping on planes to go to art fairs left, right and centre,” she says. As such, LGDR plans a limited presence at fairs, though Asia will be the exception. Here, the foursome has another partner in the form of Rebecca Wei, previously chair of Christie’s for the continent. “In the landscape of collecting, it feels in Asia like it did in America 20 years ago where we saw an influx of incredibly committed and passionate collectors,” Lévy says. “Fairs are helping to raise awareness and knowledge of art in Asia. They are still relevant.”

Lévy has previously talked about breaking through the old-boys’ network of the art world but is careful not to emphasise the dominantly female set up of LGDR and rightly rejects any feminine aspects of its collaborative approach. This is not a group hug. “We are all very ambitious,” she says, emphatically.

There is a shift away from some of the other art world habits. “I don’t believe in worldwide representation of an artist or controlling them completely,” she says. It may be that not all their artists want to stay the course. Since the creation of LGDR was announced, the estate of the American artist Terry Adkins moved its representation to Paula Cooper gallery. But Lévy welcomes — and wrought — the change. “We had a wonderful five years and I felt we had reached the ceiling. So I reached out to the gallery and to Alexis [Johnson, a director at the gallery who had previously worked with the artist at Lévy Gorvy]. This is the way things always should be,” she says. Meanwhile, she notes, there has been lots of support for and conversations with their existing artists about LGDR — and many others curious to learn more.

For her, personally, “I grew up feeling that art was freedom and fresh air,” she says. Her mother, Lévy felt, was “a bit stifled” by life in the Swiss countryside and escaped to galleries and art fairs — the dealer first went to Art Basel “in a stroller”. Fifty years later, Lévy wants to inject some of that fresh air back to the market. “It is a bit early in the process, but I hope that our openness means there is a range of possibility rather than a range of uncertainty,” she says. “By the way,” she adds, “in life, you might be wrong in your decisions. But as long as you learn from them, then that’s fine. You just have to have the courage to make choices.”

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