Memoir of a Collection: Finding Meaning through Art

A leading New York gallerist reflects on the artworks that have meant the most to him―and shows how collecting, and looking at, art can change your life.

In this book of linked, illustrated essays―a unique hybrid of memoir, art writing, and wisdom-seeking narrative―Steven Kasher looks closely at some thirty artworks in his personal collection. These are not necessarily the largest or most valuable pieces that have passed through his hands, but the ones that have lodged themselves in his mind: a photograph of Janis Joplin, a Philip Guston painting of a salami sandwich on seeded rye, a haunting self-portrait by the comics artist Leela Corman. What sufferings and joys are revealed through these images, he asks? What can they teach us about an expanded self? Can they show us how to love?

Through his reflections on these works, Kasher also retraces his personal journey. It is a journey through the New York art world as an artist, an art dealer, a collector, a curator, a writer. The journey of a first-generation Jewish American who plants a Zen seed as a teenager and finds spiritual fruition decades later. A journey through the memory of the Holocaust and a firsthand experience of the Civil Rights Movement. But most of all it is a journey through the meanings we find in art―one that will inspire every art collector and art lover to go take another look at their favorite pictures.

Steven Kasher is the author of seven books, including The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954–68 (Abbeville) and America and the Tintype. He worked as a visual artist before starting, in 1995, Steven Kasher Gallery, which represents many noted photographers and graphic novelists.