Michael Findlay

Michael Findlay is a Director of Acquavella Galleries, which specializes in Impressionist and Modern European works of art and post-war American painting and sculpture. The gallery shows the work of leading post-war artists including Lucian Freud and James Rosenquist, and represents Wayne Thiebaud and Miquel Barceló. Acquavella presents major loan exhibitions of works from museums and private collections such as “Picasso’s Marie-Thérèse”(2008), “Portrait of a Collection: Robert and Ethel Scull” (2010), “Georges Braque—Pioneer of Modernism” (2011) “Jean Dubuffet: Anticultural Positions” Miró | Calder “Constellations” in 2017 and "Picasso-Seven adecades of Drawing" in 2021.

Born in Scotland in 1945 Mr. Findlay directed one of the first galleries in SoHo, New York City, in the 1960’s and ran his own gallery there 1969-1977. He was the first dealer in the United states to show the work of Joseph Beuys, Sean Scully and other European artists and gave American artists such as John Baldessari, Hannah Wilke, Stephen Mueller and Billy Sullivan their first solo exhibitions as well as representing veteran Abstract Expressionist Ray Parker.

From 1964 until 1984 Mr. Findlay bought and sold Impressionist and Twentieth century works of art on behalf of American and European private collectors and secured early portrait commissions of Dennis Hopper and others for Andy Warhol.

In 1984 he joined Christie’s auction house and was head of the Impressionist and Modern paintings department until 1992 when he became International Director of Fine Arts and a member of Christie’s Board of Directors. He supervised the sale of many important collections: Mr. and Mrs Paul Mellon, Hal B. Wallis, Victor and Sally Ganz as well as the sale of “Dr. Gachet” by Vincent van Gogh in 1990. Findlay opened Christie’s office in Shanghai in 1994 with an exhibition of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary masterpieces and in 1995 was part of a small team assisting the creation of a Western art program at the Shanghai Museum. He retired from Christie’s in 2000.

Since 2001 Mr. Findlay has served on the Art Advisory Panel for the Internal Revenue Service of the Treasury Department of the U.S. Government. He is on the Advisory Council of the Appraisers Association of America and on the Board of the Art Dealers Association of America Foundation, the British Schools & Universities Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2022 he was appointed by President Biden to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee at the State Department.

In 2011 Findlay was keynote speaker at the international seminar in Spain on authentication sponsored by the Salvador Dalí Foundation. He has lectured at museums and universities including Seattle Art Museum, The Menil Collection, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Bridgestone Museum, Tokyo, New York University, Washington & Lee University, Gakushuin University, Tokyo) and Peking University, Beijing.

Findlay has published essays and art criticism in magazines and exhibition catalogues and has been writing and publishing poetry since the 1960’s when he read in venues like The Judson Church and The Metro Café with Ann Waldman, Gerard Malanga, Barbara Holland and others. He studied poetry with Jean Valentine, June Jordan and Kenneth Koch and his work appears in poetry magazines most recently Lalitamba and Cloudbank 11.

He is a contributing author of “The Expert versus The Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts” edited by Ronald Spencer and published by Oxford University Press in 2004. His book, “The Value of Art – Money, Power, Beauty”, was published by Prestel in 2012, and has been translated into German, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. His second book, “Seeing Slowly – Looking At Modern Art” was published in 2017 and both books are now available in Mandarin. A memoir, "Potrait of the Art Dealer as a Young Man" (Prestel) was published in September, 2024. Mr. Findlay has two children and is married to the contemporary quilt artist Victoria Findlay Wolfe. They live in Manhattan and Campbell Hall, New York.

Victoria Findlay Wolfe is the author of three books, "Modern Quilt Magic: 5 Parlor Tricks to Expand Your Piecing Skills - 17 Captivating Projects" (2017), "Double Wedding Ring Quilts - Traditions Made Modern: Full-Circle Sketches from Life" (2015) and "15 Minutes of Play - Improvisational Quilts: Made-Fabric Piecing, Traditional Blocks, Scrap Challenges" (2012).