Mitchell Algus, the proprietor and curator of the Mitchell Algus Gallery, on New York’s Lower East Side, located above a graffiti-covered discount-jewelry store.

The Secret Source

While the Mitchell Algus Gallery has launched the careers of many current art-world sensations, Algus himself struggles to pay the rent

By Bianca Bosker

In 2002 the gallerist Mitchell Algus opened a solo show of black-and-white paintings by the artist Betty Tompkins that, for 30 years, other dealers had refused to exhibit. The pieces, now known as Tompkins’s “Fuck Paintings,” featured close-up depictions of genitals mid-coitus.

A curator saw Tompkins’s work at Algus’s gallery and, impressed, included it in a prestigious biennial in France. Soon after, a piece was purchased for the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Now, Tompkins’s paintings sell for upwards of $500,000 and hang in museums around the world. Algus, Tompkins has said, “was like a fairy godmother.”