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After six years of selecting and installing exhibitions in other galleries, I began to realize a gift for recognizing creative work. In 1946, I started my own gallery in which I promoted many painters now famous: Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Bradley Walker Tomlin, ^[[Walter Murch, Hedda Sterne William Congdon]] and the young Robert Rauschenberg. Each artist was different, but each man possessed a vocabulary according to his nature and feeling toward life. This feeling of personal identification and strength seemed to be what I was instinctively looking for in each work.

The first five years of the gallery, 1946-1951, were particularly exciting as the artists were stimulated by one another's work and out of those years came the paintings which are now the classics of postwar American art. Although the public was reluctant to recognize the artists' affirmations of their lives, the artists formed their own audience and praised one another. It was a very gradual acknowledgement which came to them, beginning only with a few collectors and [[strikethrough]] a couple of [[/strikethrough]] museums.

I never doubted that I was participating in a dynamic wave of creative ability concentrated in this country---an expression of the vastness, freedom and newness of a young nation. Within that first decade, sustained by a small, convinced public, the artists found their way into