Today, the staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe shares some of the stories that inspired his Profile of the world’s biggest art dealer. One pleasure of writing for a publication that is nearly a century old is that you can occasionally find yourself in conversation with other articles that have run in the magazine, sometimes decades ago. Almost as soon as I started making phone calls for my Profile of the art dealer Larry Gagosian, I heard that he has a fascination with one of his predecessors in the business, the great early-twentieth-century dealer Joseph Duveen. In particular, Gagosian admires a biography of Duveen by S. N. Behrman, which originally ran as a multi-part series in The New Yorker, in 1951. Gagosian described himself to me as a combination of Duveen and another dealer, Leo Castelli, who was Gagosian’s mentor, and who was profiled by Calvin Tomkins in 1980 and written about again by Peter Schjeldahl (in a review of the biography “Leo & His Circle,” by Annie Cohen-Solal) in 2010. The accounts of these two dealers who were so influential to Gagosian were very helpful in thinking through his inspirations and innovations, as were Connie Bruck’s extraordinary 2010 Profile of the art collector Eli Broad, who was a major Gagosian client; Rebecca Mead’s 2016 piece about Loïc Gouzer, a friend of Gagosian’s (and a source for my piece); and Nick Paumgarten’s 2013 Profile of one of Gagosian’s key competitors, David Zwirner. Beyond The New Yorker, I drew on many earlier articles and books that shed light on Gagosian and the art market. With any figure who has risen to this sort of prominence, it is always interesting to look back at articles that were written in an earlier era, when nobody had an inkling of quite how prominent the subject would become. I particularly enjoyed this 1989 profile, “What Makes Larry Go-Go?” by Deborah Gimelson, published in the magazine 7 Days. | 
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