In Memoriam: Julie Saul (1954–2022)

February 16, 2022

By Grey Art Gallery Staff

Julie Saul in her West Village apartment with her dog Augie in an undated photo. Photo by Tahir Karmali, courtesy The New York Times.

We at the Grey are heartbroken by the loss of our friend Julie Saul, an entrepreneurial Manhattan gallerist and NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts alum who championed many photographers and multimedia artists. Saul passed away on February 4, 2022, from leukemia. Penelope Green has written Saul’s obituary for the New York Times.

At the time of her death, she was working on a project she had begun nearly two decades years earlier to promote the life and legacy of Berthe Weill, a pioneering, early-20th-century Parisian art dealer who has been largely written out of art history. Saul was determined to get Ms. Weill’s memoir in print. Her dream will come to fruition this summer when “Pow! Right in the Eye! Thirty Years Behind the Scenes of Modern French Painting” is released by University of Chicago Press. It will be followed by an exhibition about Weill at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in the summer of 2024 and at the Grey the next year.

Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey and a colleague of Saul, notes: “As all who knew her can attest, Julie was a truly irrepressible and effervescent force in the art world —she possessed a discerning eye and loved art history. She was also a longtime friend of Tom Sokolowski, my predecessor at the Grey Art Gallery. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Julie for introducing me to Berthe Weill, and like Julie, I became totally fascinated and transfixed by the saga of this remarkable woman who was the very first dealer to promote emerging artists. Julie lived life to the fullest and she’ll be dearly missed.”