As a schoolboy in the 1960s studying art history at the University of Cambridge, Alan Cristea and a few friends paid frequent visits to London’s Whitechapel Gallery. There he remembers taking in solo exhibitions that showcased the abstract expressionists Jasper Johns and Franz Kline, as well as shows featuring works from British pop artists Richard Hamilton, Allen Jones, Peter Blake, and Peter Phillips. “We thought it was a cool thing to do. Having developed an interest in contemporary art, I decided to go back in time,” says Cristea, noting that he wrote a thesis on 19th-century printmaker Charles Méryon.
His professional art world debut was in 1969 at the Marlborough New London Gallery. “I was employed in the print department when the so-called pop generation of artists was embracing printmaking wholeheartedly. It was a time of great innovation, and it was also a far more democratic age than the one we live in now,” Cristea says. “We were publishing original prints by some of the best contemporary artists, which were being lapped-up by collectors for a few pounds each.”
Several years later, Cristea took over Leslie Waddington’s print gallery, collaborating with the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, and Howard Hodgkin for more than two decades. In 1995, Cristea took his years of expertise and opened his eponymous London gallery, becoming one of the world’s leading publishers of original contemporary prints and editions. It was reborn earlier this year as the Cristea Roberts Gallery to honor the 21 years that David Cleaton-Roberts served as its director.
“Every artist is an individual,” he says. “All of them need different things from their representative dealer.” For example, Hodgkin preferred paintings to prints, telling Cristea he was done with making the latter. But in 2009, Cristea convinced the artist to create a 20-foot-long etching, leading to the creation of “two versions of the same gigantic print, As Time Goes By,” says Cristea. “When [Hodgkin] was later asked in an interview why he had made such enormous ones, he replied, ‘To show that I could.’”
Celebrating artists’ distinctive visions and approaches is the ethos that propels the Alan Cristea Gallery forward. “We are catalysts and facilitators for the making of new work and also the mediators in trying to exhibit it in the best possible way.”
A colorful piece by Pop artist Joe Tilson selected by Cristea adorns a stairwell at the Whitby Hotel
