The Man Who Helped Create the Modern Art Market Has a Few Regrets

In 1960, after only a year in business, Rudolf Zwirner’s fledgling gallery in Essen, Germany, was in serious debt. In a panic he turned to the dealer Hein Stünke, whose gallery in Cologne, Der Spiegel, had become a gathering place for the European avant-garde. “Young man,” Stünke said, “you can’t expect to earn enough money with contemporary art. You also have to be active on the secondary market. Buy paintings that customers are looking for, and then resell them at a profit.”

And with that, Stünke neatly summed up a winning business model that would carry Zwirner—and almost every other successful contemporary art dealer—for the next 60 years. Now 87 and living in semiretirement in Berlin, he’s arguably a more influential figure in the history of contemporary art than his son, David, whose mega-gallery has locations in Hong Kong, London, New York, and Paris.