Remember the Women Institute is sad to announce that our friend and benefactor of our VIOLATED! exhibition, Gertrude Stein, the renowned American art dealer who founded Gallery: Gertrude Stein on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, died on February 27, 2026, in New York. She was 98.
Her death was confirmed by Anthony Williams, chair of the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, where she served as president. “Gertrude was a force of nature,” Williams said. “She had more energy than anyone could imagine, and her ability to discover, evaluate, and support new artists was unparalleled.”
For more than five decades, Stein stood as a singular presence in the postwar art world, advocating for artists whose work challenged political complacency, commercial trends, and aesthetic convention. She was one of the most steadfast champions of the NO!art movement. In 1963, at a moment when Pop Art was ascendant and commercial galleries were consolidating power, Stein opened her gallery at 24 East 81st Street. The space quickly became a sanctuary for artists working outside the mainstream. Central to its mission was NO!art, the confrontational movement founded by the artist Boris Lurie (1924–2008), which critiqued consumerism, nuclear proliferation, historical amnesia, and American militarism. Stein served as patron, advocate, and muse to Lurie.
The gallery’s inaugural exhibition featured Lurie, a Holocaust survivor, and announced its uncompromising stance. Among the works shown was Railroad to America (1963), a collage juxtaposing pin-up imagery with photographs of Nazi concentration camps — a searing indictment of both cultural complacency and the emerging Pop aesthetic. Lurie’s mother and sisters were murdered in Latvia by the Nazis and their collaborators, and this had a deep effect on his life and his artwork.
Born in Brooklyn in 1927, Stein graduated from the City College of New York with a degree in art and literature and went on to study at the Art Students League and the New School for Social Research. The combination of intellectual rigor and aesthetic conviction she developed in these years shaped her career as both dealer and philanthropist.
Her professional life extended beyond the commercial art world. As program director for the
New York City Department of Welfare, she developed arts initiatives and social clubs for senior citizens, bringing creative engagement into public service. The role reflected her belief that art was not solely the province of collectors and museums, but a vital civic resource.
After Lurie’s death in 2008, Stein formally established the Boris Lurie Art Foundation to preserve his work and that of other NO! artists. As president, she devoted herself to exhibitions, publications, and institutional partnerships designed to secure the movement’s place in art history as scholars and curators reassessed its significance.
Throughout her career, significant works passed through her gallery into major institutional collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. A longtime member of the Appraisers Association of America from 1962 to 1997, she was widely respected for her expertise in postwar art.
She is survived by her son, Claude Ethe, and was predeceased by her son, Andy Ethe.