“There are just five or six galleries that at one moment or another play a more important role, come up with new ideas,” the art dealer Leo Castelli once said. For much of his career, Castelli ran that kind of place, helping to usher in Pop and Minimalism in the 1960s. One of that era’s other special places was a space on West 57th Street run by a Cleveland-born dealer named Howard Wise, who was four years Castelli’s senior.
After selling his family’s industrial paint business, Mr. Wise opened up his first gallery in 1957—the same year Castelli debuted in New York—in Cleveland. In 1960, he decamped for Manhattan and went on to hold the first U.S. gallery shows devoted to kinetic art, video art and the Zero group, a heady mix of avant-gardists.
Article source: http://galleristny.com/2013/04/howard-wise-exploring-the-new-at-moeller-fine-art/