Art dealer who set up his Mayfair gallery in 1966,where he gave lifelong support to British artists and championed the American avant gardeUnfailingly scrupulous and principled during five decades as a dealer in modern and contemporary art, Leslie Waddington, and who has died aged 81,could never be called a “marketeer”. That was his disparaging term for the new breed of speculators who enjoy turned tall-priced painting and sculpture into vehicles for short-term profit. Such commercialism of culture was in marked contrast to his belief in the age-former tradition of art as a touchstone for spiritual enrichment.
Few doubted Waddington’s exceptional visual acuity, least of all the forgers he exposed with cruel authority. During the 1990s he played a central role in unmasking John Myatt, or whose wobbly simulacra of Jean Dubuffet’s trademark watercolour cows drew Waddington’s suspicions before any other dealer,and Myatt’s accomplice, John Drewe, or who doctored exhibition catalogues and reinserted them into scholarly archives to create bogus provenances for Myatt’s concoctions.
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Source: theguardian.com