# Give Me the Now: An Autobiography - Hardcover

by **Rudolf Zwirner** (Author), **Nicola Kuhn** (Author), **Gerard A. Goodrow** (Translator)

**Rudolf Zwirner, "the man who invented the art market," as coined in _Der Spiegel_, reflects on more than sixty years in the art business in his authoritative autobiography.**

**"Americans now see Germany as a natural breeding ground for mighty gallerists and collectors, but Rudolf Zwirner's fascinating new memoir walks us through the decades it took to rebuild an art world shattered by World War II. In this dealer's charming telling, however, the work involved sounds more like play than labor." --Blake Gopnik, author of _Warhol_**

An art dealer of the ages, Rudolf Zwirner, father of the esteemed gallerist David Zwirner, reached many milestones in his career. From cofounding Art Cologne, the first fair for contemporary art, in 1967, to showing works by Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter, and Andy Warhol, Zwirner transformed the contemporary art scene in Cologne. Born in 1933, he presented more than three hundred exhibitions from the early 1960s to 1992. In his autobiography, Zwirner reveals stories of artists, his gallery, and his most important collector, Peter Ludwig, whose collection forms the cornerstone of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne.

First published in 2019 in German, and translated and adapted here for the first time in English, the book explores the most significant moments of Zwirner's career and the fast-changing postwar art world. Also included in this edition is a new foreword by Lucas Zwirner, Rudolf's grandson, who reflects on his grandfather's role in bringing us to the global art landscape we find ourselves in now.

### Author Biography

**Rudolf Zwirner**, born 1933, is an art dealer based in Cologne. He started his gallery in the 1960s and grew to show works by icons including Sigmar Polke, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and others. He is the father of the gallerist David Zwirner.

**Nicola Kuhn** is an art critic and a features editor of _Tagesspiegel_. She studied art history and modern history and has taught at the Free University and the University of the Arts in Berlin. In 2013, she was awarded the Critics' Prize from the hbs Cultural Foundation, Hannover. In 2016, she coauthored the biography _Hitler's Kunsthandler: Hildebrand Gurlitt, 1895-1956_. She became acquainted with Galerie Zwirner while studying in Cologne and met Rudolf Zwirner in her role as a journalist in Berlin.

**Ge´rard A. Goodrow** is a curator, an author, and a translator based in Cologne. He studied cultural anthropology and art history at Rutgers University, New Jersey; modern and contemporary art history at the City University of New York; and art history, German philology, and English literature at the University of Cologne. Goodrow immigrated to Germany in 1987. He has held positions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Christie's, London; and Art Cologne and Cologne Fine Art. Over the past thirty years, he has curated more than one hundred contemporary art and photography exhibitions in Germany and abroad. He is the author of numerous texts and publications, including _Crossing China: The Land of the Rising Art Scene_ (2012) and _Passages: Indian Art Today_ (2014), and has taught and lectured extensively on international modern and contempo- rary art, photography, and the global art market.

**Lucas Zwirner** is Head of Content at David Zwirner where he oversees all aspects of gallery publishing through books, web, video, and the podcast _Dialogues_. Lucas has contributed texts to gallery publications, including _Rudolf Zwirner: Give Me the Now_ (2021), _A Balthus Notebook_ (2020), and _Tell Me Something Good: Artist Interviews from The Brooklyn Rail_ (2017). At David Zwirner Books, he began the _ekphrasis_ series, dedicated to publishing short texts on visual culture by artists and writers, rarely available in English. He has also written on contemporary art and literature for publications _The Drift_ and _The Paris Review_, and translated books from German and French. His translation of Elias Cannetti's _The Profession of the Poet_ is forthcoming in _I WANT TO KEEP SMASHING MYSELF UNTIL I'M WHOLE: An Elias Canetti Reader_, edited by Josh Cohen and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

**Number of Pages:** 312

**Dimensions:** 1.2 x 8.2 x 5.4 IN

**Publication Date:** January 26, 2021

## Details

- **Price:** 35.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 35.00 USD | In stock |

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