LIKE a Zelig of the art world, Sam Green was seemingly always there, filling a space in the social picture that no one quite realized was empty. Over five decades Mr. Green played pivotal roles, first as a curator, then as an art dealer, a municipal adviser and finally as a society gadabout and preservationist whose scope took in the more remote corners of the planet.
Of all his varied roles, Mr. Green is likely to be best remembered as a social adventurer, a collector of people who approached the wealthy and famous with the ardor of a lepidopterist wielding a butterfly net. “There are endless, endless social climbers in New York, but Sam seemed to me unlike any other,” John Richardson, the Picasso biographer and a long-time acquaintance of Mr. Green’s, said last week from a perch in his 5,000-square-foot loft on lower Fifth Avenue.
David Patrick Columbia, who writes the New York Social Diary, noted of Mr. Green: “there is a timeless type of character you will find prospecting in the social order. They follow social lights. They are at the center of the Zeitgeist at a memorable moment. Sam was one of those.”
The people Mr. Green collected were often exotic or titled or wealthy and, in some cases, figures of legend. Andy Warhol was a close friend, but so were Greta Garbo, the drag queen Candy Darling, the photographer Cecil Beaton and Yoko Ono.
“The whole point about Sam is that he was one of a kind,” said Mr. Richardson, who noted that expediency, luck, an appetite for high-living and a nose for inherited wealth, a mordant sense of humor, an innate theatricality and a love of the absurd were the tools of a character whose proper place in the world even now resists definition. “He was the last of the con men, in a way,” Mr. Richardson said.
At the very least, Sam Green was a fabulist, an unabashed poseur blessed with good looks, a natural flair for storytelling, a knack for self-promotion and a markedly elastic relationship to the truth. Judging his background too banal to make a great story (he was one of three children raised in an academic family in Connecticut), the man born in 1940 in Boston and christened Samuel McGee Green would later re-jigger his ancestry and style himself Samuel Adams Green, claiming descent from a founding father and two American presidents.
An indifferent student, Mr. Green abandoned academia after his three semesters at the Rhode Island School of Design, and decamped for New York. There, through the first of a series of happy accidents that defined his life, he met and was hired by the art dealer Richard Bellamy to work at the Green Gallery on 57th Street. Mr. Green would later embroider the tale and claim Mr. Bellamy hired him to run the place (he worked at the front desk) mainly because he liked the sound of “Mr. Green of the Green Gallery.” Whatever the truth, Mr. Green’s ambition was the real thing.
Within six months in New York, the college dropout made a splash by securing the loan of 50 important contemporary artworks (among them Yayoi Kusama’s “Ten Guest Table,” a dining set bristling with phalluses) and had them installed among the sober antiquities in the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan, where his father was the dean of the fine arts school.
Careers don’t happen this way anymore; perhaps few ever did. Yet a chance meeting with the unknown Warhol soon led to that artist’s first retrospective, which Mr. Green staged at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where he had managed to get appointed as its director at 25. His aptitude for publicity and the grandiose gesture was on early display on the opening night of the Warhol show. For a space capable of holding 300, he issued 6,000 invitations and made his entrance wearing a tie silk-screened with Warhol’s S & H Green Stamps, arm-in-arm with Warhol and Edie Sedgwick, who was trailing behind her the 20-foot sleeves of a Gernreich dress.
Mr. Green left the I.C.A. after three years. In short order, he was appointed a cultural adviser to New York City by Mayor John V. Lindsay, had engineered an important early earthwork installation by Claes Oldenburg and had arranged to have a giant Easter Island Moai head hauled to Manhattan and installed on the plaza of the Seagram Building.
“Sam is one of the emblematic figures of the 1960s, in the sense that a 25-year-old man at that moment could become director of the I.C.A. and could do shows that retrospectively we can recognize as seismic,” said Jonathan Katz, a historian and a curator of last year’s “Hide/Seek” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. To Mr. Katz, Mr. Green was a purely Pop creation, a kind of cartoon person whose thought-bubble changed at whim.
“Sam’s greatest strength was sociality,” said Mr. Katz, explaining that “Sam Green could be so much to so many, handsome and charming, gay and straight, serious and frivolous, anything you wanted him to be, he helped engineer the transition from an art world that still turned on the social in the early 1960s to a social world that turned on art. And we still inhabit that world.”
