Queen of Interesting

The life, loves, and lasting impact of Riva Yares

By Devon Jackson Photos by Kate Russell

Riva Yares likes big. Big men. Big cars. Big spaces. Big personalities. She herself is not big. She’s got big hair, but she stands at five foot four. Nor is she demonstrative or overbearing; at least, not so much anymore. And while she can do demure, she’s hardly shy.

Owner and director of the Riva Yares Gallery in Scottsdale, she has curated major exhibitions for many important artists of the 20th century, from Milton Avery and Morris Louis to Jules Olitski and Roberto Matta, among many others. This fall, her son, Dennis, opens a new Yares gallery in downtown Santa Fe. It’s a new chapter for the Yareses in Santa Fe, as Riva ran the former Yares Gallery, which opened in 1991 and had to give its space back to the O’Keeffe Museum several years ago.

Committed now to her Scottsdale gallery—she built herself a penthouse atop it—her focus lately has been film. She’s adapting her 2011 quasi-memoir Sleeping with Dogs into either a full-length feature or a TV series. One she hopes to direct someday.

Left: Riva Yares Gallery in Scottsdale, with Fletcher Benton’s Folded Circle Ring (2008), painted steel; right: Paintings from left to right by Graham Nixon, Sarah Frost, and Gene Davis.

Left: In front of a painting by Jim Davis are Manuel Neri’s sculptures, Bull Jumper II (2001), bronze and oil-based cast enamel, and behind it, Prietas I (2001); right: Yves Klein, Torso (c. 1960), plaster in Yves Klein blue.

In person, she will welcome you into her lovely high-ceilinged home in Santa Fe, where she can watch Zozobra burn in the fall and listen to the crack of Fuego’s semi-pro baseball bats during the summer. She will offer you a drink. A tour. A bowl of cherries. She’ll look you in the eye and show you pictures of Just Seconds Apart, a three-member band consisting of her son’s two sons and daughter.

She will dote on India, her tennis-ball-hawking poodle, who is her most recent love in a long line of canine companions. She will show you Tutu, her massive brass elephant in the backyard, a dignified-looking East Indian artifact that’s so big it had to be airlifted into place. Then she will show you some one-of-a-kind furniture, particularly four chairs designed by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier. “When I was in Paris I visited his studio,” she says. “If I had my life to live again, I’d be an architect.”

And she will show you the casita where her son and daughter and their respective families stay whenever they visit, which is also where E.L. Doctorow and his wife stayed when she had them out for the premier of her film, Jolene (based on a Doctorow short story).

Meanwhile she’ll answer whatever question you ask, offering up not so much judgments or opinions but information and statements that are brief and self-aware, but never dwelling, with no regrets. In a moment you’ll catch the faintest hint of a little girl brush across her face, followed by a stern earn-your-mother’s-love matron the next.

But here’s the thing: you may be big as all get-out (in size, stature, self-importance), but if you’re not interesting, Riva Yares may not remember you the next time you meet. Because Yares isn’t so much a size queen as she is an interesting queen, and why shouldn’t she expect others to be interesting? She’s been interesting since she was three years old—when she was chosen as the poster child for the newly constructed port of Tel Aviv, the city of her birth in Israel.

As the only child of Sala and Fishel Kilstok, Zionist emigrants from Poland who moved to what was then Palestine in the early 1930s, Yares seemed destined if not for greatness then for interestingness. By age 11, she’d been recruited into the Irgun, Israel’s paramilitary Zionist group whose tactics, according to historian William Cleveland, “appealed to a certain segment of the Jewish community that believed that any action taken in the cause of the creation of a Jewish state was justified, including terrorism.”

As Yares states in Sleeping with Dogs, when she was asked by a friend how she could have been brainwashed to become a terrorist at such a young age, she said: “Children of 11 or 12 believe that when they are asked to give the last drop of blood for their country—they really believe that the blood comes out of their body—that you sacrifice yourself for your country.”

By 15, though, the oldest allegiance of all took hold, and it was one Yares would succumb to again and again. She’d fallen in love with a bodybuilder nearly twice her age, and he ran a “big gym,” as she put it, in Tel Aviv. As she points out in her memoir, no doubt in her typically flat Joe Friday voice (in a line that becomes almost comical because of the number of men it applies to throughout her life): “He was married and had three children.”

Two years later, she met Sam, the first of her three husbands. Still a teenager, she’d taken a summer job at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Sam, whose last name she forgoes in both the book and in person, was an economics advisor and a Rutgers University professor. To Yares he looked like Alan Ladd. “I liked the power he had,” Yares recalls. “And I liked that he drove a big white Ford.” (There weren’t a lot of Fords in Israel back then.) Sam, though, was married with three children. Ba-dump-bump. No matter. He divorced his wife and married Yares. She was 18, and he was 38. Their marriage lasted six years, but out of it came a son, Dennis, and daughter, Shelli. “I’d commute to art school in Jerusalem,” says Yares of that period, “so I didn’t have to be married all the time.”

Yares’s penthouse, above her gallery, includes such rarities as a chess set made by Max Ernst. The paintings, from left to right, are Balthus, Young Girl With Mandolin (1996), oil; Jim Davis, Berlin Bar (c. 2000), oil; Armand Arman, Paintbrushes (c. 2000), multimedia.

Eventually eager to get a divorce, even if her mother said she’d kill herself if she did, Yares decided that a move to the U.S. would be the easiest way to do so. After seeing a copy of Arizona Highways at someone’s house in Israel, she says, “I thought that that would be a good place to move to. If I went there, not New York, I thought nobody would ever really know.”

So the family moved to Phoenix, and Yares got her divorce, along with custody of the kids. Suddenly a single mom, she realized she needed money, so she took a job as head of a Hebrew school, part of a reform synagogue. As Yares says, again with her typical anti-flair, “I liked the rabbi. I slept with the rabbi. He was fired. I was fired. And they closed the synagogue.” Of course, the rabbi was married and had children.
Again jobless, Yares found refuge at the Phoenix Little Theater, where she could take the kids, who hung out onstage while she was acting or working on set design.

“There was a group of about ten of us who were very interesting,” she says. “They helped me a lot.” One she became especially close to was Nick Nolte, who was still a decade or so away from acting in Rich Man, Poor Man, The Deep, and 48 Hours. Back then the two became close enough that it was a serape-clad Nolte who served as her witness at her swearing-in ceremony for U.S. citizenship. All she’ll say about him now is, “How sad,” and she leaves it at that. Which is true, and respectful.

Not long after, she would meet Clare Yares, a single father of four boys and at the time the studio manager for Phoenix’s KPHO-TV. (He’s now a master jeweler). Aside from taking his name permanently, Yares opened the Yares Gallery in Scottsdale with him in 1964—which was the one thing she wanted when they divorced. It was, as she writes, her past, present, and future. Along with the scare of having her children briefly taken from her by her first ex-husband—which required a dramatic flight back to Israel to reclaim them from him—it’s this period that probably galvanized the determination Yares is known for.

Not that she had any idea how unthinkable it was to want to run a contemporary art gallery 2,400 miles from New York City. “I was at the wrong place at the wrong time, but I had no idea, and I did it anyway,” Yares says of opening the gallery. “But I’m not interested in what other people do. I do my own thing.”

As the astute British design critic Alice Rawsthorn observed in The Guardian several years back, female gallery owners are largely allowed to be themselves. “The cutthroat economics of the market,” writes Rawsthorn, “make contemporary art dealing one of the few truly meritocratic industries. A dealer’s success is determined not by gender or ethnicity, but by their ability to source the work that collectors and museums want.”

Or, as British gallerist Maureen Paley tells Rawsthorn: “Art is one of the last unregulated markets. There are no male gatekeepers and you are not confined to traditional alpha-male values. That makes it very attractive to a certain type of woman with a strong personality.

“It attracts,” adds Paley, “larger-than-life figures, individuals, and eccentrics.”

In other words: the interesting. As for being a woman in a profession still dominated by men—male artists, male museum directors, male curators, male gallery owners—Yares waves off such issues. “I don’t care if it’s women or men. I never had a problem,” she says dismissively. “I didn’t play a woman or a man, just a gallery owner.” What she played, and what she has, is charisma. Especially when she finds you, or your art, or whatever you do interesting. What interests her, she pursues. What doesn’t interest her, she passes by.

But don’t think her merely lucky, or naïve. Yares may not have had the traditional education, or the aristocratic upbringing, but she is smart, sophisticated, and informed—in addition to having a great eye, charm, and, well, chutzpah. “My father collected art,” she explains, reiterating what she’s written in her book. “My dealings with artists and collectors are very intuitive. One cannot go to school to learn how to be an art dealer. I never worked in a gallery or art institution. Growing up with paintings and going to art school in Jerusalem were my education. All this led me to have great respect for art.

“You don’t have to know how to do it; you just have to have one good eye,” she says matter-of-factly. “And the artists trusted me because I was an Israeli, tough and pretty.”

She also wasn’t in New York, which worked in her favor. “I didn’t know any different,” she says. “I didn’t know Arizona wasn’t the place to have a gallery. And some of the really interesting, the great, great artists didn’t want to show in New York,” explains Yares, who also speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Polish, and German. “But out here it’s the Wild West. So, I went after international artists.”

These include Jules Olitski, Roberto Matta, Milton Avery, Kenneth Noland, and Jean Tinguely. As her son, Dennis, succinctly puts it in her memoir, “She has said that the secret of her success lies not in selling paintings, but rather in her ability to obtain great paintings, for great paintings sell themselves.” Which was only sort of true. Because, as the art critic Edward Lucie-Smith stated in the book’s introduction: “It is almost entirely due to Riva Yares that Matta saw the revival of his career in America.” Back then, though, the art world was different. For example, Yares tells the story of visiting the art dealer Andre Emmerich in New York. He told her: “You can have anything you want in my gallery. When you sell it, pay me.”

While the Scottsdale gallery boomed, she decided to make a go of it in Los Angeles, with the Riva Yares Gallery of Israeli Art on La Cienega Boulevard in the early ’70s, but between the earthquakes and what Yares describes as the duplicity of the Angelenos, she left after a year. “Unless you’re from Los Angeles, it’s very hard to get along with people there,” recalls Yares. “I was lucky it didn’t work. I put the tail between my legs and left.”

Nevertheless, she opened the Yares Gallery in Santa Fe in 1991, shortly after buying the house she’s in now. Her son ran it, closed it while working on Jolene (he wrote the script), and is now building a new one downtown. She also gave marriage another try—not for love but out of sympathy—to a younger man who was HIV-positive. Through the years, Yares has been active philanthropically, in particular with organizations dedicated to those who are HIV-positive or who have AIDS. “I must have turned into Mother Teresa,” she wrote. They divorced within a year.

Surrounded by art, most of it from artists in her gallery, and splitting her time between Scottsdale in the winter and Santa Fe in the summer, Yares has neither retired nor settled on her next incarnation. She still oversees her Scottsdale gallery, and she’s intrigued to see Sleeping with Dogs take to the screen. As for her gallery, and art in general, “Most artists I have any interest in,” she laments, “aren’t alive anymore.” About the tastes that drove her interests over the years, in art as much as music and literature, she comments: “It was very personal. But the art business doesn’t interest me anymore.”

Her home in Santa Fe feels like a cross between a conservatory and a gallery, populated with plants, paintings, and sculptures. Light-filled, colorful, and high-ceilinged. Many doors and windows create the illusion of the outdoor garden entering within. “I like Santa Fe because people leave me alone,” says Yares, who’s been entertaining friends in her home and enjoying the Santa Fe Opera. “I feel good in Santa Fe. I like the air, the trees. I can breathe. It’s a very special place.”

Thomas Browning, Grid 9 SARNAC (1971), acrylic. Opposite: Yares in her gallery with three Jim Davis paintings, including The Eel, right, and on the left, a painting she sold in the ’70s and bought back recently. “Sometimes I buy back things I really like, but I like everything I sell. I do,” she muses.

Jolene may have soured her somewhat on filmmaking—“I liked making the movie,” she admits, “but I didn’t like the side effects. I put $8 million into that, and I lost $8 million.” But not entirely. Who knows? She could end up making a movie about the French novelist Marguerite Duras. Writes Yares: “I thought about making a film called Marguerite Duras and Me. I was so intrigued by her. . .
I wanted to . . . maybe become her.”

Doubtful. What’s not doubtful is that Yares will remain interesting, and interested. She seems to be biding her time until the next project. Meanwhile, the flowers that fill her living room were bought specifically to complement each art piece. The dark-pink gladiolas on the long table beneath the gigantic, mostly gray, 15’ x 25’ Olitski painting match the faint streaks of purplish-pink in the upper left corner of the canvas.
“I live with dead people,” she says, uncharacteristically dramatic. She’s talked enough. She’s ready to move on. Yares sets her glass of water on the large Plexiglas table, which contains a two-inch layer of Yves Klein’s patented blue paint powder, and ushers you to her front door. “I buy flowers for their paintings.”

Brief, self-aware, charming, and firm. Interesting.

From the Fall 2015 issue