One Art Show for a Friend Moved Frances Iger Laterman From Fashion Into Four Decades of Fine Art Dealing

NEW YORK. The show was meant as a favor. A friend of Frances Iger Laterman, a French model, was married to a painter who needed a place to hang his work, and she asked Ms. Laterman to organize an exhibition. It went well. Then other artists began calling, and a woman who had spent her working life in advertising and fashion found herself in a new trade.

That trade became L'Esprit d'Art, the business she has owned since 1982. Four decades on, she remains a private art dealer and consultant in New York, prized by artists and collectors for an eye she trained long before she ever sold a canvas.

She grew up in the city and finished at Forest Hills High School, then went upstate to Syracuse University. Between 1954 and 1959 she studied fine arts, liberal arts and international relations there. The art training would matter later, though not right away.

Her first job was in advertising at Saks Fifth Avenue. From the store she moved into the fashion business, and that is where her feel for color, form and detail was first put to commercial use.

In fashion she worked as a connector. She introduced high fashion designers to top furriers, and those introductions led to a fur fashion show that put both crafts in front of the same audience.

Her next idea was more practical. The lining business was flagging, so Ms. Laterman designed sportswear made of fake fur and pitched the material purely as fabric lining. The pieces appeared in the fashion trade press, and the concept helped revive a sagging corner of the industry.

Then came the exhibition for her friend's husband. It did something none of her fashion work had done: it brought artists to her asking for representation. With the support of her late husband, Bernard, she agreed, and launched the career that has defined the rest of her working life.

The skills carried over. A dealer has to judge composition at a glance and read people as carefully as pictures. Ms. Laterman credits an eye for fashion and art that she says she was born with and has spent decades sharpening, first on clothing and then on paintings and drawings.

L'Esprit d'Art grew from that first circle of painters into a practice serving artists and collectors in New York and abroad, including France and Italy. Some clients who arrived knowing little about art left as collectors in their own right.

Dynamo Times recognizes Frances Iger Laterman for a career that began with a favor and grew into more than forty years of fine art dealing, and for proving that an eye shaped in advertising and fashion could find its truest use in art.