My father and his elder brother Otto were not fond of each other, and so I know little about Uncle Otto that is not in the public domain. He was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States, settling in New York, where he and his wife, Ilse, founded an art gallery: the Gerson Gallery. (“Garrison” was a youthful indiscretion of my father, which he regretted late in life.) After Otto’s death in 1962, the Gerson Gallery merged with the Marlborough Gallery, and so on. It’s all in Wikipedia.
In a separate thread, an old friend of mine, Tom Shima, married Barbara Kallir. It took several years of knowing Barbara for me to learn that her grandfather, Otto Kallir, had been a gallery owner in New York, and shared, along with his given name, my uncle’s narrative of emigration from Europe in the 1930s and a dedication to serious modern art and artists. It is likely that the two men knew each other, as their galleries were literally a block apart on 57th Street in Manhattan.
