Visionary Parisian gallerist Denise René passed away this morning after a long life in the arts. She was 99. She established her career as a gallerist in 1945 by exhibiting in Paris at a time when the German occupation had left the city almost culturally empty. René believed that abstraction could liberate art from the academic constraints of the figurative tradition, exhibiting under the principle that art must invent new paths in order to exist.
