Patricia Faure (née Enk) was born on April 8, 1928 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to a Catholic industrialist family. At age 15, she moved with her widowed mother and one of her sisters to Los Angeles, California to pursue a career in modeling. While Faure was a student at Hollywood High School, she attended a presentation by Vincent Price who was promoting his museum in Beverly Hills, the Modern Institute of Art. Price offered her a volunteer position at the museum in exchange for membership. This early experience of working in a museum sparked Faure's interest in art.
In the late 1940s, Faure moved to New York to expand her modeling career with the Ford Modeling Agency and to attend the New School of Social Research. It was there that she became friends with a circle of writers, artists and musicians that included Larry Rivers, Ad Reinhardt and Willem de Kooning. After her divorce from her first husband, drummer Phil Peyton, Faure moved back to Los Angeles in 1955 and became very involved with the growing art scene. She made friends with artists from the Ferus Gallery including Ed Moses, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Kienholz and John Altoon. Faure took up photography and began taking pictures of these artists, and upon marrying her second husband Jacques Faure in 1959, moved to Paris and worked full time as a fashion photographer. After 11 years, the couple returned to Los Angeles along with their daughter, Zazu.
It was in 1972 that Faure began her career as an art dealer for the Nicholas Wilder Gallery. When Wilder closed his gallery and moved to New York, Faure partnered with Betty Asher to start a new commercial gallery that mixed exhibitions of well-known artists represented by New York galleries (such as Leo Castelli, Paula Cooper and Pace) with established but lesser-known, local artists. Unlike some of the other Los Angeles galleries of its time, Asher/Faure gallery was a corporation complete with outside financial backers, and its mainstream and mostly marketable roster reflects this. Though Asher retired in 1990, the gallery continued to operate as Asher/Faure until her death in 1994. That same year, Faure moved to a new space at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica and reopened the gallery under her own name. In 2005 Faure sold the gallery to Samuel Freeman, who continued to operate it as the Patricia Faure Gallery until 2008, the year Faure herself passed away.
From the finding aid of the Patricia Faure Gallery records, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2010m13
