John Weber, 75, Contemporary-Art Dealer, Is Dead

John Weber, an art dealer known for his early advocacy of Conceptual Art, Post-Minimalist sculpture and Italian Arte Povera, died on May 23 at his home in Hudson, N.Y. He was 75.

The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his daughter Kristin Weber Friedman of Scarsdale, N.Y.

The son of a doctor, Mr. Weber was born in 1932 in Los Angeles. After serving in the Navy as a radio corpsman during the Korean War, he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1958 at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Mr. Weber became familiar with contemporary art when he was befriended by Thomas C. Colt Jr., director of the Dayton Art Institute, a short drive from Antioch. After graduation, Mr. Weber worked at the institute, helping Mr. Colt organize a show of Ad Reinhardt’s paintings. In 1960 Mr. Weber became director of the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, where he helped organize early group shows featuring Pop Art artists like Robert Indiana, Jim Dine, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

Two years later Mr. Weber took a job in Los Angeles with the Virginia Dwan Gallery, known for its focus on the French New Realists and, increasingly, on Minimalists like Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre and Robert Ryman, and young Earthworks artists like Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria. He organized several group shows there, including “De Europa,” one of the first exhibitions of Arte Povera in the United States.

In 1968 Ms. Dwan closed her Los Angeles gallery, and Mr. Weber became the director of a gallery she had opened in 1965 on West 57th Street in Manhattan. In 1971 he opened his own gallery at 420 West Broadway, the first gallery building in SoHo; he later moved it to Chelsea before closing it altogether in 2000.

He represented an impressive range of American and European artists, often early in their careers, among them Giovanni Anselmo, Mario Merz, Daniel Buren, Alice Aycock, Hamish Fulton, Alighiero e Boetti, Adrian Piper, Richard Long and Dorothea Rockburne.

Mr. Weber was married five times. He is survived by his last wife, Jeanette Streitparth of Berlin, from whom he was separated; two sons, Anson Weber-Streitparth of Berlin and John A. C. Weber of Santa Fe, N.M., and Montauk, N.Y.; three daughters, Ms. Friedman, Paolina Weber of New York and Sibilla Weber-Veronese of Milan; and four grandchildren.