Glasstire published an article by Donna Tennant paying homage to the late photography dealer John Cleary and his eponymous Houston gallery, now Catherine Couturier Gallery. Read below for excerpts.
Although John Cleary, the founder of John Cleary Gallery, passed away less than 20 years ago, many people to whom I mention his name have no idea who he was or remember the photography gallery he owned on Colquitt Street, starting in 1996. Catherine Couturier began working there as the gallery manager in 1999 and took over after Cleary’s sudden passing. Four years after that, she changed the name to Catherine Couturier Gallery.
To honor Cleary’s legacy, Couturier organized Thirty Years: The Legacy of John Cleary Gallery, which opened in June and continues through September 4, 2026. The show begins with the first print Cleary ever purchased, Le Manège de Monsieur Barré (Mr. Barré’s Carousel) by French photographer Robert Doisneau. He acquired the print after taking a class on collecting photography at Rice University in the late 1970s taught by former Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) Curator Anne Tucker and Texas photographer Geoff Winningham.
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Robert Doisneau, Le Manège de Monsieur Barré (Mr. Barré's Carousel), 1955
The black-and-white photograph is a haunting street scene of a carousel in disrepair in the pouring rain. The camera freezes the raindrops, creating an exquisite texture that partially obscures the buildings in the background. The rain hitting the street in the foreground produces a sparkling array of light that suggests diamonds or stars. With this acquisition, Cleary’s affinity for black-and-white street photography was born; it would continue to shape his personal collection and the photographs he offered for sale in the gallery. The memorial exhibition is dominated by works by Doisneau and André Kertész, but also includes prints by Willy Ronis, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Brassaï.
John Michael Cleary was born on October 13, 1937, and died on February 1, 2008. He was born in Findlay, Ohio, and moved to Houston in the late 1940s, where he attended Bellaire High School and Sam Houston State University. Early on, he founded Prestige Apartment Locators in 1967 and Wallpapers Inc. of Houston. Rounding out his idiosyncratic career, he was a professional gambler for a decade and an investment broker with Eppler, Guerin & Turner for almost 15 years.
But Cleary was known for his passion and expertise as a dealer of photographs and photography books. He especially enjoyed educating his collectors about photography. Professionally, he was a member of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers and the MFAH Photo Forum, and participated in Houston’s FotoFest. He was a founding member of the Houston Center for Photography, which named its book collection the John Cleary Library.
At the beginning of this year, Couturier realized it had been 30 years since the gallery opened and decided to honor Cleary’s memory with an exhibition of some of his favorite photographers. “I went through my inventory and picked out the pieces for the show,” she said. “Under my ownership, the gallery has evolved to embrace both that which John and I loved (mid-century French street photography and portraits of children, to name two) and more contemporary art, which was always my area of expertise.”
Cleary has played a vital role in both Couturier’s life and Houston’s photography scene, having founded what is now the city’s longest-running fine-art photography gallery. Over the years, many photography galleries have come and gone, but John Cleary’s legacy lives on.
Read the full article on Glasstire.
View the exhibition Thirty Years: The Legacy of John Cleary Gallery