In every generation some people leave a mark. Their vision, instinct, “eye” or prescience distinguish them from the rest of us. Criteria are debatable and consensus is difficult, but that said, Art & Antiques honors a small cadre whose legacies in the various arts make them for many people living legends.

Eli Broad, a long-time collector of contemporary art, with his wife, Edythe, created and heavily endowed the Broad Art Foundation, a “lending library” of nearly 800 post-1975 works by such artists as Basquiat, Schnabel, Koons and Kiefer. Since its inception in 1984, foundation artworks have been exhibited in more than 400 museums, universities and other public venues.

Believing deeply in both new art and the importance of its accessibility to a wide audience, Broad was the founding chairman of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in downtown Los Angeles and a long-time trustee and now vice-chairman of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2003 Broad announced an extraordinary gift of $60 million to LACMA to build the 70,000-square-foot Broad Contemporary Art Museum. “It’s time that Los Angeles becomes the contemporary art capital of the world,” says Broad. “We’re going to have more museum gallery space for contemporary art than any other place.” Broad is also a trustee at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and a regent of the Smithsonian Institution.

While Harvey Littleton is considered the father of studio glass-making (loosely defined as unique or limited-edition pieces individually created by hand in a studio), Dale Chihuly took it public, making studio glass accessible and broadly popular. Chihuly pieces—brightly colored, undulating, often very large shapes—are found in museums and homes around the world. He established the esteemed glass program at the Rhode Island School of Design, influencing a generation of future glassmakers, and co-founded the Pilchuck Glass School outside his native Tacoma, Washington, where he creates enormous biomorphic glass sculptures and large-scale architectural glass installations. His works can be found in more than 150 major museums worldwide. “No other artist in the field has enjoyed the public visibility of Chihuly,” says Doug Heller of Heller Gallery in New York. “He’s a risk-taker who envisions and executes enormously ambitious projects—and then promotes them with a flair that would make any public relations firm green with envy. There is only one Dale Chihuly, and without him the glass world would be a far less interesting place.”

André Emmerich, a scholarly man of protean tastes, has been universally acknowledged as one of the country’s preeminent and influential dealers for half a century. Specializing first in pre-Columbian and later contemporary art, he was closely associated with Color Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. Emmerich also championed large-scale abstract sculpture, in his gallery and his personal collection, creating an estimable sculpture garden, which he called Top Gallant at his country home in Pawling, New York. The A-list artists he exhibited ranged from Hans Hofmann to Milton Avery. Emmerich is the author of Art Before Columbus (1963), Sweat of the Sun and Tears of the Moon: Gold and Silver In Pre-Columbian Art (1965) and a memoir, My Life with Art (2006). He has given his personal and professional papers to the Archives of American Art, the largest assemblage ever received by that group.

Sometimes art needs an advocate to gain traction. For decades, Ralph Esmerian has been this force for American folk art, a colorful world of visually exciting, often quirky objects. A jeweler by profession, Esmerian began collecting folk art as a young man and has always found meaning in the “marvelous simplicity and creativity that fuels the anonymous people who produced painted furniture, utensils and quilts that were decorated to adorn daily life.” He joined the board of the then-struggling Museum of American Folk Art in the early 1970s, serving successively as treasurer, president, chairman and now chairman emeritus. Esmerian helped fund the property acquisition, enabling the museum to build its sleek new quarters, and then made an extraordinary gift in 2002 of more than 400 pieces from what was one of the most impressive private collections of American folk art anywhere. Observers praise his daring acquisitions and the superb quality of his eye.

“A life in art grows from a passion—this was my calling,” says Arne Glimcher. And realizing this as a very young man, he opened a little gallery in Boston in 1960, soon moved it to New York and grew it into the multi-disciplined PaceWildenstein (and Pace/ MacGill, which handles photographs; Pace Prints; etc.), creating a new, hydra-headed paradigm for selling art. Glimcher has written several books about various artists, sometimes with his wife, Mildred (a Jean Dubuffet scholar). Top-flight artists represented by the gallery include Dubuffet, Picasso, Baselitz, Calder, Judd, LeWitt, Mangold, Oldenburg and Chuck Close, who describes Glimcher as “always there for me. Through the normal ebbs and flows of a career in art, I’ve always had his attention and support. Pace is more like a family business than an art business.” Glimcher was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 2003 for extraordinary contribution to the recognition and reputation of French art, and for his contributions to French cultural history.