Swiss-born literary and artists’ agent Annabeth Suter died of natural causes on February 14 at the Inselspital in Bern, Switzerland. She was 91.
Anne Elisabeth Suter was born November 29, 1933, in Basel, Switzerland and grew up in a small village near Schaffhausen. A champion of literacy and fierce advocate for children’s rights throughout her life, Suter put those passions into her work when she began her publishing career in the early 1970s as assistant to Daniel Keel, the founder and publisher of Diogenes Verlag in Zurich. She later became head of the company’s subsidiary rights department. Suter and Keel shared a fondness for picture books and together they developed the Diogenes Children’s Books list, publishing such artists as Beatrix Potter, Maurice Sendak, and Tomi Ungerer.
In the early 1980s, Suter moved to New York City and in 1984 she founded the Gotham Art and Literary Agency. As an agent, she represented Diogenes and other European publishers in the U.S. and built a robust client roster of talented authors and illustrators that included Sendak and Ungerer as well as Laurent de Brunhoff, Edward Gorey, Helme Heine, Lillian Hellman, Patricia Highsmith, Petra Mathers, Salman Rushdie, and Peter Sís.
Suter was proud to support her Swiss culture by organizing programs and events at Manhattan’s Swiss Institute and the National Arts Club. A favorite project was the exhibition she curated in 1991 called “Celebrating Heidi,” which paid tribute to Johanna Spyri’s classic book Heidi, about an orphan girl sent to live with her cantankerous grandfather in the Swiss Alps. Joyce Dinkins, wife of then-New York City mayor David Dinkins, opened the show at the World Trade Center, and when the exhibit traveled to the Capital Children’s Museum of Washington, D.C., Suter persuaded First Lady Barbara Bush to open the show by marching in with the goats.
In 1997, Suter curated her most ambitious exhibition, a Peter Sís retrospective at Prague Castle-Riding School. Sís remembers it, and Suter, vividly in this tribute: “I have no idea how she contacted President Vaclaf Havel—President of Czech Republic—my home country—and arranged my exhibition in Prague Castle. Not just any exhibition but in the “Emperor’s Riding School,” the biggest space available, where I used to go see huge paintings of famous Baroque artists as a little boy. How do you fill a place like that with my art? Annabeth got to work. She arranged with numerous museums in Central Europe for loans of telescopes and instruments from Galileo’s time, models of medieval ships and dog sleds used by Innuits far, far north; a stuffed Komodo dragon and more to create ‘educational’ islands throughout the exhibition. She found a carpenter who built a labyrinth in the center of the hall. She somehow found three-story high Christmas trees when the exhibition was extended over Christmas time.
Annabeth got a Zurich insurance company to donate color papers, Caran Dache pencils, and truckloads of milk chocolate bars given to children who kept coming back hoping for more. All this was unprecedented in the newly free Czech Republic of the 1990s. I arrived in Prague for the opening with a lot of trepidation. It was incredible: the most successful exhibition in the castle ever! They still talk about it! They remember chocolate! When the opening was over, the coat check lady in the stables told me that she had seen Annabeth the night before the exhibition opened. When she realized the floors needed mopping, Annabeth had taken off her long fur coat and scraped the whole place clean. She never mentioned it to me. Oh, how wonderful and dedicated a tour de force she was!”
