When I first moved to Los Angeles about a decade ago I met Dagny Janss Corcoran at an opening. I’d known of her as the beloved founder of @artcatalogues—and as a sometimes muse to David Hockney, Ed and Nancy Keinholz, Billy Al Bengston and countless other LA legends. She was actually a source on a few of my stories before we met, but when we did formally meet at that opening, I guess she thought I was “handsome” (or so she told me over dinner recently) and we started a wonderful friendship. Dagny was funny, a great art world gossip, and an art book purveyor nonpareil who had a deep knowledge of all the interstitials of the lives of so many titans of the art world, some of whose catalogue raisonnes she helped comprise. The ultimate gift she could give anyone was to invite you to one of her dinners, and I was lucky enough to be invited to many where I received curatorial guidance from Paul Schimmel, listened to David Hockney recite a Robert Louis Stevenson poem while chainsmoking, and ate a hell of a lot of mayonnaise. Dagny loved Hellman’s mayonnaise (she even kept a book on how to weaponize it at the ready). She also let me write all about these quirks in her big, bold life for @wsjmag—from growing up the daughter of the seminal LA developer and collector Ed Janss to working for Walter Hopps at the 1965 São Paulo Bienal (it was Hopps who helped launch her catalogue outfit by tipping her off that Norton Simon was unloading all the Pasadena Art Museum inventory) to running off to Paris to be a bookiniste (of sorts) for Marian Goodman. I knew she was more sick than she let on at the last dinner we had a few weeks ago, but she was in great spirits. She was dishing on artists and serving up some great drunken shrimp and I’m glad I got to hug her one last time before I left. I’m gonna miss you, Dagny. Whether you were making me drink vodka neat, which I hate, or playing in the water with Goldie up in Santa Barbara, or just telling funny anecdotes—that secret history about LA’s finest, which you kept better than anyone—you were the glue and will always be a treasure to this town (and every town that was lucky to have you over the years). Farewell, my friend.