Art dealer’s final performance

Friends of Marijana Bego — the art dealer who leapt to her “mysterious and shocking” death on Madison Avenue last weekend — say her suicide may have been inspired by performance art. “I think she jumped off her gallery as a deliberate piece of performance art, her final work,” said an associate, adding Bego recently began starring in “outrageous” performances at her galleries. At her Greenport, LI, location last summer, Bego put on music at an opening and was “rambling, and dancing around,” the source says. “She went out on a porch and broke coffee cups. It was crazy . . . It was based on the Dada movement, meant to shock and induce an emotional response.” The source said some observers were “disturbed” by the piece: “Marijana’s openings were becoming more elaborate. And she wanted more and more attention on herself,” the associate added. The Post reported Bego was impeccably dressed when she took her own life and left a note detailing financial pressures. Her gallery showed work by artists including painter Wanda Murphy and Joel Bermano. “It’s only my opinion . . . that [if she had financial and personal problems] she jumped right in the middle of Madison Avenue as a statement,” says Murphy, who worked with Bego since 2001. “Art was her life. [This] was her way of saying, ‘If you take everything I worked for, everything I struggled for, if you take all this away, you may as well have my life, too.’ She lived and breathed art, and without it she couldn’t go on.” But Murphy says in response to those who have been calling Bego “kooky,” “A lot of people don’t understand the Dada movement. She was a bit eccentric, she was a performer.” Murphy said the crowds at Bego’s galleries had grown and she’d wanted to open a museum for emerging artists — “That was her ultimate goal.” Visitors to the Bego-Ezair galleries have included Jane Seymour, Lydia Hearst and Sonja Morgan. A source added Bego was fascinated with Coco Chanel: “She said she was the reincarnation of Coco. She’d said, ‘If I die, I want it to be on the front page . . . as if I was Coco Chanel.”