End of an Era

NEW YORK—Ileana Sonnabend, the legendary dealer whose groundbreaking support of avant-garde artists shaped the course of art history after World War II, died in her Manhattan home on October 21, a week shy of her 93rd birthday. She was the last of a generation of dealers—including, most famously, her first husband, Leo Castelli—who privileged challenging pieces by living artists and demonstrated unyielding loyalty to them, sometimes at great personal expense. “Her interest was always just in the art,” says Jeff Koons, who has shown with Sonnabend’s gallery since the late 1980s and is now also represented by Gagosian. “I’d just go off and make a body of work.  The first time the gallery was aware of the work was when they were uncrating it.”

Sonnabend was instrumental in launching the careers of many of today’s most sought-after artists, notably Koons, Georg Baselitz, Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Her nurturing approach included offering monthly stipends during periods of scant sales and covering high production costs. “With the loss of Ileana,” says Richard Armstrong, director of the Carnegie Museum, in Pittsburgh, “a whole piece of the art world has fallen away.”

Sonnabend, born Ileana Schapira, met Castelli when she was just 17 and, after accepting a Matisse painting in lieu of an engagement ring, married him a year later. The couple settled in Paris, where in 1939 they opened an Art Deco–furniture gallery. (Collecting Art Deco became one of Sonnabend’s many passions.) When the war came to Paris, they fled to New York with their young daughter, Nina. In 1957, Castelli opened a gallery in their living room, inaugurating it with a show of Johns’s paintings.

The couple divorced two years later but remained friends and business collaborators. They “were interconnected,” says Patricia Brundage, a longtime director of Castelli’s gallery. In the early 1980s, Brundage recalls, the Castelli staff even toasted what would have been their 50th wedding anniversary.

After marrying Michael Sonnabend, in 1962, Ileana shrewdly opened a gallery on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, in Paris, to introduce artists she’d discovered with Castelli to Europe. Some years later she launched a second space, on Madison Avenue, several blocks from Castelli’s, and in 1971, she and he opened galleries one floor apart from each other at 420 West Broadway, becoming pioneers in SoHo. The top floor belonged to André Emmerich, an early champion of color-field painting, who died, at the age of 82, just weeks before Sonnabend.

Sonnabend brought Pop art to Europe and later introduced Arte Povera, contemporary German painting and European Conceptualism to New York. Unsold items from her shows typically found a home in her extensive collection, which somewhat perversely she kept almost entirely in storage. Currently, her holdings are intact,
and Nina and Sonnabend’s adopted son and longtime associate, Antonio Homem, are “studying what can be done” with them, he says.

With the advent of performance and video art in the early 1970s, Sonnabend embraced lesser-known practitioners of these forms, even if that meant selling pieces from her own collection to keep the gallery running. “There was a lot of art going on,” says artist Mel Bochner.  “But nobody else was willing to get behind it.”

Beautiful and dark-eyed as a young woman, Sonnabend appeared coquettish even after an illness early in life required her to wear a wig. In contrast to Castelli, with his famous charm and inclusiveness, Sonnabend was coolly reserved and eschewed parties.  “I always moved in a very small circle and only followed my own enthusiasms,” she said last year in an e-mail interview via Homem.

In terms of art, those enthusiasms, interestingly, tended toward the darkly subversive and confrontational. Among the works she showed were Vito Acconci’s notorious 1972 performance piece Seedbed, in which the artist masturbated under the gallery floor while his grunts and moans were broad-cast over loudspeakers, and Koons’s 1991 series “Made in Heaven.” According to Koons, when Sonnabend first saw the paintings and sculptures featuring himself and his former wife, Italian porn star Cicciolina, engaging in sex acts, “she didn’t flinch. She seemed proud to have the exhibit.”

Referring to the record prices that Koons’s creations achieved at auction, Sonna-bend commented, “[They] are not more surprising than, say, Warhol’s. More surprising are the high prices of relatively little-known artists with still very short careers."

By the time she said this, Koons was already farming out his pieces to Gagosian. But the artist never completely severed ties to the dealer who, once upon a time, had watched with interest as he projected slides of his recent work—vacuums and basketballs suspended in tanks—in the back room of her gallery.

For years, Koons says, “I’d think, ‘Oh, Ileana would appreciate this.’ ” Even now, he adds, “having so much respect for her eye, her involvement, I think about what her response may have been to what I’ve made or how she would have enjoyed it.”