Trade Secrets

Trade Secrets

Bruce Nauman Robert Rauschenberg Richard Serra Andy Warhol Jasper Johns Roy Lichtenstein Donald Judd Marcel Duchamp

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Art+Auction obtained exclusive access to the Smithsonian Institution’s Leo Castelli archive, and what we found inside creates a surprisingly detailed portrait of the 20th century’s shrewdest art dealer.

Even nine years after his death, Leo Castelli’s name still resonates in the art world. Remembered as a trailblazer and a star maker, the Trieste-born dealer has nearly the same cachet as the artists whom he championed: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein and Bruce Nauman, to name a few.

Castelli had a commanding presence, despite standing only five feet, four inches tall. He began making his mark in the art world in 1939, when he opened a Surrealist art and modern furniture gallery in Paris with his then wife, Ileana, and the architect René Drouin. After World War II broke out, the dealer left Paris, eventually arriving in New York. He did not, however, open his first gallery there, on the Upper East Side, until 1957, when he was almost 50. Being a Renaissance man—he spoke five languages, held a law degree and counted figures such as Marcel Duchamp as his friends—with European flair surely helped him attain his respected position in the New York art world.

In the 1950s, the Abstract Expressionists reigned. Castelli looked to a new generation—the pioneers of Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism—to redefine American art. “There are those unsuccessful Abstract Expressionists who accuse me of killing them,” the dealer once said. “But they were dead already. I just helped remove the bodies.”

Ileana, who died in October 2007, maintained a close friendship with Leo after their separation, in 1959, as well as with the painters they both admired. She went on to open a gallery in Paris with her second husband, Michael Sonnabend, in 1962—a year before Castelli married Antoinette Fraissex du Bost, who opened Castelli Graphics in 1969 and died in 1987—helping bring exposure to Castelli’s artists in Europe.

Castelli was a man of many firsts. For instance, he started a stipend system for his artists. “It was like getting a Rockefeller grant,” Richard Serra once said; he met the dealer in 1967 and debuted at the gallery the following year. Castelli was also a leader of the great art-gallery migration to SoHo, arriving in the neighborhood in 1971. His gallery’s building, at 420 West Broadway, housed many other dealers, such as Sonnabend, André Emmerich and the new kid on the block, Mary Boone. But unlike many others, Castelli didn’t continue on to Chelsea in the 1990s but instead returned to the Upper East Side to open a space with his third wife, the Italian art critic Barbara Bertozzi.

Some stories about the dealer are well known—among them, that he discovered Johns’s studio by chance, while visiting Rauschenberg, who worked upstairs from the other artist—but much of his rich life in the trade has remained hidden until now. Last October, Bertozzi Castelli and the dealer’s children, Jean-Christophe Castelli and Nina Castelli Sundell, gave his papers and memorabilia to the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. Comprising some 350 boxes of everything from correspondence and gallery announcements to photographs and receipts, the collection was estimated to be worth $2 million in 1992, when Castelli considered selling it to the Getty. As the only magazine granted access to the trove, Art+Auction carefully chose 15 items that shed light on the life of a man with a famously good business sense and an even better eye. 

"Trade Secrets" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.