Leo Castelli
Encyclopedia
Leo Castelli was an American art dealer. He was best known to the public as an art dealer whose gallery showcased cutting edge Contemporary art
for five decades. Castelli showed Surrealism
, Abstract Expressionism
, Neo-Dada
, Pop Art
, Op Art
, Color field painting, Hard-edge painting
, Lyrical Abstraction
, Minimal Art, Conceptual Art
, and Neo-expressionism
, among other movements.
, of Italian and Austro-Hungarian Jewish origin. Castelli's first American curatorial effort was the famous Ninth Street Show of 1951, a seminal event of Abstract Expressionism. In 1957, he opened the Leo Castelli Gallery in a townhouse on E. 77th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues in New York City
. Initially the gallery showcased European Surrealism
, Wassily Kandinsky
, and other European artists. However the gallery also exhibited American Abstract Expressionism
. Jackson Pollock
, Willem de Kooning
, Cy Twombly
, Friedel Dzubas
, and Norman Bluhm
were some artists who were included in group shows.
In 1958, Robert Rauschenberg
and Jasper Johns
joined the gallery, signaling a turning away from Abstract Expressionism
, towards Pop Art
, Minimalism
and Conceptual Art
. From the early 1960s through the late 70s, Frank Stella
, Larry Poons
, Lee Bontecou
, James Rosenquist
, Roy Lichtenstein
, Andy Warhol
, Robert Morris (artist)
, Donald Judd
, Dan Flavin
, Cy Twombly
, Ronald Davis
, Bruce Nauman
, Ed Ruscha, Salvatore Scarpitta
, Richard Serra
, Lawrence Weiner
and Joseph Kosuth
joined the stable of Castelli artists. In the 1970s Leo Castelli opened a downtown SoHo
branch of the Leo Castelli Gallery at 420 West Broadway. In the 1980s, he opened a second larger downtown exhibition space on Greene Street also in SoHo
.
Castelli's first wife Ileana Sonnabend
(born October 28, 1914, Bucharest
, Romania
), whom he married in 1932, was also a formidable dealer of 20th century art. She ran a contemporary art gallery in Paris
during the early 1960s after the couple divorced. The couple had a daughter, Nina Sundell. In the 1970s, Ileana opened another contemporary art gallery in New York
, the Sonnabend Gallery.
After Ileana’s death in October 2007 at the age of 92, her heirs sold a portion of her postwar-art collection for $600 million — reportedly the largest private sale in history.
Castelli's second wife, Antoinette Castelli, opened Castelli Graphics, an art gallery devoted to the prints and photographs of Castelli Gallery and other artists. The couple also had a son together, Jean-Christophe Castelli. In 1995 Leo Castelli married the Italian art historian Barbara Bertozzi Castelli.
In October 2007, Castelli's heirs announced the donation of the gallery's archives from 1957 through 1999 to the Smithsonian Institution
's Archives of American Art
. The Leo Castelli Gallery continues to operate at 18 East 77th Street in New York under the direction of his last wife showing many of the same artists from the gallery's past.
Contemporary art
Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced...
for five decades. Castelli showed Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, Abstract Expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
, Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada
Neo-Dada is a label applied primarily to audio and visual art that has similarities in method or intent to earlier Dada artwork. It is the foundation of Fluxus, Pop Art and Nouveau réalisme. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery, and absurdist contrast...
, Pop Art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
, Op Art
Op art
Op art, also known as optical art, is a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions."Optical art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing." Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made...
, Color field painting, Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting
Hard-edge painting is painting in which abrupt transitions are found between color areas. Color areas are often of one unvarying color. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Op Art, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting.-History of the term:The term was...
, Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction
Lyrical Abstraction is either of two related but distinctly separate trends in Post-war Modernist painting, and a third definition is the usage as a descriptive term. It is a descriptive term characterizing a type of abstract painting related to Abstract Expressionism; in use since the 1940s...
, Minimal Art, Conceptual Art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
, and Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism
Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s...
, among other movements.
Life and work
Leo Castelli was born at TriesteTrieste
Trieste is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is situated towards the end of a narrow strip of land lying between the Adriatic Sea and Italy's border with Slovenia, which lies almost immediately south and east of the city...
, of Italian and Austro-Hungarian Jewish origin. Castelli's first American curatorial effort was the famous Ninth Street Show of 1951, a seminal event of Abstract Expressionism. In 1957, he opened the Leo Castelli Gallery in a townhouse on E. 77th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. Initially the gallery showcased European Surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
, Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely-abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics...
, and other European artists. However the gallery also exhibited American Abstract Expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
. Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
, Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning
Willem de Kooning was a Dutch American abstract expressionist artist who was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands....
, Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. was an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors...
, Friedel Dzubas
Friedel Dzubas
Friedel Dzubas was a German-born American abstract painter.-Life and work:Friedel Dzubas studied art in his native land before fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and settling in New York City. In Manhattan during the early 1950s, he shared a studio with fellow abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler...
, and Norman Bluhm
Norman Bluhm
Norman Bluhm , was an American painter classified as an abstract expressionist, and as an action painter.- Biography :...
were some artists who were included in group shows.
In 1958, Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. Rauschenberg is well-known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations...
and Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns
Jasper Johns, Jr. is an American contemporary artist who works primarily in painting and printmaking.-Life:Born in Augusta, Georgia, Jasper Johns spent his early life in Allendale, South Carolina with his paternal grandparents after his parents' marriage failed...
joined the gallery, signaling a turning away from Abstract Expressionism
Abstract expressionism
Abstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
, towards Pop Art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
, Minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
and Conceptual Art
Conceptual art
Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...
. From the early 1960s through the late 70s, Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, Larry Poons
Larry Poons
Lawrence Poons , better known as Larry Poons, is an abstract painter who was born in Tokyo, Japan. He studied from 1955 to 1957 at the New England Conservatory of Music, with the intent of becoming a professional musician...
, Lee Bontecou
Lee Bontecou
Lee Bontecou is an American artist who was born 15 January 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island. She attended the Art Students League of New York from 1952 to 1955, where she studied with the sculptor William Zorach. She received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Rome in 1957-1958 and the Louis...
, James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist is an American artist and one of the protagonists in the pop-art movement.-Background and education:...
, Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...
, Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola , known as Andy Warhol, was an American painter, printmaker, and filmmaker who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art...
, Robert Morris (artist)
Robert Morris (artist)
Robert Morris is an American sculptor, conceptual artist and writer. He is regarded as one of the most prominent theorists of Minimalism along with Donald Judd but he has also made important contributions to the development of performance art, land art, the Process Art movement and installation...
, Donald Judd
Donald Judd
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism . In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy...
, Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures.-Early life and career:...
, Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly
Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. was an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors...
, Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis
Ronald Davis , born 1937, is an American painter whose work is associated with Geometric abstraction, Abstract Illusionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Hard-edge painting, Shaped canvas painting, Color field painting, and 3D Computer Graphics...
, Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico....
, Ed Ruscha, Salvatore Scarpitta
Salvatore Scarpitta
Salvatore Scarpitta was an American artist best known for his sculptural studies of motion.Scarpitta was born in New York City and grew up in Los Angeles graduating from Hollywood High School. He then attended the premier art university in Europe, the Academia di Belle Arte in Rome...
, Richard Serra
Richard Serra
Richard Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement.-Early life and education:...
, Lawrence Weiner
Lawrence Weiner
Lawrence Weiner was a central figure in the formation of conceptual art in the 1960s His work often takes the form of typographic texts.- Life and career :...
and Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth
Joseph Kosuth , is an American conceptual artist. Kosuth lives in New York and Rome.-Early life and career:Kosuth was born in Toledo, Ohio. He attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. In 1963, Kosuth enrolled at...
joined the stable of Castelli artists. In the 1970s Leo Castelli opened a downtown SoHo
SoHo
SoHo is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, notable for being the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, and also, more recently, for the wide variety of stores and shops ranging from trendy boutiques to outlets of upscale national and international chain stores...
branch of the Leo Castelli Gallery at 420 West Broadway. In the 1980s, he opened a second larger downtown exhibition space on Greene Street also in SoHo
SoHo
SoHo is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, notable for being the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, and also, more recently, for the wide variety of stores and shops ranging from trendy boutiques to outlets of upscale national and international chain stores...
.
Castelli's first wife Ileana Sonnabend
Ileana Sonnabend
Ileana Sonnabend was a dealer of 20th century art. She ran a contemporary art gallery in Paris during the early 1960s. After leaving Paris, she opened a Sonnabend Gallery in New York City in 1971, at 420 West Broadway, in SoHo...
(born October 28, 1914, Bucharest
Bucharest
Bucharest is the capital municipality, cultural, industrial, and financial centre of Romania. It is the largest city in Romania, located in the southeast of the country, at , and lies on the banks of the Dâmbovița River....
, Romania
Romania
Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea...
), whom he married in 1932, was also a formidable dealer of 20th century art. She ran a contemporary art gallery in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
during the early 1960s after the couple divorced. The couple had a daughter, Nina Sundell. In the 1970s, Ileana opened another contemporary art gallery in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, the Sonnabend Gallery.
After Ileana’s death in October 2007 at the age of 92, her heirs sold a portion of her postwar-art collection for $600 million — reportedly the largest private sale in history.
Castelli's second wife, Antoinette Castelli, opened Castelli Graphics, an art gallery devoted to the prints and photographs of Castelli Gallery and other artists. The couple also had a son together, Jean-Christophe Castelli. In 1995 Leo Castelli married the Italian art historian Barbara Bertozzi Castelli.
In October 2007, Castelli's heirs announced the donation of the gallery's archives from 1957 through 1999 to the Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...
's Archives of American Art
Archives of American Art
The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 16 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washington, D.C...
. The Leo Castelli Gallery continues to operate at 18 East 77th Street in New York under the direction of his last wife showing many of the same artists from the gallery's past.
Further reading
- Annie Cohen-SolalAnnie Cohen-SolalAnnie Cohen-Solal is a French academic, writer, historian, and biographer. Born in pre-independence Algeria, she is part of the Jewish diaspora that left that country for France during the Algerian War of Independence. Her most famous work is a biography of Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre: A Life, which...
, Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli, 2010.
External links
- Castelli's Oral History Interviews with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art: May 1969 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/castelmay69.htm; July 1969 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/casteljuly69.htm; May 1997 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/castel97.htm
- Portrait by Robert MapplethorpeRobert MapplethorpeRobert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men...
from ArtNews "Portrait of the Art World" exhibition http://www.npg.si.edu/cexh/artnews/castelli.htm