Ileana Sonnabend, Art World Figure, Dies at 92

By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: October 24, 2007
Ileana Sonnabend, whose eye, shrewdness and lasting alliance with her first husband, Leo Castelli, made her one of the most formidable contemporary art dealers of her time, died on Sunday at her home in Manhattan. She was 92.


Sonnabend Gallery
Ileana Sonnabend in 2004.
She died in her sleep after several months of illness, her daughter, Nina Sundell, said yesterday.

Starting in the 1960s, Mrs. Sonnabend was a force to contend with in the art world. She was especially important for introducing postwar American art to Europe in the 1960s, and later for bringing Americans up to speed with developments abroad. She was also famous for amassing an enormous art collection that remained mostly in storage.

Her galleries — Sonnabend Gallery in New York and Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris — showed new, usually top-tier talent from both continents for more than 40 years, from the Pop and Minimal Americans to the Italian Arte Poveristas, to various strands of Conceptual Art, Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Geo and beyond.

The list is long, and remains an astounding record of an artistic era studded with names like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, George Baselitz and Jeff Koons.

Mrs. Sonnabend’s exhibitions often had the art world talking. One was “Underneath the Arches,” in which the British team of Gibert & George, painted gold and wearing tweed suits, lip-synched a British vaudeville song over and over. The performance opened Mrs. Sonnabend’s gallery at 420 West Broadway — one of the earliest in SoHo — in 1971.

Also talked about was the Sonnabend 1991 show of Jeff Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series of paintings and sculptures that showed the artist engaged in sexual acts with his wife, Ilona Staller.

Mrs. Sonnabend was variously described as “an iron marshmallow” and “a cross between Buddha and Machiavelli.” Short and plump, she was grandmotherly in appearance from a relatively early age due in part to an illness that necessitated a wig.

Her genteel, old Europe manner belied an often imperious yet bohemian and self-deprecating personality. Her soft, fluty voice often left a listener unprepared for the force of her comments, which she could deliver in at least five languages. On leaving a dance concert in the 1960s, she is said to have remarked to a companion, speaking of the choreographer, “I’m not coming back until someone tells me his I. Q. has gone up.”

Mrs. Sonnabend was perhaps the last in a line of important European-born American art dealers that included Kurt Valentine and Pierre Matisse as well as Mr. Castelli, who died in 1998 but whose Leo Castelli Gallery continues to operate.

She was born Ileana Schapira in Bucharest, Romania, on Oct. 28, 1914, the daughter of Mihail Schapira, a prominent Jewish industrialist. She grew up in luxury, attended by nannies and governesses. But she demonstrated an early independence and interest in art that she may have inherited from her Viennese mother, Marianne, who years later divorced her father and married the Russian-born American artist John Graham.

Mrs. Sonnabend met Mr. Castelli when she was 17 and married him a year later, asking for and receiving a painting by Matisse instead of an engagement ring. In 1935, the couple moved to Paris, where they became part of the Surrealist circle. In 1939, Mr. Castelli, backed by his father-in-law, opened his first gallery with an interior designer named René Drouin.

After World War II broke out, the Castellis and their daughter, Nina, fled to New York, where Mrs. Sonnabend’s parents had already established themselves, having purchased a town house at 4 East 77th Street in Manhattan. The Castellis reached New York on a Portuguese steamer out of Lisbon and moved into an apartment in the building. In 1957, after dealing privately for more than a decade, Mr. Castelli opened a gallery in the couple’s living room.

Mrs. Sonnabend did not begin her own career in earnest until after 1959, when she divorced Mr. Castelli. With her second husband, an amateur Dante scholar named Michael Sonnabend, whom she had met in the 1940s while attending classes at Columbia, she moved first to Rome and then to Paris. In 1962, they opened a small gallery on Quai des Grands-Augustins with a show of Mr. Johns’s work.

There, and in a larger gallery on Rue Mazarine, the Sonnabends established a European bulkhead for new American art, often to the vehement dismay of French art critics. They introduced Pop and Minimal artists like Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jim Dine, James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg, George Segal, Donald Judd and Robert Morris.

Mr. Sonnabend was known for philosophical discussions while Mrs. Sonnabend sold work and arranged exhibitions. In the late 1960s, they hired as gallery director a slim, elegant Portuguese student named Antonio Homem, who bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Castelli as a young man and who became something of an alter ego to Mrs. Sonnabend. In the late 1980s, she and Mr. Sonnabend adopted Mr. Homem. Mr. Sonnabend died in 2001.

In addition to Mr. Homem and her daughter both of New York, Mrs. Sonnabend is survived by three grandchildren and two great-granddaughters.