Ileana Sonnabend: a taste for the unexpected, a life in contemporary art

‘I only want what I don’t like.’ Such was Ileana Sonnabend’s unlikely credo. For the legendary gallerist, cultivating an openness to what challenged established taste was a way of keeping her eye firmly trained on the new. ‘I found that things I didn’t like very much made me think,’ she explained, ‘while things that I liked, I accepted, and that was that.’ Rather than settle into the comfort of the familiar, Ileana continually sought out work that pushed artistic conventions.

It was a way of seeing that she traced back to her childhood explorations in the museums and galleries of Bucharest, and one she would carry with her across decades spent in the contemporary art worlds of Paris and New York. ‘I like things that make me think, make me look for their meaning, things that force me to investigate the mental life of the artist. I am very instinctual and I seek things that are problematic, difficult to classify on the basis of things already known. … My only rule would be not to categorize a work too easily: finding something that you don’t recognize is not interesting in itself. You must find meaning.’ That vision radiated outward, through the artists she represented and the family with whom she shared her life in art: her husband Michael Sonnabend, her former husband Leo Castelli, her daughter Nina Castelli Sundell and her adopted son Antonio Homem Sonnabend.

This fall, Christie’s is honoured to present The Collection of Antonio Homem Sonnabend in a series of sales across Paris, London and New York, with works headlining the 21st Century Evening Sale in November. The collection brings into focus a figure whose own life in art was inextricably entwined with that of Ileana’s. Antonio worked alongside the Sonnabends at their eponymous gallery for 46 years, including as the director, helping to advance one of the most influential programmes in contemporary art while becoming a tireless advocate for the collection they built together.

Following Ileana’s death in 2007, Antonio co-founded and served as president of the Sonnabend Collection Foundation, with his stewardship culminating last year in the opening of a permanent museum for the collection in Mantova, Italy. Built over decades, through both bequest and acquisition, his collection reflects a lifetime spent in intimate dialogue with artists and art, shaped in no small part by Ileana’s visionary eye.

‘Antonio’s collection tells the story of Ileana Sonnabend, the grand dame of contemporary art,’ says Sara Friedlander, chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s in New York. ‘It is a time capsule of the Paris and New York art worlds in the second half of the 20th century. There’s Pop, there’s Arte Povera; there’s Andy Warhol and Bruce Nauman, Jean Dubuffet and Mario Schifano. You can tell the story of two nations and five decades through these works. And it was all because of her.’

‘Extraordinary taste’

When Antonio entered Ileana’s life in 1965, she had already established her own gallery in Paris, opening its doors three years earlier with an exhibition of paintings by Jasper Johns. Born in Bucharest in 1914, Ileana met Leo Castelli at 17 and married him soon after, beginning a partnership that would eventually carry them to New York. In February 1957, they opened Castelli Gallery in the living room of their apartment at 4 East 77th Street. Their marriage ended not long after, but the professional and intellectual alliance they had forged would prove more enduring.

‘When Ileana was with Castelli, it was she who had the extraordinary taste,’ explains William Featherby, Junior Specialist for the 21st Century Evening Sale at Christie’s New York. ‘Castelli was a master strategist, but Ileana was instrumental in the discoveries of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and she would eventually take Roy Lichtenstein and Warhol to new heights, crucially introducing them to Europe at a time when Europe had little visibility and knowledge of what was happening in America.’

Even after their marriage dissolved, Castelli continued to turn to Ileana for advice. In 1961, he asked her to visit the studios of Lichtenstein and Warhol, then emerging artists experimenting with imagery drawn from comic strips and commercial advertising. According to Calvin Tomkins, ‘Ileana urged Leo to take both of them, but Leo, feeling that Warhol’s paintings were not as good, opted for Lichtenstein. (Warhol would join the gallery three years later.)’

What had Ileana seen that Castelli had not? ‘It’s so tempting to pile these artists together and assume they were thinking about exactly the same things,’ says Featherby. ‘Perhaps Castelli felt like there was only room for one, but I think Ileana had a much more daring, nuanced and comprehensive view of these artists. She understood absolutely that Warhol and Lichtenstein could stand shoulder to shoulder in their unique explorations of this consumerist society.’

Two works in the sale from the Sonnabend Foundation Collection bring that distinction vividly into focus: Lichtenstein’s Large Spool (1963) and Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can (Turkey Noodle) (1962). ‘Lichtenstein places emphasis on play and beauty, while Warhol was perhaps a little more cutting, a little more cynical, a little more observant of the reality of our society and what it means to be a part of it,’ Featherby explains. ‘The spool becomes something very meditative, very minimal, very modernist in a way, whereas the soup can is much more conceptual, much more contemporary, much more vigilant. Both are now icons in the canon.’

'Global household names’

Ileana’s attentiveness to the individual character of an artist’s work fostered relationships of remarkable depth. When she and Michael opened their eponymous gallery in Paris in 1962, its first two exhibitions were devoted to Johns and Rauschenberg — artists with whom she had developed particularly close bonds.

Their history stretched back to the earliest years of Castelli Gallery, when a search for ice during a studio visit to Rauschenberg’s apartment led Castelli and Sonnabend to offer a show to Johns, Rauschenberg’s downstairs neighbour. Several days later, Rauschenberg wandered into the gallery to ask about an exhibition of his own — which Ileana immediately scheduled without consultation. Her judgement soon came to matter to him deeply. ‘Let’s just say I never finished a painting without wondering what Ileana would think of it,’ Rauschenberg later told Tomkins.

Just before Ileana left for Paris, Rauschenberg transformed a partially sucked Life Saver into a good-luck charm encased in soft metal. Ileana wore the tiny talisman on a chain around her neck for years. ‘It became an icon of our friendship, beyond the call of duty,’ Rauschenberg told Tomkins. That history reverberates through Antonio’s collection in works from two defining periods of Rauschenberg’s career: Untitled (Collage with Cuff) (1957), an intimate, jewel-like collage from his Combine era, and Untitled (1963), from the celebrated silkscreen paintings that secured him the Golden Lion at the 1964 Venice Biennale.

‘I never believed that art should have a nationality,’ Ileana explained. ‘I thought of the Americans as a group of people doing sensational work, work that had to be seen.’ In Paris, Sonnabend Gallery became a meeting place for those interested in advanced American art, with Antonio joining Ileana and Michael in 1968. In 1970, the trio moved their operations back to New York, eventually settling in the iconic 420 West Broadway in SoHo, where they shared a building with Castelli and Andre Emmerich that would become one of the most famous addresses in the history of 20th century art.

‘Later I began finding interesting artists in Europe and I tried to arrange shows for them in New York,’ she continued. ‘Opening a gallery in New York was really the reverse of my Paris situation because I wanted the Europeans to be seen here.’

‘When she set up her own gallery in Paris, she made those names no longer just U.S. household names, but global household names,’ says Featherby. ‘Europe began to understand the gravitas of their work. And then, perhaps even more impressive, she turned around and introduced these very rigorous European artists to an American market still caught up in Pop and Abstract Expressionism — suddenly thrusting Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giovanni Anselmo, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Georg Baselitz and Christo into the mix. Her influence really worked in both directions across the Atlantic.’

In SoHo, Ileana’s appetite for the unexpected intensified. The gallery opened with Gilbert & George’s The Singing Sculpture; the following year came Vito Acconci’s provocative Seedbed, and in 1975 Jannis Kounellis appeared astride a black horse, his face concealed behind a classical plaster mask. And she continued looking. In 1986, her exhibition of Ashley Bickerton, Peter Halley, Meyer Vaisman and Jeff Koons helped usher the so-called Neo-Geo generation from the East Village into SoHo.

For Koons, Ileana ‘just presented opportunities,’ he later recalled. ‘She didn’t want anything in return, other than to experience great art and to be able to offer the works she enjoyed to her friends.’ Among the works in Antonio’s collection is Koons’s Hulk (Friends) (2004–2012), a sculpture that once again makes the familiar strange. ‘To stand in front of this object is to be truly fooled by your eyes, despite knowing exactly what the object is,’ says Featherby. ‘Polychrome steel mimics the flex and the folds and the creases of painted rubber so beautifully that, even though you’re standing in front of this weighty, industrial material, you feel like it’s as light as air.’

‘We had a tendency to look for artists who were not successful, because we thought they should be, and we’d try to make them so,’ Antonio later recalled. Over more than five decades, that shared pursuit of the new became inseparable from the collection they built around it. For Antonio, the collection that grew out of their life in art became something more than the sum of its extraordinary works. ‘I always said that the collection was an autobiography and an auto-portrait of Ileana, for Michael, for me, and that for me is very interesting,’ he reflected. ‘In other words, a work is just not something one bought for a certain amount at the moment; it’s a kind of distillation of our lives, of years of our lives. And so I think it becomes much richer.’