Ileana Saturday

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ileana Sonnabend (born Ileana Schapira ; born October 28, 1914 in Bucharest ; † October 21, 2007 in New York City ) was an American gallery owner who worked as an art dealer and promoter of new developments in the US and Europe for more than forty years contemporary painting was active. She was one of the most influential people on the international art market of the 20th century.

Live and act

Ileana Schapira was the daughter of one of the richest men in Romania, the prominent and wealthy Jewish - Romanian industrialist Michail Schapira. Her mother Marianne came from Vienna . Already at age 18, she married her first husband, the from Trieste originating Leo Castelli . The young couple moved to Paris in 1935 , made their first contacts with the local art world and began collecting works by surrealists such as Salvador Dalí , Max Ernst and Meret Oppenheim . In 1939 they opened their first gallery on Place Vendôme . With the invasion of the German Wehrmacht in 1940, the Castellis fled to New York with their daughter Nina. There Ileana studied at Columbia University , while her husband Leo established himself in the art trade. The marriage with Leo Castelli was divorced in 1959; Castelli and Ileana, however, were to remain friends for life. A short time later she married the Dante philosopher and occasional director Michael Sonnabend.

From then on, Ileana began to build her own network of gallery owners and traveled to Paris and Rome . In 1962, she opened her first gallery in Paris on the Quai des Grands-Augustins and had her first success with a Jasper Johns exhibition. She slowly established Pop Art in Europe, which soon earned her the nickname “Mom of Pop”. After Johns there followed exhibitions by Claes Oldenburg , Roy Lichtenstein , Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol . Since 1965, the Saturday couple lived, among other things, in an apartment in Ca 'del Dose in Venice .

At the beginning of the 1970s she returned to New York and now, conversely, sponsored young European artists in America. The opening of their gallery in the autumn of 1971 at 420 West Broadway, SoHo was accompanied by a performance by the still unknown British artist duo Gilbert & George . Ileana Saturday's gallery was one of the first in the district and, along with the Leo Castelli Gallery, which is also located there, became an important source of inspiration for Manhattan's cultural scene . Shows by Jannis Kounellis , Mario Merz or Bernd and Hilla Becher soon followed .

Saturday's idea to present a combination of young American and European artists soon proved to be a success. In the mid-1970s she even collaborated with her "competitor" Castelli at times. In the 1980s she introduced the German artists Georg Baselitz , Jörg Immendorff and AR Penck in New York and relied on neo-geo artists such as Ashley Bickerton , Peter Halley and Jeff Koons . Ileana Sonnabend introduced Koons to the controversial exhibition Made in Heaven in 1992 , in which the larger-than-life, erotic-kitschy portrayal of Koons and his then-wife, the Italian porn actress Cicciolina ( Ilona Staller ) was shown.

With the onset of the economic crisis in the USA at the end of the 1990s and an obvious reorientation of the art scene towards Europe, her New York gallery lost important artists. In contrast to Castelli, who operated almost exclusively on the American art market, the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery with its branches in Paris and Rome survived this phase of the cultural recession almost unscathed. In early 2000, when she was still old, she dared to move her gallery from SoHo to Chelsea . In 2001 her husband Michael Sonnabend died at the age of 100.

Ileana Sonnabend died after a brief serious illness on October 21, 2007 in her apartment in Manhattan. Saturday was considered one of the most important gallery owners for modern art in the 20th century. Her children have already paid $ 471 million in inheritance tax on their estate, the value of which is estimated at one billion dollars. The taxation of Robert Rauschenberg's Canyon property is disputed .

exhibition

literature

  • Margaret Sundel (Ed.): From Pop to Now: Selections from the Sonnabend Collection. Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, New York, 2002, ISBN 978-0970879073

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Mom of Pop" Elke von Radziewsky in the period 12/1996
  2. ↑ “Ileana Sonnabend, Art World Figure, Dies at 92” , The New York Times , October 24, 2007
  3. ↑ This is an Italian portrait in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung from July 31, 2011, page 45
  4. ↑ She took the new under her wing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on January 5, 2024, page 35
personal data
SURNAME Saturday, Ileana
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schapira, Ileana (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American gallery owner
DATE OF BIRTH October 28, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Bucharest
DATE OF DEATH October 21, 2007
Place of death New York City