In 1975, when I was a critic for the Times, an editor sat me down and told me that the paper was cutting back on reviews in favor of features. He added that there was a big future for a young man who wanted to be an investigative reporter in the art world. What story did he have in mind? The dealings of Leo Castelli. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. That year, a celebrated conviction of the dealer Frank Lloyd, for conspiring to plunder the estate of Mark Rothko, fed popular suspicions that the art world was a quasi-criminal enterprise zone, in which Castelli—who had a near-monopoly on the top artists and sold their work for prices that seemed fantastic—figured to be the gangster-in-chief. And what young journalist didn’t ache for the laurels of a Woodward or a Bernstein? I didn’t. I liked the art world, and I revered Castelli, though he made me nervous. Treated to the silken manners and melting gaze of the small, neat man from Trieste—with his unplaceable accent, which Tom Wolfe described as “soft, suave, and slightly humid, like a cross between Peter Lorre and the first secretary of a French embassy”—I felt like a farm boy with cow pies in my pockets. He sensed this, I’m convinced, and left me alone when I visited the holy of holies that was his gallery, first at 4 East Seventy-seventh Street and, after 1971, at 420 West Broadway, flashing me the odd quick knowing smile. Leo (almost no one who met him even once called him anything else) wielded custom-tailored ways of making people feel special—all people, because he crowned his Continental glamour with a faintly comic and completely endearing American-style openness.
The Times did run a piece that year, which probed Castelli’s handling of his thoroughbred stable: Johns, Rauschenberg, Twombly, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Oldenburg, Kelly, Stella, Judd, Flavin, Morris, Nauman, Serra, Ruscha, et al. It reported that he gave special consideration to favored collectors and might refuse to sell anything significant to others, and that he cultivated a network of coöperating galleries in other cities, which showed works by his artists and split the commissions on sales with him. No scandal there. The sole hint of impropriety was unsourced: “It is said that throughout the late sixties Castelli had collectors bidding up works on his behalf at auction.” But the first germane auction didn’t take place until 1970, and inflating market bubbles wasn’t Castelli’s style. He played a long game, aimed at securing art-historical, institutional recognition for his artists. Rising prices kept score, but where a work went was more important to him than what it went for. He set his sights beyond collectors, on museums and the academy. The article missed the central, arguably shady aspect of Castelli’s practice: the seduction not of pocketbooks but of hearts and minds. His mentors (whether or not they consented to the role) included Marcel Duchamp; Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art; the critic Clement Greenberg; and the collector and dealer Sidney Janis. Castelli’s first wife, Ileana Schapira, who was at least his equal in taste and intellect, was never more helpful than after their divorce, in 1959, when she emerged as a formidable gallerist with her new husband, Michael Sonnabend; in Paris in the sixties, the Sonnabend Gallery raised the flag of Castelli’s American artists, to the horror of the French art establishment and the corresponding ardor of many other Europeans. At one time or another, Castelli’s brain trust numbered the art historians Leo Steinberg and Robert Rosenblum; Alan Solomon, the brilliant director of the Jewish Museum (in the early sixties, a showcase for avant-garde art); the talent-scouting dealers Dick Bellamy, uptown, and Irving Blum, in Los Angeles; and no end of critics. Castelli’s web of influence allowed him to change the culture of art from the inside out.
Who was he? A biography, “Leo & His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli” (Knopf; $35), by Annie Cohen-Solal, written in French and elegantly translated by Mark Polizzotti and the author, immerses the question in facts and sensitive analysis without exactly answering it. Something impenetrable survives the best efforts of Cohen-Solal, who met Castelli at a dinner in New York in 1989, soon after she became the cultural counsellor at the French Embassy. “So, you are the new one,” she remembers him saying to her. “Well, you’re going to take the city by storm with your orange skirt and your long gloves! Why don’t you come to the gallery tomorrow around five? You’ll see the show, you’ll meet Roy. He has an opening, and you’ll stay for the party!” With that personal note, the first and almost the last in an impeccably judicious book, Cohen-Solal establishes her membership in the community of the bedazzled-by-Leo. It’s an important credential. The impressions that Castelli made on people are not incidental to his story. In a way, they are his story.
He was born Leo Krausz, in Trieste in 1907, the second of three children of a prominent Hungarian banker and an Italian merchant heiress, both of whom were Jewish. The family took his mother’s maiden name in 1934, when the Fascist government banned non-Italianate patronymics. The family’s eventful history, reaching back on his maternal side to Renaissance Tuscany, brims with the frequent tribulations of Jewish experience at the fringes of the Austrian and the Austro-Hungarian Empires. Castelli didn’t conceal his heritage. He ignored it, subjecting his Jewishness to “unreflective and absolute erasure,” Cohen-Solal writes. She provides a backstory, spanning centuries, that is so detailed—her protagonist doesn’t occupy center stage for most of the book’s first hundred pages—that it initially exasperated me. But I returned to it, later, for its absorbing and, after all, highly relevant scrutiny of the historic loam that produced a bloom as exotic as Castelli.
A slight child raised in luxury in Trieste—and, during the First World War, in Vienna—he was expected to follow a career in finance. He asserted his independence by becoming both an athlete in several sports, notably mountain climbing, and a passionate student of literature in four languages. “I wanted to be a Renaissance man, and physically strong,” he recalled. At first unsuccessful with girls, he profited from a single session with a Freudian psychoanalyst, whose advice—to consider the girl’s point of view—helped to launch him on his lifelong sideline as a Casanova. Cohen-Solal evokes a world of “the Finzi-Continis of the Adriatic”; the gathering menace of Mussolini raised only mild alarm among people who were almost used to occasional spells of persecution. Castelli, whose father prudently took party membership, remembered thinking, languidly, of the Fascists as “rather intolerable.”
In 1932, at the age of twenty-five, Castelli took a job with an insurance company in Bucharest, where he courted the elder daughter of Mihai Schapira, a business tycoon. Rebuffed by her, Cohen-Solal writes, Castelli turned his attentions to her “impish, refined” sister, Ileana, who later said, none too sentimentally, “as I wanted to get out of Romania at any cost, I married him.” The couple relished the Dada art scene in Bucharest, their sensibilities agreeing in “iconoclasm, refusal of convention, love of subversion, insatiable curiosity, juvenile humor.” In 1935, a job transfer for Castelli brought them, via the Orient Express, to Paris. He was ecstatic there, while she, for all her striving and Schiaparelli raiment, felt awkwardly out of step, even as they “developed their taste in the zone between the abstraction of Klee and Kandinsky, the Surrealism of Miró, and the Dadaist loyalties” of the critic Michel Tapié. They had a daughter, Nina, in 1937, then commenced to lead separate lives.
Anxious to forestall a final breach, Ileana’s father lent Castelli the money to start a gallery, on the Place Vendôme, which was named for its co-director, the fashionable decorator René Drouin. It opened in July, 1939, with a show of modern and antique furniture, including commissioned pieces by Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, Leonor Fini (a former girlfriend of Castelli’s from Trieste), Eugene Berman, and other artists in the force field of Surrealism. The business closed two months later, when war broke out. The closing peeved Ileana, who had been elated by Leo’s new vocation. She recalled (ruefully, I hope), “We were so carefree—what did the war matter to us? It was unimportant. What was important was what we were doing, which was so much more fun!” They were in Cannes when Paris fell, and managed to acquire visas for a departure by ship from Marseilles. By way of Oran, Oujda, and Casablanca, then overland to the north of Spain and with a subsequent docking in Havana, the family reached Ellis Island on March 12, 1941. A few days later, Castelli made his first visit to the Museum of Modern Art.
That year saw an auspicious influx of European artists and intellectuals to New York, where they joined a starry cohort that already included Duchamp, Mondrian, and Dali. Castelli fit right in. He lived with his family in a graceful brownstone that Mihai Schapira had bought: 4 East Seventy-seventh Street. Leo and Ileana enrolled at Columbia University, where she studied psychology and he, thinking that he might become a teacher, took up economic history, with a concentration in Renaissance mercantilism. In March, 1942, he volunteered for the Army. (The promised shortcut to citizenship may have bolstered his courage.) Trained in intelligence for a mission in France that was later aborted, he found himself back in Bucharest, serving as a translator. In May, 1945, Sergeant Leo Castelli visited the ruins of Budapest, where his parents, having taken refuge there with his sister Silvia and her Christian husband, had just died—his mother of drowning during a panicked relocation across the Danube and his father of an infected wound.
Returning to New York, Castelli took a managerial position with his father-in-law’s new clothing factory, which he performed lackadaisically. He also embarked on what Cohen-Solal calls “the strangest ten years of his life”—1946 to 1956—which happened to be “precisely the same years as the transformation of the New York art scene.” Castelli took as gospel Alfred Barr’s modernist genealogy—a flow chart of styles from Impressionism to Surrealism and varieties of abstraction—with its open book of illustrative masterpieces at MOMA. (In 1987, he lamented that model’s dissolution: “I never thought it would come to this. I’ve always believed in development, one movement following another. . . . But everything today is very much in flux.”) Hoping to ingratiate himself with Barr, in 1946, he donated an Arshile Gorky drawing to the museum. Barr remained aloof, but that didn’t daunt Castelli, who revealed a gift for unstinting service to anyone he esteemed.
Clement Greenberg introduced Castelli to the emerging American painters, whom he quickly befriended—shifting his loyalty from the Surrealists as, later, he jumped to the insurgents of Pop art and minimalism. He bought works, often on layaway, by Klee, Mondrian, Gorky, Pollock, and other still inexpensive masters. (His later wealth, such as it was, owed largely to the appreciation of his collection.) His first exercise as a private dealer came through Drouin, in 1947: some hundred canvases by Kandinsky, consigned by his widow, Nina, a gorgon who seems to have driven a previous agent to a nervous breakdown. Castelli had to cope with creditors and tangled legal claims, while seeking exposure and buyers for the work. Mme. Kandinsky hectored him, and as much as accused him of dishonesty. Finally, he wrote to her in a tone that, for him, amounted to frothing rage: “I would like to remind you that it was because of me that a considerable number of very important paintings have been sold here in America, and that these sales have cost me a huge amount of work without earning me a dime.” He added, “It is not my habit to blow my own horn.” (Rudeness always flummoxed him. In the sixties, he smoothly handed off boors to his less politic chief assistant, Ivan Karp.) The widow wasn’t mollified, but the ordeal gained Castelli valuable contacts and taught him a great deal about the diplomatic challenges and the back-room ins and outs of the upper-tier art trade.
In 1950, Castelli inspired Sidney Janis to mount a showdown between European and American painters, pairing works by de Kooning and Dubuffet, Pollock and André Lanskoy, Rothko and Nicolas de Staël, Franz Kline and Pierre Soulages, and so on. (Poor Europe!) Castelli puzzled the downtown artists, who, he recalled, “figured there must be some financial angle to it. In reality, money played no part in what I was doing. While they didn’t know what to make of me, I had tremendous admiration for them.” The same year, Leo and Ileana became two of only three non-artists (the other was the much-loved, eccentric dealer Charles Egan) who were founding members of the Club, the legendary discussion group that met three times a week for the next six years. In 1951, Castelli financed—paying a few hundred dollars for rent and publicity—and helped hang the breakout Ninth Street Show, of sixty-one artists, including the cream of the New York School. After the opening, he had the signal pleasure of going to the Cedar Tavern with Alfred Barr, who, previously having resisted the local avant-garde, humbly wrote the artists’ names on the backs of photographs of work that Castelli handed him.
For two years, Willem and Elaine de Kooning summered with the Castellis in East Hampton. That friendship soured, first when Ileana proclaimed her preference for the art of Jackson Pollock, and then when Castelli opted not to represent the great Dutchman. (Ileana explained, “Leo was more interested in what was coming up than in what had already bloomed.”) The long, relative eclipse of de Kooning’s art-world prestige, until the eighties, may have stemmed from that decision. Castelli altered a situation in which critics and curators had wielded guiding authority. He became, effectively, the scene’s predominant critic. What he showed didn’t invariably succeed, but what he wouldn’t show came to bat with two strikes against it. His winning bets came to seem self-fulfilling prophecies. Cohen-Solal puts it plainly: “Castelli gave the impression of having internalized Orwell’s insight that history is written by the winners. And so he determined to write his own part in it, and that of his artists.”
Castelli was nearly fifty when he underwent a “lightning metamorphosis from dilettante dandy and financial dependent to master gallerist,” Cohen-Solal writes, opening his gallery, in the wake of a snowstorm, on February 3, 1957, in two rooms of the family home: the living room and Nina’s bedroom. The show was a dazzling foray in subtle taste, juxtaposing first-rate modern and contemporary works by Europeans and Americans. (At the entrance, a Pollock hung next to a Delaunay.) Castelli’s first roster of young artists, mostly second-generation Abstract Expressionists, was undistinguished, except for the irrepressible Robert Rauschenberg. Then Rauschenberg introduced him to Jasper Johns. Castelli’s discovery of Johns’s Flag, Target, Alphabet, and Numbers paintings, at the artist’s loft near Coenties Slip, is an event steeped in mythological significance. The taciturn images, tenderly brushed in fleshy encaustic, announced an American revolution in art. Johns remembered “a lively few minutes,” during which Castelli offered him a show. Within days of the opening, in January, 1958, Barr had acquired four Johns paintings for MOMA.
The next big find, the following year, was the sensationally dour “pinstripe” black paintings by the twenty-three-year-old Frank Stella. Leo Steinberg recalled that Castelli, distressed to learn that before he could launch the work some of it would appear in a group exhibition at MOMA, dispatched Rauschenberg and Johns to Princeton, where Stella, a recent graduate of the university, was living, to dissuade him from showing at the museum. (They failed.) Then came Castelli’s years of miracles. Starting in 1962, with a show of Lichtenstein’s comic-book-panel paintings, the revelatory débuts came in a torrent. Steinberg remembered Ivan Karp remarking, “We should discover a genius! It’s been two weeks since we last discovered a genius!” Castelli, to hold on to his artists, paid them regular stipends, on a scale unheard of in America, whether their work sold or not. In 1963, Castelli married a Frenchwoman twenty-one years his junior, Toiny Fraissex du Bost. They had a son, Jean-Christophe, later that year, and she began managing a branch of the business devoted to prints.
Castelli’s repeated efforts on behalf of Rauschenberg, in the teeth of stubborn resistance from Barr and some of his successors at MOMA to the artist’s extravagant style, are a leitmotif of Cohen-Solal’s detailed and savvy account of the dealer’s doings in the sixties. His chief coup, which doubled as a somewhat obnoxious triumph for postwar American art in general, occurred at the Venice Biennale of 1964, where Rauschenberg became the first American to win the Grand Prize for Painting. Under the auspices of the United States Information Agency—beefed up during the culture-smitten Kennedy Administration—predominantly outsized works by Rauschenberg and seven other artists, including Johns and Stella, arrived in an Air Force Globemaster C-124. The scale of the effort, extending to an auxiliary show at a palazzo on the Grand Canal, was imperial, if not imperialistic. Cohen-Solal’s chapter on the Biennale presents it as a play in eight acts, complete with an extensive dramatis personae. The politicking was intense. Ileana, who represented Rauschenberg in Europe, remarked, “I hate the game of politics that goes on here, but I think if we are going to play it at all, we should play to win.” In the end, arrogant French opposition proved more off-putting to the mostly Italian judges than arrogant American ambition. (It may also have mattered that Rauschenberg’s art was wonderful.) Castelli’s labors for the artist were crowned in 1989, when he was hailed for the munificence of his personal donation to MOMA of Rauschenberg’s iconic “Bed” (1955), a paint-slathered quilt, sheet, and pillow. He dedicated the gift to Barr, who had died in 1981.
Castelli was a quick study, obviously, though not an instantaneous one, the Johns epiphany aside. He was wary of Warhol, who frequented the gallery as a collector, and craved admittance as an artist. (Rauschenberg and Johns disparaged Warhol, as they had Lichtenstein; a kind of crisis recurred whenever the gallery’s artists begrudged a newcomer, activating Castelli’s skills as a conciliator.) He was reluctant, too, to take on James Rosenquist, whose billboard-derived montages of commercial imagery struck him as too akin to Surrealism. In both cases, he was swayed by advisers in his network. Castelli’s recruitment of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Robert Morris confirmed his sovereignty by conjoining the yin of minimalism to the yang of Pop, in a catholic overview of the new. He even played host, briefly, to exponents of color-field painting, a mode of abstraction that took its bearings from Greenberg’s nostalgic ideals of progressive modernism and aesthetic purity. But color-field couldn’t be squared with Castelli’s loyalty to art that gratified the intellect as well as the eye. Another dealer, André Emmerich, absorbed the Greenbergian artists, marking a historic fissure in the avant-garde, which soon fragmented beyond Castelli’s power to unite it under his hallmark.
He débuted his last genius early in 1968: Bruce Nauman, who, with Richard Serra and Eva Hesse, established the context-sensitive aesthetics of post-minimalism that still condition new art today. Later that year, Castelli opened a temporary annex, the Castelli Warehouse, on West 108th Street, with a stunningly innovative show, organized by Robert Morris, of environmental sculpture by nine artists, including Nauman, Serra, and Hesse. But Castelli’s anxiety to corral the spread of artistic novelties, including the newfangled medium of video, grew frantic. He was stung by an immense exhibition at the Met, “New York Painting and Sculpture, 1940-1970,” organized by the then thirty-four-year-old curator and scene-making gadabout Henry Geldzahler. The spectacular yet soft-headed survey included many of Castelli’s artists, but its heavy emphasis on color-field marginalized his painstakingly discriminated vision. Meanwhile, Castelli mistook a trend in art—conceptualism—as a movement along classical lines, with leaders and followers. But conceptualism proved to be a miscellany of ploys for exalting ideas over objects. His anointed conceptualists—Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry—were faces in a crowd.
In 1971 came the expansion to SoHo, in a five-story building bought with a coöperative of dealers. Castelli took the second floor and the Sonnabend Gallery the third. Ileana outflanked him with a wave of new European artists and outrageous Americans, including Vito Acconci (who, in his performance piece “Seedbed,” hid under a ramp and masturbated while vocally fantasizing, via an amplifier, about the viewers above him). Sales of Johns and Lichtenstein kept Castelli afloat, but, what with production costs for grandiose minimalist and post-minimalist works that sold slowly, if at all, and the never interrupted outlay of stipends, amid a recession, the business was hard put by the time I declined the chance to trigger a Castelligate. Judd left, ending up at the Pace Gallery. Rauschenberg was lured away by the Knoedler Gallery. One after another, gallerists arose, including Mary Boone and Larry Gagosian, who usurped Castelli’s primacy even as they voiced tribute to him as a hero. Castelli took it as a “truly poisoned shaft,” Cohen-Solal writes, when, behind his back, Arne Glimcher, of Pace, arranged the watershed million-dollar sale of Johns’s “Three Flags” from a private collection to the Whitney Museum, in 1980. Joint shows with Boone, of Julian Schnabel, in 1981, and David Salle, in 1982, amounted to strategic capitulations. Castelli’s once mighty business model began to seem almost quaint. For one thing, he rarely worked the secondary market in already owned works, a money machine for Gagosian. Of the top galleries today, only Marian Goodman’s hews closely to Castelli’s paradigm.
Castelli’s prestige began to count against him, with his former partisans in the press “growing weary of the art scene’s more-fabulous-than-thou aura,” Cohen-Solal observes. His competitiveness waned. He took victory laps. He received the rosette of the French Legion of Honor, apparently in exchange for donating works by Johns to the Pompidou museum, and he visited Trieste four times (with as many female companions), where he was hailed by journalists as the “lord of art” and the “magnificent Triestine.” The mayor made him the honorary director of the Revoltella Museum, where, however, the real director vetoed a show of Castelli’s artists, declaring, “No merchants in the temple!” (The polyglot city had not ceased to be a twisty place.) Castelli collapsed in public more than once from a heart ailment that required surgery and a pacemaker. But he strove onward, if not so much in art and business, at least in love. His union with Toiny had inevitably faltered, given his wandering ways, but they remained married until she died, in 1987. Gagosian recalled the dealer’s invitation to join him and an artist girlfriend: “Come, let’s have a drink with her, and we’ll go to her studio and you can tell her you like her paintings.” Marriage to the Italian critic Barbara Bertozzi, in 1995, finally slowed him down. She “took away his Hermès appointment book,” Castelli’s gallery manager, Susan Brundage, said. The SoHo space closed in 1997. But Castelli remained socially active, refulgent with verve. He died at home, at the age of ninety-one, on August 21, 1999.
At a memorial service at MOMA, Jean-Christophe Castelli confessed his jealousy of the art world, for so consuming his father, but added a note of gratitude: “Instead of baseball, my father gave me the Italian Renaissance.” It was no flip remark. A friend, Bob Monk, related an astonishing scene after the funeral of Jean-Christophe’s mother: “When Leo saw that I had arrived, he lit up, came to me, and said, ‘You must see Toiny, you must see Toiny, she is beautiful.’. . . They removed the red roses, undid the screws, opened the top, and we looked at Toiny together. ‘Doesn’t she look beautiful?’ Leo asked.” I can’t decide if that story is more touching than macabre, or vice versa. Either way, it feels close to the incomprehensible core of the man, whose grief, no doubt tinged with hysteria, found outlet in aestheticism. Perhaps art was the mode in which he assessed everything and everybody, himself included, as if fitting each passing sensation, personality, and event into an evolving composition. ♦
