Leo Castelli

Leo Castelli ( Krausz; September 4, 1907 – August 21, 1999) was an Italian-American art dealer who originated the contemporary art gallery system. His gallery showcased contemporary art for five decades. Among the movements shown were Surrealism, abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, pop art, op art, color field painting, hard-edge painting, lyrical abstraction, minimalism, conceptual art, and neo-expressionism.

Early life and career Leo Castelli was born Leo Krausz, in Trieste, Austria-Hungary, the second of three children of Italian and Austro-Hungarian Jewish origin. His father was Ernest Krauss, a Hungarian by birth, who had gone to Trieste as a young man and married wealthy heiress Bianca Castelli, from an established family of coffee importers. After World War I, which the family spent in Vienna (where Leo Castelli learned perfect German), they returned to Trieste. Specializing in surrealistic art, The couple would remain married for more than 25 years, and were friends and partners even after their divorce, when Ileana married Michael Sonnabend and that couple opened its own gallery. In 1957, he opened the Leo Castelli Gallery in a townhouse at 4 E. 77th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenues in New York City. From the mid-1960s through the 1970s, the gallery was perhaps the most prominent commercial venue for art in the world. Initially the gallery showcased European Surrealism, Wassily Kandinsky, and other European artists such as François-Xavier Lalanne. 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.

Castelli Gallery's first Warhol exhibition, Flowers, November, 1964 From the early 1960s through the late 70s, Frank Stella, Larry Poons, Lee Bontecou, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Cy Twombly, Ronald Davis, Ed Ruscha, Salvatore Scarpitta, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth joined the stable of Castelli artists. He gave Johns, Stella and Lichtenstein their first one-man shows. The couple also had a son together, Jean-Christophe Castelli, but Antoinette Castelli died in 1987.

Recognition Castelli received the rosette of the French Legion of Honor, allegedly in exchange for donating works by Johns to the Centre Pompidou.

In 1982 a traveling exhibit honoring the 25th anniversary of Castelli Gallery visited the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. The Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, showed "Three Decades of Exploration: Homage to Leo Castelli", an exhibit of more than 30 works by artists discovered, shown and encouraged by Castelli in 1987. That same year, the Butler Institute of American Art presented "Leo Castelli: a tribute exhibition". In 1996, Gagosian Gallery mounted the exhibition "Leo Castelli: An Exhibition in Honor of His Gallery and Artists" in Beverly Hills. In 1999, on the occasion of Castelli's death, Time published a eulogy by James Rosenquist.

In 1988, when there were no tax deductions for gifts to museums, Castelli gave one of the icons of postwar American art, Robert Rauschenberg's Bed (1955) to the Museum of Modern Art. In 1992, amid rumors that Castelli was negotiating to sell his archives to the Getty Center in Los Angeles, his collection was said to be worth some $2 million. In October 2007, Castelli's heirs – his widow, Barbara Bertozzi Castelli, and his two children, Jean-Christophe Castelli and Nina Castelli Sundell – announced the donation of the gallery's archives from 1957 through 1999 to the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art. Castelli had been interviewed for the archive's oral-history project in 1969, 1973 and 1997.