Most art dealers, by definition, sell pictures and make money and enter the history books only as footnotes. But Leo Castelli, who opened a gallery in New York in 1957 and became the leading dealer of Pop Art and early Minimalism, deserves to be remembered in full-size type. A trim, courtly émigré who had worked as a banker in prewar Europe, he was fluent in at least five languages and able to extol a Warhol soup can or a Richard Serra lead-pipe sculpture even in Romanian, which had tangible benefits. His achievement was to globalize American art in an age when Europeans still thought that “made in the U.S.A.” was a label best reserved for washing machines.
One never knew what lay behind the smiling mask, the easy-seeming urbanity. Annie Cohen-Solal, in her lively and detail-laden “Leo and His Circle,” provides the widest glimpse so far. He was no stranger to desperation. He fled France soon after the Nazis marched in, but his parents did not escape. They died heartbreaking deaths in Budapest, hounded by Hungary’s fascist Arrow Cross Party. Castelli’s life story has traditionally been presented as an art-world fable about an elegant Italian man in nicely cut suits who had the look of a little prince as he stood in his gallery, welcoming visitors with a kiss on both cheeks and describing everything as fan-TAS-tico. But this biography reminds us that America’s cultural dominance is inseparable from the historical nightmares that scattered the Jewish population of Europe into safe exile in New York and elsewhere.
Castelli, who was loath to discuss his past or acknowledge his religion, began life in 1907 as Leo Krausz, the son of a prosperous Hungarian banker. Trieste, the city of his birth, was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it was annexed by Italy after World War I; with the rise of Fascism, citizens were required to adopt Italian surnames. So the Krausz clan took the name Castelli (his mother’s maiden name), and the future dealer learned firsthand about the frightening malleability of identity. National boundaries can be erased overnight, and even your name can be taken away. By the 1930s, the one unalterable piece of his identity, his Jewishness, had been twisted under evil circumstances into a reason for his extinction.
He was, in other words, an Old World figure whose dearest wish was answered in the New World. Finally, he could assimilate and take proud citizenship somewhere — i.e., inside the unrestricted borders of the American art scene, which at the time was staging its own repudiation of Europe. These were the heroic years when New York was toppling Paris as the capital of art, and Castelli assisted in the upset by opening his gallery in time to provide the first-ever glimpse of paintings of Coke bottles and cartoon girls, of Liz and Marilyn and Elvis — brightly fetching, accessible images whose rascally audacity gave establishment critics like Hilton Kramer a case of permanent heartburn and only enhanced Castelli’s love for his adopted homeland.
You cannot say he was shady. In terms of his business practices, Castelli emerges from Cohen-Solal’s book as a gentleman dealer who understood that an artist’s worth does not reside in his sales figures. He had a touching regard for the achievements of artists, or at least of his artists, conferring on their shaggy-haired heads every blessing his profession had to offer. He gave Jasper Johns and Frank Stella their first one-man shows. He spoke about Roy Lichtenstein and Donald Judd as if their legacy were roughly tantamount to that of Rembrandt.
Did he have a great eye? Probably not, but he certainly had the good sense to listen to people who knew more than he did, and the good fortune to be sent to Bucharest as a young insurance agent. There, in 1933, he met Ileana Schapira, a 17-year-old Romanian heiress whose taste was genuinely rarefied and extreme. He married her that year, and eventually she became the legendary art dealer Ileana Sonnabend. “Leo had no idea, no vision of his own,” Robert Storr, the critic and dean of the Yale School of Art, tells the author, not implausibly. Castelli, he feels, was “a go-between with an exceptional gift for public relations.” Once, on a visit to Bruce Nauman’s studio for an advance peek at the artist’s latest homemade video, Castelli fell asleep.
He owed a substantial debt to his inordinately wealthy father-in-law, Mihai Schapira, who bankrolled Castelli’s first gallery in Paris and kindly dragged him along when the family fled to America. Arriving here in 1941, Castelli hardly seemed destined for great things, and you can even see him as a pioneer of the slacker life. He lived on the top floor of his father-in-law’s elegant town house, at 4 East 77th Street, and worked for the Romanian’s garment company. For a decade he managed a knitwear factory. He was almost 50 years old when he finally opened the Castelli Gallery — in his living room. Visitors who climbed the four flights in the Schapira town house to see the debut exhibition found two enormous works hanging in the entranceway: a Jackson Pollock drip painting and a Cubist-style view of the Eiffel Tower by the French painter Robert Delaunay — in other words, a face-off between American culture and French culture, a contest in which Castelli had already decided the victor.
By then his marriage was in ruins, perhaps because he was not built for monogamy. His amatory conquests were so numerous that even his biographer appears to lose interest in cataloging them. After the divorce from Ileana came the inevitable second and third marriages, but Castelli and his first wife remained quaintly entwined through the years. His SoHo gallery, which opened in 1971 amid deserved fanfare, occupied the second floor at 420 West Broadway — one flight below Sonnabend’s gallery. In their later years (he died in 1999), they talked regularly and at last settled into the kind of untroubled companionship that had eluded them during their marriage.
For all its interesting disclosures, “Leo and His Circle” is compromised by careless writing and a breezy indifference to humble facts. The book is long on hyperbole and short on insight. The author deposits exclamation points at the end of too many otherwise unsurprising sentences, as if she were composing advertising copy for Champagne. “Nineteen fifty-eight: to all appearances a banner year!”
Deborah Solomon, who writes the “Questions For” column in The Times Magazine, is the author of “Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell” and a forthcoming biography of Norman Rockwell.
LEO AND HIS CIRCLE
The Life of Leo Castelli
By Annie Cohen-Solal
Translated by Mark Polizzotti with the author
Illustrated. 540 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
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