Ileana sonnabend biography

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Instead it’s a personal recap, a selective memoir. Major artists whom the gallery launched but no longer represents (Carroll Dunham, Peter Halley, Terry Winters) are also among the missing. But times were quite tough. There, on the eve of World War II, Leo opened his first gallery.

When the Germans invaded, Ileana’s fortune allowed the couple to migrate to New York in comfort, and they were soon drawn into the circle of Abstract Expressionist painters, whose works Leo began dealing on a private basis.

In Rome and then in Paris, local dealers were unreceptive.

There was, it turned out, only one way to show artists like Johns, Rauschenberg, Dine, and Lichtenstein: to do it themselves.

Resistance forced the Sonnabends’ hand, but it also guaranteed that they didn’t have any competition. The ’70s—lean years for the art world generally—were great years for the Sonnabends.

When many critics turned up their noses at his Campbell’s soup cans, Ileana saw in them a new language, capable of speaking to contemporary society. “I met Leo. He was different from the others. But clearly, the era’s return to painting didn’t correspond to any latent loyalty on the Sonnabends’ part.

If that’s true, lending this show to the Tang might be a way of avoiding bigger, more expectant institutions. About personal matters, on the other hand, she can be memorably blunt. Sometimes, Ileana recalled, she, Allan Stone, and Ivan Karp would start “around five o’clock, when the galleries closed, and go on until two in the morning.”

The excitement of those visits, followed by her decision to divorce her congenial but philandering husband, changed her life.

The next year, 1960, she married the scholarly, talkative Michael Sonnabend. “You do what you need to do,” she told Acconci about a performance that involved two weeks of sporadic public masturbation. He was leaving soon, and since I wanted to leave Romania at all costs, I married him”. The city was invaded by the Germans, so in 1941 the couple moved to New York.

As Antonio Homen would recall, “The important place for the family was Vienna… Ileana used to say that her interest in art was born from being left for entire days at the museum in Vienna while her mother and sister went shopping”.
Little Miss Schapira had a sheltered and happy childhood and adolescence (Bucharest, in the early twentieth century, was a vibrant and culturally stimulating city).

But the gypsy soul ‒ in its best form ‒ is something more structured: on the one hand, it thrives on independence, unconventionality, and substantial autonomy; on the other, it must anchor itself somewhere to avoid wandering aimlessly. As another dealer of her generation remarked, Sonnabend is “a major, major figure—and we don’t even know how major because it’s all been so discreet.” The collection has apparently never been inventoried, and Sonnabend and her gallery’s director and legal heir, Antonio Homem, politely decline to offer even a rough estimate.

A glance at the checklist reveals obvious gaps (no Frank Stella, no Chuck Close, no Cindy Sherman).