Ileana Sonnabend: An Italian Portrait is a tribute to the Romanian-born gallerist who died in 2007 and was among the most formidable dealers of her time. This exhibition presents works from the Sonnabend Collection, New York, on the theme of Italy: works by Italian artists, and works by international artists which reference Italian culture, tradition, and topography.
Ileana was born in Bucharest into a wealthy Jewish family.Here she met her first husband Leo Castelli of Trieste. The couple moved to Paris where they settled until the German occupation which drove them to New York
After divorcing Leo Castelli (with whom she remained lifelong friends) in 1959 she married Michael Sonnabend whom she had met during the 1940s.
Peggy not only collected European abstract and surrealist art, she was also a patron of the American Abstract Expressionists. Ileana promoted avant-garde over a fifty-year period. Like Peggy, Ileana was in close contact with the artists she promoted. One difference – Peggy relied on advice from Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett etc. Whereas Ileana made her own choices and had a key eye and was confident in her own taste and intuition.
Ileana and her husband Michael Sonnabend felt a strong affinity for Venice and had an apartment here.
Ileana has been a promoter of Italian art in france and America and opened The Sonnabend Gallery in New York City in 1971, at 420 West Broadway, in SoHo. In the late 1999s, the gallery moved to Chelsea and continued to be active until Sonnabend's death.
After Sonnabend’s death in October 2007 at the age of 92, her heirs sold a portion of her post-war art collection for $600 million—reportedly the largest private sale in history.
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All of these works weren’t made by the artist. They are all conceptual pieces.
Sol Lewitt ‘Arcs from Four Corners’ 1971- Ileana Sonnabend met LeWitt during this crucial period, in 1971, at the time of the opening of their New York gallery. Much impressed by his work and his ideas, they commissioned a wall drawing for their apartment in Venice, where they would spend
each summer. Her son Antonio said “The drawing became completely part of our Venetian life and when, fifteen years later, we had to change apartments, our main regret was not being able to go on living with this drawing, on that wall, in that room.”
Jeff Koons ‘Buster Keaton 1988 - Koons presents aspects of his personal cultural history, with the aim of encouraging viewers to embrace their own. A master craftsman from Ortisei in the Alto Adige created Buster Keaton. He specialised in the religious tradition of Crucifixions and wood statues of the Virgin Mary, carved the sculpture with a centuries-old technique and placed his signature on this contemporary equivalent of a sacred image. The sculpture is Buster Keaton from a film still. Koons changed the colours and the composition, adding oraltering details. A small cartoon bird perches on Keaton’s shoulder and the donkey has become a miniature pony. Buster Keaton as Christ and the bird as the Holy Spirit. The work alludes to images of Christ on a donkey entering Jerusalem.
Gilbert & George ‘Postcard Sculpture’ 1976 – Postcards of Pompeii and the guards at Buckingham Palace
Haim Steinbach 2009 - Steinbach exhibited a series of works using design objects by the Italian company Alessi. The soap dispenser shaped like a duck is called 'Mr Cool'. Steinbach is commenting on the post-industrial society where form (and apparently subtle erotic looks) outweighs the utility and functionality of the object itself.
Robert Raushcenburg ‘Untitled (Venetian)’ 1973 - Robert Rauschenberg was one of the artists with whom Ileana and Michael Sonnabend forged, over time, close and long-standing friendships, in both human and professional terms. The Venetian series was created between 1972 and 1973 on Captiva after a trip to Venice, where the Sonnabends spent their summers. They were one of the reasons why Rauschenberg was an assiduous visitor to Venice and its Biennales and became an international celebrity as winner of the Grand Prix of the 1964 Venice Biennale. For the Venetian series he used mainly mass-produced and secondhand domestic materials: cloth, rope, wood, leather, stone, electric cables and wires, chairs, vases, pillows, an old bathtub, water and scrap-iron. In each of them there is a clear reference to the aura of Venice, even if this is never spelled out. He uses banal materials such as cardboard packaging, spread out to form a reductive and elegant architecture, condense the force and the fragility of Venetian buildings, becoming metaphors for existence itself.
Robert Raushcenburg ‘Untitles (Gift to Ileana)’ 1996 - “Ileana is really the first serious person in my professional life that respected my work and, bless her heart, may be the last. I would show her what I was doing, and every time I changed my attitude, my work, even if I felt that she had extreme reservations about the changes, I would always come back and she would be my strongest supporter.” Theirs was a close relationship, as witnessed by the inclusion of the image of Bronzino’s Allegory of Love.
‘Untitles (Gift to Ileana)’ by Robert Raushcenburg 1996Jannis Kounellis ‘Untitles’ 1985 - Black smooth square with the rough circle and smooth white egg. Real egg. Very hard to find in Venice.
Arman ‘Portrait of Mike’ 1969 - It consists of a vitrine presenting us with things that characterized his life, his interests and his habits: a striking tie, Cuban cigars, most obviously books, some about Pop Art, but most of them by or about Dante Alighieri. The Divina Commedia was a fixed part of Sonnabend’s life. He read it every day in medieval Italian and knew much of it by heart.
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Andy Warhol ‘Ileana Sonnabend’ 1973 - They were both avid collectors of Art Déco furniture and Warhol proposed that he be paid with a piece of furniture by Ruhlmann that belonged to Sonnabend and which he admired. The sitter is depicted and the image manipulated with the same iconic charge as a consumer product, a movie poster, or an illustration to a news story in a daily newspaper. The
image is silkscreened onto a canvas from a photograph—hence from a preexisting, mechanical image which ‘negates’ the impression or interpretation which arises from the artist working directly from the sitter and manipulating paint, subjecting him or her instead to the visual and ideological parameters of mass reproduction in advertising or the print media. In this way the portrait has been stripped of its aura of uniqueness—whether of the artist’s manual skill, or of the individuality of the sitter, who is no longer recreated in terms of the artist’s intuition and intimate knowledge of that person, but becomes instead mere merchandise.
James Rosenquist ‘Sliced Bologna’ 1968 – Sliced Bologna is derived from advertising for a brand of mortadella of Italian origin popular in the States in those years. It is painted on a transparent support of polyethylene terephthalate (Mylar) and sliced into strips hung from the ceiling, allowing the viewer to walk through the image, in an all encompassing tactile-visual experience.
John Baldessari ‘Strobe Series/ Futurist : Dog on Leash (for Balla) –Baldessari dedicated his career to debating what it means tomake art, challenging historically accepted conventions, genres andstyles, whether in painting, photography, drawing, text, film, books or performances, and often using different media in the same work. ‘Strobe Series’ is an ironic and anachronistic version of the study of images in motion, as if reworking, in a different medium, Giacomo Balla’s well-known 1912 painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash which is a classic example of Italian Futurism’s obsession with speed and its visual representation.
Rona Pondick – ‘Dog’ 1998-2001 – Wanted to contemporise the mythological hybrid such as sphinx, siren, centour etc. by making them of shiny stainless steel, inducing the shock that a Surreal image combined with a familiar material (as stone was to the Ancient Romans) can transmit.
She has created other hybrids like this, always using her own face and hands. Others are even freakier! The juxtaposition of the rough realistic human parts against the smooth body of the dog just doesn't gel with me.
Robert Feintuch - Bacchus in the Studio, 2007 Robert Feintuch reinterprets myth, acknowledging the impossibility of its reinterpretation, figuring and reliving it with deadpan theatricality, almost to the point of farce, in a spirit of melancholy disavowal. Feintuch reduces myth to the essential visual syntax of its classical iconography and at the same time sets it within the banality of daily life: the artist is in his underwear and a newspaper has dropped to the floor. The timelessness of myth, its immortality, its endless possibilities for iteration contrast with the option to locate it in the here and now. Only the core iconographic detail of the bunch of grapes, gazed upon before being impetuously and deliriously swallowed whole, evokes the drama of Bacchus/Dionysus, the Greek god of the vintage, depicted as always in a state of intoxication, and alludes to the universality and the mystery of its message, highlighting the irrational side of man bared in its irrefutable reality.
Clifford Ross ‘St Paul by Giovan Maria Morlaiter’ 1996 –
Used digital cameras to get different effects. For his hurricane series he was in the sea taking photos tied to shore with a rope for safety. In these two photos of statues of St Peter and St Paul by the
eighteenth-century sculptor Giovan Maria Morlaiter in the Venetian Church of the Gesuati, the Church Fathers are revealed to us from a highly subjective point of view, dal sotto in su, with Ross lying on the floor looking up and with a special lens that exaggerates foreshortening in the visual field. The relations in scale of the parts of the body and the iconographical symbols that identify the saints visually confound normal expectations and, like waves in a stormy sea, assault the eye with an ungovernable and startling force.
Elger Esser ‘Fondamente Nove, Italy’ 2002 - Esser has said that postcards of the 1950s and 60s that he grew up with have been an influence because of their bold, distinct colors and intense hues, because of their tranquil, reassuring mood, and because of their capacity to condense the essence of a place. His photographs, often with long exposures and deliberately blurred, have the intent to recreate both the literal and the metaphoric atmosphere that emanates from his subject. The Casino degli Spiriti and the Venetian lagoon are photographed here, like many of his images, at a time of day when light no longer has a precise direction, creating a sense of diffuse and filtered sunlight.
Andrea Robbins and Max Becher Venice Las Vegas, Meeting Place: Rialto Bridge and Campanile Tower, 2010 –
Max Becher and Andrea Robbins are among the youngest artists to have had their work exhibited in Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery, but also the most frequently, since their first show in Chelsea in 2001.
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