Leo Castelli | Art Dealer & Patron of Pop Art

Leo Castelli (born 1907, Trieste, Austro-Hungarian Empire [now in Italy]—died August 21, 1999, New York, New York, U.S.) was an art dealer of Hungarian and Italian descent whose promotion of American painters helped contemporary American art gain acceptance in Europe.

Castelli was brought up in an affluent Jewish family in Trieste. During World War I the family moved to Vienna. After the war they moved back to Trieste, which had become part of Italy, and they changed their last name to Castelli, Leo’s mother’s maiden name. After graduating with a law degree from the University of Milan in 1924, he began a career in insurance and banking and moved to Bucharest to take a job at a bank. There Castelli met his first wife, Ileana Schapira, whom he married in 1933 (divorced 1959). With the assistance of his new and very wealthy father-in-law, Castelli and his wife relocated to Paris, where Castelli was assured a banking job. In 1939, again with financial support from his father-in-law, he and his friend, architect and interior designer René Drouin—opened an art gallery that featured Surrealist art and decorative arts. Unfortunately, with the outbreak of World War II, the gallery had to close, and the Castelli family settled in New York City in 1941 as European refugees.

In 1942 Castelli joined the United States Army and was granted U.S. citizenship following the war. In New York Castelli held a job in the textile business as he made a place for himself among New York City’s finest artists and built a large collection of modern and contemporary art. Instead of attempting to represent well-known, successful artists such as the Abstract Expressionists who had been holding court in the New York art scene, Castelli sought to develop talent from its nascency and to discover artists who had yet to become known in the art world. Over the years, Castelli amassed a large network of mentors—among them Museum of Modern Art founding director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., art critic Clement Greenberg, and art historians Leo Steinberg and Robert Rosenblum.

Castelli opened his gallery in 1957 on the fourth floor of his home on East 77th Street in New York City. His early representation of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg a year later gave his gallery a strong foundation on which to build. His promotion of their work was particularly influential because it spurred the Pop art movement in the United States just as American Expressionism began to wane in influence. By beginning to represent Frank Stella in 1960, Castelli also began to promote and direct the emergence of Minimalism. Castelli’s international reputation received a significant boost when, in 1964, Rauschenberg became the first American artist to win the grand prize at the Venice Biennale. The Leo Castelli Gallery soon became the place in Manhattan to see the newest and best art.

As his gallery expanded, the space became a breeding ground for Pop art, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and Neo-Expressionism. Besides giving Johns, Stella, and Roy Lichtenstein their first solo exhibitions, Castelli soon brought attention to Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Cy Twombly, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, and Joseph Kosuth, as well. Castelli set himself apart as one of the first American dealers to establish a monthly stipend system with his artists so they could focus on their art.

Castelli introduced American art into European art channels. Because of his cultured European upbringing and his age (he did not open his gallery until he was nearly 50 years old), the established art dealer was able to form valuable ties with curators and collectors abroad, including with his former wife, who had remarried (Michael Sonnabend) and opened the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris in 1962. Those relationships proved influential for his artists, whose work began to appear in prestigious European art galleries. Castelli skillfully paved the way for American art of the 1960s and ’70s to gain an international audience.

In 1971 Castelli moved the location of his gallery to the downtown Manhattan neighbourhood of Soho, to a building also occupied by the New York branch of the Sonnabend Gallery. Though his business declined, and he lost artists to other, younger dealers, Castelli ran his gallery until he died. In 1999 the Leo Castelli Gallery moved back uptown, down the block from its original location, and it was operated into the 21st century by his widow. In 2007 the full collection of the gallery’s records through 1999 were donated to the Archives of American Art in Washington, D.C.