Ileana Sonnabend - Life and Work

Life and Work

Sonnabend was born Ileana Schapira in Bucharest to a Romanian Jewish father, Mihail Schapira, and his Viennese wife, Marianne Strate-Felber.

Her father, Mihail Schapira, was a successful businessman and financial advisor to King Carol II of Romania. Sonnabend was, for many years, married to Leo Castelli whom she met in Bucharest in 1932 and married soon after. The couple had a daughter, Nina Sundell. She and her husband left Europe during the 1940s and settled in New York City. During the 1940s her mother Marianne Schapira divorced her father and met and married the Russian born American painter John D. Graham (who was a mentor figure to artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky). Graham also became a mentor to Ileana and Leo by introducing them to his artist friends in the New York art world. In 1950, the couple curated a show of young American and European painters which included both Jean Dubuffet and Mark Rothko. After divorcing Castelli (with whom she remained lifelong friends) in 1959 she married Polish-born Michelangelo scholar Michael Sonnabend whom she had met during the 1940s.

Two years later, they opened Galerie Ileana Sonnabend on Quai des Grands Augustins in Paris, where she introduced art by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and others, and helped establish a European market for their work. In 1965 they acquired an additional apartment on Calle del Dose in Venice. In 1968, the couple closed the Paris showroom and moved back to New York. At one time the couple thought that Michael Sonnabend would run the New York gallery while Ileana oversaw their Paris establishment, but he soon found that the art business did not suit him.

In 1971, she opened the Sonnabend Gallery, in a building at 420 W. Broadway in Soho. The industrial chic restoration instantly became the center of the emerging SoHo art scene. She inaugurated her gallery with a performance by Gilbert & George. She exhibited American artists like Jeff Koons and Vito Acconci, and introduced European artists like Christo, Georg Baselitz, and Jannis Kounellis, to U.S. audiences. When the performance artist Vito Acconci announced that his Seedbed piece called for him to masturbate in her gallery for two weeks in 1972, Sonnabend simply replied, "You do what you have to do."

In 2000, after she had closed her other galleries, Sonnabend and her adopted son Antonio Homem moved the SoHo gallery to West 22nd Street in the Chelsea district.