Leo Castelli - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Leo Castelli, whose original name was Leo Krausz, was born in Trieste, Italy, the second of three children of Italian and Austro-Hungarian Jewish origin. His father was Ernest Krauss, a Hungarian by birth, who had gone to Trieste as a young man and married wealthy heiress Bianca Castelli, from a family of coffee importers which had long been established there. After World War I, which the family spent in Vienna (where Leo Castelli learned perfect German), they returned to Trieste. The family changed its name to “Krausz-Castelli” and then “Castelli” in the mid-1930s, when Mussolini’s government required names to be Italianized.

After earning a law degree at the University of Milan in 1924, Castelli returned to Trieste, where his father got him a job with an insurance company. In 1932, he went to work for an insurance company in Bucharest, where he married Ileana Schapira one year later. After their marriage, the couple honeymooned in Vienna and bought their first artwork, a Matisse watercolor.

Castelli's father-in-law, Mihai Schapira, helped him to be transferred in 1935 to the Banca d'Italia in Paris. There, Ileana's taste and money helped him start his first gallery at Place Vendôme in Paris, which was named for its co-director, the decorator René Drouin, and situated between the Ritz Hotel and the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli. Specializing in surrealistic art, the gallery opened in July 1939, with a show of modern and antique furniture, including commissioned pieces by Drouin, Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, Leonor Fini (a former girlfriend of Castelli’s from Trieste), Eugene Berman, and other artists in the force field of Surrealism.

Ileana’s connections enabled the couple to flee to America at the start of World War II. Castelli's parents did not escape but died deaths in Budapest, hounded by Hun­gary’s fascist Arrow Cross Party. The couple would remain married for more than 25 years, and were friends and partners even after their divorce, when Ileana married Michael Sonnabend and that couple opened its own gallery. Castelli arrived in the United States in 1941, by way of Marrakesh, Tangier, Algeciras, Vigo and Havana. He took graduate history courses in economic history at Columbia University until volunteering for the Army, serving in the intelligence service in Europe. After the liberation of France, he was sent to Bucharest as an interpreter for the Allied commission that controlled the city. As a result of Castelli's military service, he was given American citizenship. Returning to New York, Castelli took a managerial position with his father-in-law’s clothing factory.

Read more about this topic:  Leo Castelli

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:

    I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.
    Ruth Behar (b. 1956)

    It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, already grown too weary and too noble for life and action, had reached the end of its history, and its last utterances were sounds of music: a few violin notes, full of the sad insight which is ripeness for death.
    Thomas Mann (1875–1955)

    Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.
    Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)