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.
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