Leo Castelli

By 1960s: Days of Rage on August 5, 2024

"Leo Castelli (né Krausz; September 4, 1907 – August 21, 1999) was an Italian-American art dealer who originated the contemporary art gallery system. His gallery showcased contemporary art for five decades. Among the movements which Castelli showed were Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Op Art, Color field painting, Hard-edge painting, Lyrical Abstraction, Minimal Art, Conceptual Art, and Neo-expressionism. ... In New York, the Castellis were two of only three non-artist members (the other was dealer Charles Egan) of the Club, an influential coterie founded in 1949 that included Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Franz Kline, and Ad Reinhardt. Castelli's first exercise as a private dealer came through Drouin, in 1947: some hundred canvases by Kandinsky, consigned by his widow, Nina. His first American curatorial effort was the Ninth Street Show of 1951, a seminal event in the emergence of Abstract Expressionis. ... From the early 1960s through the late 70s, Frank Stella, Larry Poons, Lee Bontecou, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Cy Twombly, Ronald Davis, Ed Ruscha, Salvatore Scarpitta, Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth joined the stable of Castelli artists. He gave Johns, Stella and Lichtenstein their first one-man shows. Castelli opened a temporary annex, the Castelli Warehouse, on West 108th Street, with a show organized by Robert Morris, of environmental sculpture by nine artists, including Nauman, Serra, and Eva Hesse. In 1971 Leo Castelli opened a downtown SoHo branch of the Leo Castelli Gallery at 420 West Broadway, in a building bought by the Hague Art Delivery Company and a cooperative of dealers: Castelli took the second floor; his former wife's Sonnabend Gallery took the third floor, and André Emmerich (later replaced by Charles Cowles) took the top floor; while John Weber, (former director of the Dwan Gallery) rented his gallery on the fourth floor. ... Castelli also pioneered a stipend system that was unknown in New York when he opened his gallery. He put his artists on a payroll whether or not their work sold. For this and other reasons, desertions were initially rare among his artists. When Castelli discovered Serra in 1967, for example, he offered him a guarantee of three years of monthly payments even though he did not expect to sell any of the unknown sculptor's lead-plate work in that time. Castelli also was known for spotting new talent and insisting on European exposure for his American artists, leading to Rauschenberg in 1964 becoming the first American to win the Venice Biennale's international grand prize in painting. ..."
Wikipedia
How The Leo Castelli Gallery Changed American Art Forever
NY Times: A Smooth Operator, at the Vanguard of the Gallery World in the 1960s
New Yorker: Leo the Lion By Peter Schjeldahl (2010)
MoMA: Ten from Leo Castelli