Among the must-see shows of the Venetian art season, a selection of thirty works from the prestigious body of work assembled by Ileana Sonnabend (1914‐2007) is on view at the Museum of Modern Art of Ca’ Pesaro, whose permanent collections’ arrangement has been recently re-designed and has already won great acclaim. The collection, offered as a long-term loan to the FondazioneMusei Civici di Venezia (The Foundation of the Museums of the City of Venice), includes works by some of the major artists discovered by Ileana Sonnabend and promoted with memorable exhibitions in her galleries, providing space for the new languages of contemporary movements: from Pop art to Minimalism, from Conceptual art to Arte Povera.

A portrait by legendary art collector and dealer Ileana Sonnabend by Andy Warhol

Known for her sharp vision and sure taste, Ileana Sonnabend née Ileana Schapira was born to one of Romania’s wealthiest families, and was among the world’s most powerful dealers in the 1960s and 1970s, as her first husband, Leo Castelli, was a mythical figure in New York’s art scene. “Both in her collecting and in business, Ileana followed her interest and her enthusiasms,” said Antonio Homem, whom Ileana Sonnabend adopted in the 1980s with his second husband Michael Sonnabend, when he was already an adult and working in her gallery. “The Sonnabend collection is a kind of self-portrait, a diary of her life.”

Her interest in art started in a peculiar way. In an interview contained in the archives of the MoMA, Ileana Sonnabend enthusiastically recalls her encounter with modern art on the occasion of her engagement with her first husband Leo Castelli that she married in 1932: “I want to tell you that traditionally a man buys a woman a ring, but I didn't want that, so we went to a gallery, the first gallery I visited in Vienna also, and they had a show of watercolours, and so I chose a Matisse watercolour instead of a ring. So that was really my entrance to modern art, so to speak. After I got married, my involvement with art began to grow. I became more curious, of course, particularly about Surrealists, about Salvador Dalí and André Breton and all of that. It was there. But I didn't participate very much, you know. Leo opened his gallery [In 1935 they moved to Paris and Leo Castelli opened an art gallery there in association with interior designer René Drouin] and he had his friends and I had my baby [Nina Sundell, the couple’s daughter who is in charge of Ileana Sonnabend’s estate with Antonio Homem].”

The young couple emigrated to New York in 1941 on the dawn of the outbreak of World War II. But soon Leo Castelli joined the US army, he became a sergeant with an intelligence unit and an interpreter with the Allied Control Commission in Romania, and Ileana started to study at Columbia University, where she met Michael Sonnabend, a Dantephile and filmmaker whom she was to marry in 1959. In 1957, after having initiated a collection that included works by Piet Mondrian and Jackson Pollock among the others, they opened their first art gallery in New York, in their own living room.

The first exhibition included Robert Delaunay, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock. The Castellis owned most of the works. Together they discovered and exhibited the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg- an artist the couple has always been very affectionate to-, and began showing new art, beginning with Neo-dada and Pop Art (Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and James Rosenquist). Two years later, in 1959, their "divorce made in heaven" sparked Ileana's independent career but, and even though they were no longer husband and wife, Ileana and Leo were devoted to each other until the end of Leo's long life in 1999 at 91, and often cooperated.

Sonnabend instructs Castelli to send her two works by Andy Warhol, Car crashes on white, so that she can sell them. Ileana Sonnabend telegram to Leo Castelli, 1965 Apr. 15. Leo Castelli Gallery records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Late in 1962 after moving to Paris, Ileana and her second husband Michael Sonnabend, that she married a few years before, opened the Galerie Sonnabend in Paris, where they exhibited the work of American artists but also the work of several young Italians, beginning with Mario Schifano (1963) and Michelangelo Pistoletto (1964). In 1970 Ileana Sonnabend opened a new gallery in New York, moving in 1971 to the SoHo district, together with the Castelli Gallery, thus spurring a migration of the contemporary art scene in New York. She opened her SoHo gallery with a now-celebrated performance by Gilbert&George that anticipated many talked about shows and extreme performances. One of the most scandalous events took place when Vito Acconci was allowed to masturbate under the floorboards while the public heard his groans via a loudspeaker. The performance by Gilbert&George attracted a huge number of visitors. “When 420 opened, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I remember a big crowd, champagne for everyone. It became the first department store of art: an amazing event! G&G were unbelievable! I had no idea who they were, and suddenly SoHo became where everything was, where you lived; the art world just moved there.” Billy Sullivan recalls the day of the opening of the gallery and its earth-shaking effects on the entire SoHo area. The performance was groundbreaking: on their pedestal, the then unknown British duo created a singing sculpture miming robotic gestures in time to Underneath the Arches. "They did that for five hours straight," Ileana Sonnabend often recounted. "People had cautioned us not to inaugurate our space with European artists, they said it was crazy, and that we had to show an American since Americans were not interested in foreigners. To my mind, that was the perfect reason to start with Gilbert&George, bucking the tide, as I had done in Paris in 1963, as people had warned me against opening my gallery with Jasper Johns [It was one of the very first European exhibitions of Jasper Johns's work].” Another much talked about event was the Sonnabend 1991 show of Jeff Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series of paintings and sculptures that showed the artist engaged in sexual acts with his wife, Ilona Staller.

Gilbert&George at Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery in 1969

Ileana Sonnabend, Robert Rauschenberg, and Michael Sonnabend at Galerie Sonnabend in Paris, ca. 1963. Courtesy Sonnabend Gallery, New York

Gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend and artist Jeff Koons pose behind a sculpture by Koons during preparation for Koon's Made in Heaven exhibition at the Sonnabend Gallery. Photography:Bob Adelman© Bob Adelman/Corbis

As she continued, through her gallery and collecting, to register new art as it emerged on both the European and the New York scene--Minimalism, Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, Transavanguardia, Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Geo — she acquired a reputation for her connoisseurship, her appetite for ‘the new’ and for the international character of her gallery. Sonnabend was known to be quiet and discreet in public. "It was Sonnabend Gallery, and the artists, that Ileana promoted. Not herself," veteran New York art dealer Paula Cooper said in an interview in 2007, after Ileana Sonnabend passed away.

Daniel Buren, Ileana Sonnabend, Leo Castelli, Paul Maenz 1976 Photography: Paolo Mussat Sartor © Paolo Mussat Sartor 2013

What is currently on view at Ca’ Pesaro is a prism through which read the complex personality of Ileana Sonnabend and her devotion to art, her far-sighted vision and intuition. It is also a part of what remains of a massive collection that after the passing away of Ileana Sonnabend has been either donated or auctioned to cover the estate taxes that amounted to more than half the value of the assets, experts said. In 2008, the heirs of the legendary dealer parted with about $600 million worth of paintings and sculptures in two transactions. Although the family of Sonnabend never revealed who acquired the pieces, it is said that a group of artworks, all Andy Warhols, was sold to the Gagosian Gallery for $200 million. Among the Warhols sold by Sonnabend’s heirs are Four Marilyns, from 1962; two paintings of Elizabeth Taylor; and three small paintings from the artist’s Death and Disaster series. Apart from the Gagosian Gallery, several very wealthy collectors were involved, among them François Pinault, the French luxury goods magnate and owner of Christie’s; Sammy Ofer, the Israeli shipping magnate; and Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican telecommunications billionaire, whom Forbes listed in 2007 as the world’s third-wealthiest man.

After this first colossal private sale, Antonio Homem said he and Nina Sundell hoped to hang on to as much of Sonnabend’s collection as they can. “Although we have lost many great things, our intention has always been to keep the character of the Sonnabend collection intact,” he said. “Basically,” he added with satisfaction, “the idiosyncrasies are still there.” In addition to selling art Ileana Sonnabend enjoyed holding on to her favorites, and over the years she amassed hundreds of outstanding examples of 20th-century furniture. Much of it travels on loan to museums around the world, but a good deal has also been in storage for decades.

In 2012 one of the best-known Combines by Robert Rauschenberg Canyon was donated to the MoMa after a long dispute. Under U.S. law, the piece could not be sold since it contains a stuffed bald eagle, a violation of the country’s 1940 Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act as well as the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The law provides criminal penalties for persons who “take, possess, sell, purchase, barter, offer to sell, purchase or barter, transport, export or import, at any time or any manner, any bald eagle . . . alive or dead, or any part, nest, or egg thereof,” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website. Sonnabend acquired Canyon in 1959 from a show at the gallery of her former husband, Leo Castelli. But it wasn’t until some 20 years later that Sonna­bend learned the stuffed eagle would be problematic. At first, Canyon was often loaned to major museum venues in the United States and Europe. It was included in the Venice Biennale in 1964, the year that Rauschenberg won the grand prize for a foreign artist. However, in 1981, as the work returned to the United States following an exhibition tour in Europe, Fish and Wildlife agents became aware “of the peculiar situation involving a protected bird carcass that was affixed to a great American masterwork.” Agents notified the Sonnabend Gallery that restrictions written into the bald-eagle and migratory-bird acts applied to the artwork. In the following years, the gallery encountered resistance from administrators, museums, and Ileana Sonnabedn was even warned that she could not own the piece. Rauschenberg himself came to the rescue, but the poece could not travel anymore outside the US and just last year it found a proper new home.

View of the installation at Ca’ Pesaro, with works by Andy Warhol in the front

View of the installation at Ca’ Pesaro, with a work by Anselm Kiefer – “Baum mit Palette” (1978) in the front and Roy Lichtenstein’s “Wall Explosion II” (1965) in the back.

View of the installation at Ca’ Pesaro, with a work by Rona Pondick "Dog"

Robert Rauschenberg, “Canyon,” (1959) © 2012 Museum of Modern Art. Photo by John Wronn

Roy Lichtenstein, “Eddie Diptych,” (1962), one of the works sold by the heirs of Ileana Sonnabend and auctioned at Christie’s in 2008