Ileana Sonnabend

Ileana Sonnabend (née Schapira, born October 29, 1914, Bucharest, Romania, died October 21, 2007, New York City) was a dealer of 20th-century art. The Sonnabend Gallery opened in Paris in 1962 and was instrumental in making American art of the 1960s known in Europe, with an emphasis on American Pop Art. In 1970, Sonnabend Gallery opened in New York on Madison Avenue and in 1971 relocated to 420 West Broadway in SoHo where it was one of the major protagonists that made SoHo the international art center it remained until the early 1990s. The gallery was instrumental in making European art of the 1970s known in America, with an emphasis on European conceptual art and Arte Povera. It also presented American conceptual and minimal art of the 1970s. In 1986, the so-called “Neo-Geo” show introduced, among others, the artist Jeff Koons. In the late 1990s, the gallery moved to Chelsea and continues to be active after Sonnabend's death. The gallery goes on showing the work of artists who rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s like Robert Morris, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Gilbert & George as well as more recent artists like Jeff Koons, Rona Pondick, Candida Höfer, Elger Esser, and Clifford Ross among others.

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.

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