Leo Castelli
| Leo Castelli | |
|---|---|
Leo Castelli seated with artist Jasper Johns standing behind, c. 1970s
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| Born |
Leo Krausz September 4, 1907 Trieste, Austrian Littoral, Austria-Hungary |
| Died | August 21, 1999 (aged 91) New York City, United States |
| Nationality | Italian, American |
Leo Castelli (born Leo Krausz; September 4, 1907 – August 21, 1999) was an Italian-American art dealer. 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.
Leo Castelli was born Leo Krausz, in Trieste, Austria-Hungary, 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 based 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 managed to gain 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.
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