Leo Castelli Gallery

Leo Castelli
Leo Castelli seated with artist Jasper Johns standing behind, c. 1970s
Born	Leo Krausz (1907-09-04)September 4, 1907 Trieste, Austrian Littoral, Austria-Hungary
Died	August 21, 1999(1999-08-21) (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 cutting edge 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, whose original name was Leo Krausz, was born 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.