George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann
A Legendary Dealer’s Eagle Eye
‘Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New’ at MoMA
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times
‘Ambassador for the New’: A look at a new exhibition at MoMA that highlights the career of the gallery owner and art collector Ileana Sonnabend.
If you think that all art exhibitions result from the natural meeting of laudable subjects and curatorial passion, consider “Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New,” which opens on Saturday at the Museum of Modern Art. Although the subject is a worthy one — Sonnabend was among the most foresighted art dealers of the late 20th century — the show is a byproduct of legal hassles and diplomatic campaigns surrounding her billion-dollar estate, which may be one reason it feels, as a tribute, cool and impersonal, a portrait-in-art that is only a sketch.
The art is certainly impressive, a constellation of icons, with Sonnabend’s eye and energy the gravitational force. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Romania in 1914, she married a future art dealer, Leo Castelli, born Leo Krausz, in 1932. During World War II, they and their young daughter, Nina, fled Europe for New York, where Castelli opened a gallery.
Artwise, they made a good pair. Although very different in demeanor and temperament — Castelli was debonair and talkative, Sonnabend stolid and shy — they shared an appetite for the untried and the difficult, with Sonnabend, in the long run, having the more adventurous eye. Together, in 1957 they made a famous exploratory trip to Robert Rauschenberg’s studio, where they met Jasper Johns. Sonnabend bought a Johns painting on the spot and became Rauschenberg’s avid and lasting advocate.
After she and Castelli divorced in 1959, Sonnabend remarried, moved to Paris and opened a gallery of her own. She introduced American artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Rauschenberg to Europe, helping, long-distance, to position New York as the new art capital. When she moved back to Manhattan in 1968 and set up business in SoHo, she pulled traffic in the other direction, drawing avant-garde European art from across the Atlantic. She sustained this cosmopolitan mix for five decades, and stayed interested in new art until her death at 92 in 2007. The MoMA show, organized by Ann Temkin, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, and Claire Lehmann, a curatorial assistant, is a sampler of some 40 objects covering that span, all owned by Sonnabend at one time. Rauschenberg’s monumental 1959 assemblage or “combine” titled “Canyon” has pride of place just inside the gallery entrance, and for good reason. It was Sonnabend’s favorite among the thousands of objects she acquired. It was a much-reported MoMA acquisition in 2012. And it’s still a startler.
Its central element, a taxidermied bald eagle, spread-winged and with a trussed pillow dangling from its claws, conjoins an American emblem with a reference to the Greek myth in which Zeus, in the form of a bird, abducts a boy he lusts after. A collaged photograph of the artist’s young son and the combine’s general air of chaotic dereliction add an intensely subversive spin to the notion of “American” art.
The chaotic look of the piece aroused indignation among some of its initial viewers, which was to Sonnabend always a sign of success. She hit that jackpot repeatedly. Europeans grumbled over Jasper Johns’s work, which was her debut presentation in Paris, and over Andy Warhol’s two years later. A piece by Mr. Johns, “Device,” from that first show, is in the MoMA show. So is one of Warhol’s spectacular “Death and Disaster” pictures, with repeated images of a suicide shuddering across the canvas. (Although shipped, this painting didn’t end up in Warhol’s Paris show because it was too big to fit in the gallery.)
She brought more Pop from New York — James Rosenquist, Tom Wesselmann — but by the mid- to late-1960s her interests had moved on to American Minimalism, evident here in a majestic Robert Morris sculpture in draped industrial felt. At the same time, she was captivated by a European near-equivalent, Arte Povera, distinguished by a grounding in radical politics and by a poetic use of materials, as in an untitled Giovanni Anselmo sculpture made from carved granite and fresh lettuce.
She exhibited and collected photography at a time when many people didn’t accept the medium as art. And she challenged those who did by promoting hard-to-love work, like the mid-1960s “portraits” of German industrial architecture taken by Bernd and Hilla Becher. She gave fledgling media like video and performance an early berth.
It’s safe to say that Vito Acconci’s notorious 1972 performance, “Seedbed,” for which the artist masturbated, invisibly but audibly, for hours, under a gallery floor, would not have been welcome at many other SoHo spaces, including, one suspects, the Castelli Gallery. When Sonnabend found an artist interesting, she let him (her roster was almost entirely male) do what he wanted, no questions asked.
Her final commitment to something like a movement came in the 1980s when she took on young American artists like Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach, who cribbed from Pop, Minimalism and Conceptualism and who, in ways that make even more sense now, were gripped by a love-hate infatuation with the market. Classic pieces by all three are here.
When I say classic, I mean typical pieces, but I also mean widely seen and often reproduced. Given the thousands of objects that passed through Sonnabend’s hands over five decades, and the rich store of them that became her collection, the objects chosen for the MoMA exhibition are surprisingly unsurprising. With few exceptions — a 1962 Jim Dine “tool” painting, a 1972 Jannis Kounellis text piece — they’re familiar, and in the case of “Canyon,” a textbook staple.
“Canyon” plays a major role here. The show revolves around it in a very basic way. Because it incorporates the remains of a bald eagle, an endangered species, the work could not be sold. When Sonnabend died and her collection was appraised for tax purposes, her heirs — her daughter, Nina Sundell, and her adopted son, Antonio Homem — valued the unmarketable “Canyon” at zero; the Internal Revenue Service, however, estimated that it was worth $65 million and was prepared to tax the estate accordingly.
A deal was struck. If the piece was donated to a museum, the estate tax on it would be dropped. Both the Met and MoMA badly wanted it, and Sonnabend’s heirs made conditions for a gift.
The receiving institution would be required to mount an exhibition in Sonnabend’s honor and inscribe her name in the museum’s list of founding donors. In the end, Ms. Sundell and Mr. Homem deemed MoMA, which owns five Rauschenberg combines, the more appropriate setting.
Ms. Sonnabend’s name is now dutifully listed among the founders in the museum’s lobby.
Dutiful is also how the tribute exhibition feels, and cautious. MoMA is clearly concerned about perceptions of impropriety, the taint of commerce. Sonnabend Gallery is still in business; what remains of the collection (portions have already been sold) could go on the block at any time. Apparently to avoid the impression that the MoMA exhibition might serve as a sales show, the curators have surrounded “Canyon” mostly with work already in museum collections, including its own.
Such caution is wise, but in this instance it also prevents a subject from getting its full due. Sonnabend’s is an important story, not only because of the range of art she embraced, but because she lived in an era when few women were doing what she did.
MoMA presents her monumentally as a tastemaker and canon-shaper, but leaves out all the constructive matter, the human complications, a sense of misses along with hits: in short, context of a kind revealed in letters, informal photographs and contemporary documents. Such material is essential to any truly historical — which inevitably means personal — show. Sonnabend, quiet but deep and prescient, deserves that kind of accounting.
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