Leo & His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli
Category: Biography
Author: Annie Cohen-Solai
Copyright/published Year: 2010 by Knopf
ISBN: 1400044278
Binding: Hardcover
Leo Castelli reigned for decades as America's most influential
art dealer. Now Annie Cohen-Solal, author of the hugely acclaimed
Sartre: A Life ("an intimate portrait of the man that
possesses all the detail and resonance of fiction"-Michiko
Kakutani,The New York Times), recounts his incalculably
influential and astonishing life in Leo and His
Circle.
After emigrating to New York in 1941, Castelli would not open
a gallery for sixteen years, when he had reached the age of
fifty. But as the first to exhibit the then-unknown Jasper Johns,
Castelli emerged as a tastemaker overnight and fast came to
champion a virtual Who's Who of twentieth-century masters:
Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Twombly, to name a few.
The secret of Leo's success? Personal devotion to the artists,
his "heroes": by putting young talents on stipend and seeking
placement in the ideal collection rather than with the top
bidder, he transformed the way business was done, multiplying the
capital, both cultural and financial, of those he represented.
His enterprise, which by 1980 had expanded to an impressive
network of satellite galleries in Europe and three locations in
New York, thus became the unrivaled commercial institution in
American art, producing a generation of acolytes, among them Mary
Boone, Jeffrey Deitch, Larry Gagosian, and Tony Shafrazi.
Leo and His Circle brilliantly narrates the course of
one man's power and influence. But Castelli had another secret,
too: his life as an Italian Jew. Annie Cohen-Solal traces a
family whose fortunes rose and fell for centuries before the
Castellis fled European fascism. Never hidden but also never
discussed, this experience would form the core of a guarded but
magnetic character possessed of unfailing old-world charm and a
refusal to look backward-traits that ensured Castelli's visionary
precedence in every major new movement from Pop to Conceptual and
by which he fostered the worldwide enthusiasm for American
contemporary art that is his greatest legacy.
Drawing on her friendship with the subject, as well as an
uncanny knack for archival excavation, Annie Cohen-Solal gives us
in full the elegant, shrewd, irresistible, and enigmatic figure
at the very center of postwar American art, bringing an utterly
new understanding of its evolution.
Condition Information
This book is 'remaindered' and may have marks on the cover and/or bottom of pages.
Condition Description
This is a "Remaindered Book" and has a red pen mark on the page bottoms. Otherwise like new.
