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The Life of Leo Castelli
Alfred a Knopf
May 2010
On Sale: May 18, 2010
576 pages
ISBN: 1400044278
EAN: 9781400044276
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
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.
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