Leo Castelli

It wasn't until 1957, when he was almost 50, that Castelli opened his first gallery on New York's Upper East Side. But by 1958 he'd already shown Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and was playing a key role in fostering new directions in American art. Significantly, he gave his artists monthly stipends so that they would never have to worry about affording paints, or potatoes, again. The year after that saw the work of Cy Twombly and Frank Stella in the gallery, while the early '60s brought Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol and the blooming of pop art.

This was Castelli's greatest moment. He had identified the artists, Americans whom he believed had as much validity as any Europeans. The economy was booming and JFK had set the tone of the '60s by actively promoting American culture at home and abroad. America was about to assert itself in the last arena in which Europe could still feel some sort of superiority. The East Coast Ivy League Wall Street elite got into the swing of things and U.S. artists no longer had to contemplate slow starvation. Castelli worked hard and successfully to give the new American art respectability at home and a presence in Europe, both radical notions at the time. Thirty years earlier, President Hoover had replied to a letter from the president of France inviting American participation in the Salon d'Autome, blithely stating that there were no artists in the United States. Now, finally, living American artists were being supported by museums, corporations and businessmen on two continents. New York became the new center of the international art world.

True to form, Castelli did not merely defend his position as the purveyor of pop, but continued to follow the new. He championed minimalism, conceptualism, neo-expressionism and more. Among his artists were Rosenquist, Judd, Oldenburg, Kosuth, Nauman, Flavin, Salle and Schnabel. He followed his own instincts. This was brought forcefully home to me during a conversation in which I, a young and green critic, asked what he thought of art criticism. Castelli replied with debonair affability that he always marveled at the descriptive talents of good critics. But, I insisted, had he ever, even once, actually been influenced by what a critic had to say? Giving me an icy stare that told me I'd made, and was forcing him to make, an ungentlemanly breach, he replied with a single word, "No." It was that resounding "no" that convinced me to open my own gallery.

Following his divorce from Ileana in 1959, Castelli married Antoinette Fraissex du Bost, who founded Castelli Graphics. They had a son, Jean Christophe. After the death of "Toiny" in 1987, Castelli married for a third time, to the young Italian art critic Barbara Bertozzi, with whom he opened a new gallery.

While he did not single-handedly transform the American art world, Leo Castelli did more than any other individual to see to it that American art was appreciated both here and abroad. It seems perhaps improbable that this should have been accomplished by a suave, reticent European ladies' man who often downplayed his own importance. But perhaps it was a job that could only be pulled off by a literary, mercantile, polyglot, Jewish, Italian, Austro-Hungarian, banking, lawyering, art-dealing veteran of the OSS.

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