She was born in Bucharest in 1914, the daughter of an industrialist. At eight years old, she asked her nanny to take her to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and stayed there the entire day. Destiny, at times, announces itself early.
When she became engaged to Leo Castelli, instead of asking for a ring she asked for a watercolor by Henri Matisse. It was not a romantic gesture. It was a statement of method.
At the outbreak of the war, they fled Europe. In 1941 they were in New York: she studied psychology at Columbia University, he economic history. They learned to read a world that was about to change. In 1957, when Leo opened his gallery, it was Ileana — not him — who was the true discoverer of Andy Warhol, and a key supporter of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Yet she remained in the background. Silent. Attentive.
As fragile in her sentimental life as she was charismatic in business, Ileana concealed her private world behind a single phrase: “My life is not important.” Tired of Leo’s affairs, she left him. She married Michael Sonnabend, a scholar of Dante. With him she returned to Europe — first Rome, then Paris — and in 1962 opened the Galerie Sonnabend at 37 Quai des Grands Augustins. It became the first true European platform for American Pop Art, but also a gateway for young Italian artists such as Mario Schifano and Michelangelo Pistoletto, to whom she dedicated some of their earliest international exhibitions.
Her gaze never stopped moving. In the 1960s and 1970s she brought Italian Arte Povera to New York for the first time, supporting Giovanni Anselmo, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, and Gilberto Zorio. In the 1980s she discovered Jeff Koons and elevated him with the famous Neo-Geo exhibition. She was always ahead, always elsewhere from where the market was looking.
Today her collection — 94 works, eleven rooms — is housed in the Palazzo della Ragione in Mantua. The curatorial project aims to restore not only the artworks, but the way Ileana lived with them and arranged them in her spaces. There is something precise in this geographical choice: it is not merely suggestive to observe that Ileana Sonnabend’s collecting sensibility creates an ideal link with Isabella d’Este, ruler of the Marquisate of Mantua and considered one of the greatest patrons of the arts of her time. Two women, five centuries apart, the same gesture: deciding what deserves to exist.
Ileana Sonnabend died in 2007 in Manhattan, aged 92, without leaving an autobiography. She had said her life was not important. She was wrong.