Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli by Annie Cohen-Solal (review)

Leo Castelli was the first dealer in modern art to become a celebrity. At the same time, he created an era of celebrity artists—great artists who epitomized “the artist” as Leo epitomized “the art dealer.” He had a prognosticator’s eye for evolution at the onset of cultural shifts and thought of himself as a historical catalyst—not a mover himself but a means for artists to make art history by redefining what art was supposed to look like. In his own way, then, Castelli was like the Parisian dealers Ambroise Vollard, who promoted Cézanne in the 1890s, and Daniel Kahnweiller, who took on the management of Picasso and Braque at the onset of Cubism.

Annie Cohen-Solal is a superb writer, her virtuosity rolling through history like a hot summer’s tumbleweed. I know of no biography the likes of this one: Cohen-Solal spends several thousand words providing background before catching up with her subject. Without the background, Castelli’s personal history would be like a jigsaw puzzle missing most of its pieces. Cohen-Solal locates the pieces and skillfully assembles them. We learn that Leo, born in Trieste in 1907 as Leo Krausz, was the son of a prominent Hungarian banker. At the time, Trieste was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire but was annexed to Italy after World War I. When Italian fascism had gained ground, a few years later, Hungarians in Trieste were required to adopt Italian surnames: Krausz became Castelli, his mother’s maiden name, and Leo learned firsthand about the frightening malleability of personal identity and blood-linked reality. He wound his way through life speaking four languages. His Jewishness was indelible, like a full-body tattoo, and his father’s profession as a Jewish banker added virulence to mark his family for extermination. His parents died tragically in Budapest, and Leo made his way to Paris. Before World War II, Castelli was a minor actor in the Paris art trade, associated with Dada and Surrealism. He arrived in New York in 1941 at the age of thirty-four, and with his multiple identities was in and out of many activities before becoming a full-fledged art dealer in 1959, when he was fifty-two. Cohen-Solal describes him as (in the 1940s and 1950s) a dilettante, a European dandy with no occupation, an art collector with no money, and a husband with many girlfriends. Yet he must have had a programmed magnet in his head, for he was drawn inward from the periphery of the art world to engage an emerging transition just when Pop Art and Minimalism were shifting attention away from Abstract Expressionism. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and a dozen others who came to prominence in the 1960s owe their start to the uncanny dealer they all called Leo.