The private assortment of Ileana Sonnabend, a groundbreaking artwork vendor who championed generations of rising artists within the US and Europe from the late Nineteen Fifties till her demise in 2007 at age 92, now has a devoted, long-term residence in Mantua, Italy. On 29 November, Sonnabend Assortment Mantova (Mantua) opens to the general public within the renovated Palazzo della Ragione, a distinguished Thirteenth-century constructing within the metropolis centre that has beforehand served as a city corridor, a market, a courthouse and an occasion house.
The brand new artwork museum is a partnership between the Sonnabend Assortment Basis, the municipality of Mantua and Marsilio Arte, which can deal with administration of the house alongside the town. Practically 100 works by artists whom Sonnabend confirmed and picked up early of their careers—together with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Merz, Gilbert & George, Donald Judd, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Anselm Kiefer and Jeff Koons—might be exhibited in 11 modern galleries designed by Federico Fedel inside the palazzo’s grand corridor. The venue additionally features a momentary exhibition gallery, screening Warhol movies for its first present, in addition to a bookshop and an academic division.
Andy Warhol’s Ileana Sonnabend, a 1973 portrait of the artwork vendor and collector © Andy Warhol Basis; courtesy Sonnabend Assortment
“I at all times noticed the gathering as a type of biography and portrait of Ileana,” says Antonio Homem, the previous director of the Sonnabend Gallery in New York. He began working within the vendor’s unique Paris gallery in 1968 and was adopted by Sonnabend and her second husband, Michael, within the late Eighties. After the vendor’s demise, Homem, along with the late Nina Sundell, Ileana’s daughter together with her first husband, Leo Castelli, and Ileana’s granddaughter Margaret Sundell, chosen a core group of works “that we felt maintained the narrative of the gathering”, Homem says.
Whereas parts of the gathering had been on long-term mortgage on the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples from 2005 to 2012, after which at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, from 2013 to earlier this 12 months, the whole group of works has not been exhibited collectively till now.
One other pioneering feminine collector
Mario Codognato, the previous chief curator of the Naples museum and lifelong buddy to the Sonnabend household, knew of their need to discover a actual residence for the gathering in addition to curiosity inside the Mantua municipality in remodeling using Palazzo della Ragione into one thing vital and everlasting. Codognato performed matchmaker and is now serving because the director of the Sonnabend Assortment Mantua.
Jeff Koons’s Wild Boy and Pet (1988) © Jeff Koons © Sonnabend Assortment
“The thought of getting the Sonnabend Assortment in an area specifically designed for it within the Palazzo della Ragione, subsequent door to the Ducal Palace and its Mantegna room and never removed from the Palazzo Te and its Giulio Romano frescoes, was too fantastic to withstand,” Homem says.
Codognato compares Sonnabend to the Renaissance collector Isabella d’Este, the spouse of Mantua’s ruler. “To be a lady and a collector of the artwork of her time was extraordinarily uncommon,” he factors out. “In that sense, there’s a reference to Ileana’s extraordinary eye and that she was in a position to see first the best artists of her time.”
Whereas Mantua is famend for its medieval and Renaissance buildings, having probably the most essential artwork collections of the second half of the Twentieth century places the town on the worldwide modern artwork map. Codognato additionally emphasises the gathering’s significance at a extra native stage.
“In Italy, we nonetheless lack essential public collections of that interval, particularly American artwork,” he says. “This offers the chance to artwork college students from everywhere in the nation to come back to see the works of very related artists.”
Sonnabend Assortment Mantua opens on 29 November
