What you reading YG? : Leo & His Circle
Before there was Deitch, Gagosian, Shafrazi or Mary Boone…. there was Leo Castelli!
I just got a copy of Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli in the mail yesterday. Castelli is the most influential art dealer of the 20th Century & now I’m about to delve into his story written by Annie Cohen-Solal. The man didn’t open his 1st gallery until his was 50. Now what better example to illustrate that it is never too late to get out your dreams. -!YG
Synopsis
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 fictionâ€â€”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 “heroesâ€: 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.
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