The personal collection of Ileana Sonnabend, a groundbreaking art dealer who championed generations of rising artists in the US and Europe from the late 1950s until her death in 2007 at age 92, now has a dedicated, long-term home in Mantua, Italy. On 29 November, Sonnabend Collection Mantova (Mantua) opens to the public in the renovated Palazzo della Ragione, a prominent 13th-century building in the city centre that has previously served as a town hall, a market, a courthouse and an event space.
The new art museum is a partnership between the Sonnabend Collection Foundation, the municipality of Mantua and Marsilio Arte, which will handle management of the space alongside the city. Nearly 100 works by artists whom Sonnabend showed and collected early in their careers—including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Merz, Gilbert & George, Donald Judd, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Anselm Kiefer and Jeff Koons—will be exhibited in 11 contemporary galleries designed by Federico Fedel within the palazzo’s grand hall. The venue also includes a temporary exhibition gallery, screening Warhol films for its first show, as well as a bookshop and an educational department.
Andy Warhol’s Ileana Sonnabend, a 1973 portrait of the art dealer and collector © Andy Warhol Foundation; courtesy Sonnabend Collection
“I always saw the collection as a kind of biography and portrait of Ileana,” says Antonio Homem, the former director of the Sonnabend Gallery in New York. He started working in the dealer’s original Paris gallery in 1968 and was adopted by Sonnabend and her second husband, Michael, in the late 1980s. After the dealer’s death, Homem, together with the late Nina Sundell, Ileana’s daughter with her first husband, Leo Castelli, and Ileana’s granddaughter Margaret Sundell, selected a core group of works “that we felt maintained the narrative of the collection”, Homem says.
While portions of the collection were on long-term loan at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples from 2005 to 2012, and then at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, from 2013 to earlier this year, the entire group of works has not been exhibited together until now.
Another pioneering female collector
Mario Codognato, the former chief curator of the Naples museum and lifelong friend to the Sonnabend family, knew of their desire to find a real home for the collection as well as interest within the Mantua municipality in transforming the use of Palazzo della Ragione into something significant and permanent. Codognato played matchmaker and is now serving as the director of the Sonnabend Collection Mantua.
Jeff Koons’s Wild Boy and Puppy (1988) © Jeff Koons © Sonnabend Collection
“The idea of having the Sonnabend Collection in a space specially designed for it in the Palazzo della Ragione, next door to the Ducal Palace and its Mantegna room and not far from the Palazzo Te and its Giulio Romano frescoes, was too wonderful to resist,” Homem says.
Codognato compares Sonnabend to the Renaissance collector Isabella d’Este, the wife of Mantua’s ruler. “To be a woman and a collector of the art of her time was extremely rare,” he points out. “In that sense, there is a connection with Ileana’s extraordinary eye and that she was able to see first the greatest artists of her time.”
While Mantua is renowned for its medieval and Renaissance buildings, having one of the most important art collections of the second half of the 20th century puts the city on the international contemporary art map. Codognato also emphasises the collection’s importance at a more local level.
“In Italy, we still lack important public collections of that period, especially American art,” he says. “This gives the opportunity to art students from all over the country to come to see the works of very relevant artists.”
- Sonnabend Collection Mantua opens on 29 November
