Castelli’s life and influence on modern art

May 29, 2010|Jonathan Lopez, Globe Correspondent

From the mid-1950s until his death in 1999, Leo Castelli, the renowned New York gallery owner who discovered and promoted such artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein, exerted a profound and transformative influence on the aesthetic tastes and commercial practices of the contemporary art world. A beneficiary and instigator of American art’s postwar emergence on the international stage, this Italian-born impresario is generally acknowledged to have been the most important art dealer of the late 20th century.

It is therefore surprising that one can follow Castelli’s story for the first 230 pages of “Leo and His Circle,’’ a mammoth new biography by the French critic and historian Annie Cohen-Solal, without even reaching the point at which the man opens his gallery. But while Cohen-Solal, author of a well-regarded life of existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, lavishes more attention on Castelli’s early, preprofessional period than other writers might, she reaps abundant rewards in the process.

Cohen-Solal expands Castelli’s life story into one of sufficient historical and cultural resonance to interest not just art lovers but a general audience as well, offering a richly detailed account of Castelli’s upbringing as a well-to-do Jewish lad in the Italian city of Trieste; unearthing his family’s multigenerational history as merchants and traders with business connections throughout Europe; and narrating in often mesmerizing prose the tragic rise of fascism, which would result both in Castelli’s hasty relocation to the United States at the outbreak of World War II and in the heartrending death of his parents on the run from the Nazis.

The primary flaw in this ambitious and, in many ways, very impressive book is that the great promise of its first half is not altogether fulfilled in the second. Once Castelli arrives in the United States and embarks on his art-world career, Cohen-Solal follows up only haphazardly on many of the themes developed earlier, particularly the central question of how a European Jewish identity — something Castelli and his family alternately cherished and obscured — may have shaped the dealer’s character, personality, and aspirations.