Works from the collection of Ileana Sonnabend and the estate of Nina Castelli Sundell will come up at Christie’s Post War and Contemporary Art evening sale in New York on May 13 and at the day sale on May 14. The collections include works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Gilbert & George, Jeff Koons, Michelangelo Pistoletto, John Baldessari, Robert Ryman, Anselm Kiefer, Giovanni Anselmo, Pier Paolo Calzolari and Mario Merz.
Nina Castelli Sundell with her parents Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend.
Ileana Sonnabend was one of the most innovative, daring, and stimulating gallerists of 20th-Century art, and her daughter Nina Castelli Sundell was a visionary curator and scholar who worked to introduce contemporary art to audiences throughout the United States. Ileana Sonnabend devoted her life to the discovery, appreciation, and promotion of new talent, often championing minimal, conceptual and performance works that were outside the comfort zone of the majority of her peers. From her gallery in Paris she introduced European connoisseurs to the untested American talents of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jim Dine. A decade later she reversed the process, using her New York gallery to expose Americans to a new generation of European artists. She also brought together a major art collection of her own, one that has never been on the market and that boasts classic examples of Post-War and Contemporary paintings, drawings, and sculptures, as well as major works of Arte Povera.
Nina Castelli Sundell grew up surrounded by some of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. She followed her parents’ passion, and strove to foster that same environment around the world. Sundell introduced contemporary art to audiences throughout the United States at a time when its exhibition was largely restricted to New York. In the years prior to her death in 2014 she was president of the artists’ community Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. The community has been residence to thousands of distinguished cultural figures including Milton Avery, Aaron Copland, Sylvia Plath, Patricia Highsmith, Truman Capote, Philip Guston and Clyfford Still.
UPDATE: The stellar collection assembled by Sonnabend and Sundell gave the Post-War and Contemporary art sale a lively start. All nineteen works from the collection selected for the Evening Sale found buyers, with many reaching hammer prices well above estimate. The group totaled $60.1 million, more than twice the pre-sale estimate.
