Leo and His Circle - The Life of Leo Castelli

Zusatztext 43900091 Informationen zum Autor Annie Cohen-Solal was born in Algeria and received a Ph.D. in French literature from the Sorbonne. She has taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris! at the Universities of Berlin! Jerusalem! Paris XIII! Caen and is currently Visiting Arts Professor at Tisch School of the Arts! New York University! where she teaches seminars on Cultural Policy and on the Globalization of the Visual Arts. She first came to New York in 1989 as the Cultural Counselor to the French Embassy in the United States! after her acclaimed Sartre biography! Sartre: A Life ! had become an international best seller! translated into sixteen languages. Her encounter with Leo Castelli prompted a shift of her interest to the art world. Cohen-Solal was awarded the Prix Bernier of the Académie des Beaux Arts for the French edition of Painting American in 2001 and won the Art Curial Prize for the best contemporary art book for the French edition of Leo Castelli and His Circle in 2010. She lives in New York! Paris and Cortona. Chapter 1 Around the Hall of Merchants My father never talked about the fact that he was Jewish. JEAN-CHRISTOPHE CASTELLI Ebreus perfidus est, ut cantat Ecclesia est inimicus fidei, et ideo presumitur odium abere Christi fidelibus, ergo abetur pro suspecto.  ARCHIVES OF MONTE SAN SAVINO Monte San Savino, 1656. “Those people bristle with ideas, they brim with inventions!” The enthusiastic delegate seemed unable to find words to extoll the ingenuity of the local Jewish merchants. Taking advantage of the city’s geographical location, they imported their goods from the Marques and the Vatican regions, avoiding the prying eyes of the Cortona customs officers, before “racing all over the country to sell them, not just in the Valdichiana, but even further afield, right to the borders of the Papal State!” Monte San Savino was a small city of some two thousand tucked away in the Tuscan hills between Sienna, Arezzo, and Cortona. Since 1550 it had enjoyed feudal privileges granted by the Medicis, rulers of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, to one of the great local families, the Cosci di Monte, in homage to one of their sons who became Pope Julius III. Monte San Savino was thus exempt from the customs duties imposed by the Florentine corporations, operating as a free zone and independent enclave within the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. What would have become of this little rural center, floundering with its local artisans, its few leading families, and its numerous religious orders, but for its Jewish citizens, who skillfully took advantage of the exceptional circumstances to become moneylenders and establish a monopoly in commodities, the only professional prerogatives of Tuscan Jews at the time? Even today, Monte San Savino seems to revolve around its hall of merchants, the Loggia dei Mercanti. Austere and grey, with slender arcades, fluted columns, and Corinthian capitals carved in pietra serena , the hall is solidly lodged between two private houses on the main street, and its elegant, imposing presence surprises the visitor to the city center. Constructed at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Loggia was rented out a hundred years later to Jewish merchants, who set up stalls there. Directly across the Ruga Maestra stands the majesty of Palazzo di Monte, the masterpiece of the great Renaissance architect Sangallo, which was the home to a local boy who would one day become Pope Julius III. Today, he is remembered for his patronage of Palestrina and Michelangelo, for his religious life “perverted by pleasures and indulgences or else for his political life as an inveterate nepotist”—and for the papal bull of August 12, 1553, whereby he decreed the destruction of all the copies of the Talmud. While the covered market looks out over the main street of the ...

Bericht

"Cohen-Solal writes wonderfully about Castelli's gifts of personality [and] delivers the silky story of a classic American immigrant overachiever.... [S]erious, probing... beautiful.... photographs, sprinkled throughout, pop from the page."
-Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"[M]onumental.... gripping portraits.... thrilling.... Her ample monograph is really three complex studies....Cohen-Solal's disclosure of the distinguished Jewish family history of which Castelli himself was only in part aware-when he was not ignoring or suppressing it for purposes of social advancement-is a miracle of scholarship. Her reconstruction of the incinerated Austro-Hungarian golden age, including the world of Eastern European and Italian banking, is astonishing. And her telling of Castelli's own life story makes for a great bildungsroman.... [a] 360-degree tour d'horizon ."
-Robert Pincus-Witten, Artforum

"[E]legant....Cohen-Solal...has practically created two independent books...one examining the Castelli family's trials and tribulations over five generations, the second picking up in detail after Leo's arrival in the U.S. in 1941...Both, it should be said, are well worth reading....Cohen-Solal narrates Castelli's career....[with] revealing insights....[and] does the great service of showing just how the art world metastasized into a big business driven by celebrity artists represented by celebrity dealers."
-Mark Lamster, Los Angeles Times

"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...unearthing his family's multigenerational history...and narrating in often mesmerizing prose the tragic rise of fascism....[a] very impressive book [that] present[s] a wide-ranging discussion with many compelling observations about what made the dealer tick."
-Jonathan Lopez, Boston Globe

"[A] n impeccably judicious book....detailed and savvy....[Cohen-Solal] provides a backstory...that is ....absorbing and [a] highly relevant scrutiny of the historic loam that produced a bloom as exotic as Castelli."
-Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker

"Leo Castelli was my friend, partner and unwitting mentor; and yet this biography comes as a startling revelation. With great skill and understanding, Annie Cohen-Solal has brought to life a singular personality-uniquely charming, erudite and savvy-and shown us precisely how he created the business model that the art world follows to this day. Leo and His Circle is a testament to a great professional legacy and an unlikely life story as compelling as a fine novel."
-Larry Gagosian

" Leo and His Circle truly captures the essence of the man. Leo set a standard, an ethical standard that has never been surpassed. He was always inclusive, building a sense of community and a constituency for contemporary art that never existed before."
-Peter M. Brant

"[Cohen-Solal] gives us with great skill a history of the Jews in Monte San Savino in the 17th century, the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, the fall of France, the blossoming of the art world starting in the middle of the 20th century, and the emergence of Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptualism....Her virtuosity keeps you reading....marvelous....fascinating."
-Milton Esterow, ARTnews

"Cohen-Solal writes with passionate intensity and poetic precision....establishes a remarkably vivid cultural context for the artists, beginning with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Castelli zealously and shrewdly championed....[and] has created an invaluable, magnificently encompassing, and compelling biography of extraordinary scope, energy, and feeling."
-Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"Cohen-Solal deftly integrates European cultural history (beginning with Castelli's Jewish merchant ancestors) with Castelli's intellectual, personal, and professional evolution. Cohen-Solal writes with

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Annie Cohen-Solal
• Mitarbeit: Mark Polizzotti (Übersetzung)
• Verlag: Knopf
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Fester Einband
• Erschienen: 18.05.2010
• EAN: 9781400044276
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-4427-6
• Abmessung: 165 mm x 242 mm x 46 mm
• Themen: Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik > Kunst > Allgemeines, Lexika; Sachbuch > Philosophie, Religion > Biographien, Autobiographien