From Booklist
When New York City became the capital of the global art world, gallery owner Leo Castelli was king. Cosmopolitan and ardent, he was a “master tastemaker” and an “impresario-cum-dervish” who resoundingly elevated contemporary American art and transformed the international art market. But who was he before he opened his first gallery at age 50? What “made him tick”? Cohen-Solal, author of a major Sartre biography, is the first to track down Castelli’s fascinating and heartbreaking Jewish family history, with its long line of consummate merchants and deep roots in Hungarian shtetl life and Viennese culture. Castelli grew up in Trieste and would have perished in the Holocaust if his commanding father-in-law hadn’t engineered an escape to New York. There Castelli’s wealthy wife (later the famed gallery owner Ileana Sonnabend) supported his innovative approach to working with artists. Cohen-Solal writes with passionate intensity and poetic precision about the people and places, tragedies and good fortune that shaped Castelli and fed his hunger for life and devotion to cutting-edge art. She also establishes a remarkably vivid cultural context for the artists, beginning with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Castelli zealously and shrewdly championed. Cohen-Solal has created an invaluable, magnificently encompassing, and compelling biography of extraordinary scope, energy, and feeling. -- Donna Seaman
