Let’s live for the beauty of our own reality:
“ Charles Lamb”
I remember:
The searing Spanish light appeared to make me seem naked in my hotel window reflection. I stared down at the frenzied Mayor Plaza in Madrid. I was trying to recall glimpses of experiences from my previous three days. Romantic memories of art history stirred my imagination. It is what happens when when I am alone. I reimagined the hypnotic myth of Chaim Soutine: His eyes saw red rubies and green sapphires dancing in the sands of Saint-Tropez. He scampered towards his benefactor Alfred Barnes like an addict chasing a fix. My phone rang. It was a call I had expected.
Photo by Andre Kertesz : My impression of Charles Egan walking alone In Barcelona
The American art dealer Charles Egan was calling from Barcelona. Egan was among maybe three New York art dealers (Depending who you speak to) who opened their doors to Abstract Expressionism artists.
Egan’s voice was aged and halting. Before I could begin my Q&A with him, he blurted out, “I only have a few minutes”. I had traveled from New York to Spain to photograph him. Fortunately he granted me at least a chat. Two hours later I had this picture in my mind of a scruffy old man in an oversized woolen coat chasing Las Ramblas night shadows in Barcelona. The shadows hid him from certain truths. If only he could catch one shadow and step into darkness forever. I always felt he was trying to figure out a way to live and die simultaneously.
I listened as he spoke with an inelegant charm. The manner in which Egan shared his life among artists, lured me towards artists of a certain age. They had been”there”. It didn’t matter where, but “there”.
Egan never sat for my camera. Still, 1982 was a banner year. I had photographed a bit more than 50 London and New York art dealers. Most were unique. A template for living was beginning to take form. Artists like Dekooning and Noguchi had sat for me. Miro and Dali were coming up.
For the next 10 years my art world life sped on a hyperloop. Oddly enough, I wasn’t aware that my camera was capturing the new world’s art world in Soho New York and more.
This was just about the time I met Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend.
Leo Castell in his Gallery
Generational Giants
Soho was the center of the art world universe for near two decades. Yet If the power broker and master of his own universe Robert Moses had his way, Soho would have become an american industrial disaster. Moses envisioned a Baron Haussmann like renovation of Paris. Today, Soho would not exist and Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades” would be even a sadder historical recount of what we had lost.
Soho helmed some of the finest artists in the world. They came to pay homage to New York, but in Soho. Among the most powerful art dealers the world represented a collection of those artists. In one particular building in New York, 420 West Broadway seemed to be like a scene from Ghostbusters. The building used to throb with power. Nothing seemed to pass through the city without Leo and Ileana knowing about it.
Other dealers and artists were very successful and some very powerful. But the word on the streets was whispered, “Castelli…Sonnabend”. It wasn’t that they were Mr and Mrs Corleone. Their marriage was over years before. Their successful influence on their “stable” seemed to out run most other galleries.
Certainly other dealers made a considerable impact on the art world: Pace, Cooper, Emmerich easily come to mind. It is not my intention to measure celebrity. But when Leo and I made an arrangement to photograph his artists, I realized I was given the key to the knights of the kingdom: Lichtenstein, Warhol, Johns, Serra, Stella and…
Ileana Sonnabend in her gallery
When Sonnabend allowed me to photograph Koons, Gilbert and George and many more, I realized that I was photographing royalty and budding squires. I was enriched by the experience. More importantly because Castelli and Sonnabend had suggested entree for me, no door was left unopened. It was a privilege that few could offer.
The collection of maybe 100 art dealers, and maybe 500 artists I have photographed wasn’t because of those two celebrated dealers. I had already been with the above mentioned Dekooning, Noguchi, Miro and Dali and, and, and. But their names carried a weight that was a catapult in directions unimagined. What followed were many exotic, stupefying, mind numbing, life changing stories that occurred because of my sessions with artists. Those stories and more are for another time. My photographic life has been akin to a genetic map.
Looking in the rear view mirror is a bit too easy. But sometimes it illustrates the obvious: The cache that the names Castelli and Sonnabend carried was a particular cashmere that I will never have again.
Leo Castell: A second session with him