Christie’s has announced it will bring a substantial portion of the Antonio Homem Sonnabend collection to auction this Autumn and winter, spreading the sales across London, Paris and New York in a series of appointments that concludes one of the twentieth century’s most consequential gallery legacies.
Homem Sonnabend was the adopted son of Ileana Sonnabend, a name that barely needs qualification among anyone who has spent time around postwar art history. For more than fifty years she ran the Sonnabend Gallery alongside her husband Michael and, eventually, Antonio himself, building relationships that quite literally shaped the transatlantic art world as we now understand it. She was the person who brought Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg to European audiences, while simultaneously introducing American collectors to European figures like Gilbert and George, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Schifano and Giovanni Anselmo. That kind of bidirectional cultural traffic was rare then and remains rare now.
Ileana died in 2007, and Homem Sonnabend spent the years afterwards co-founding the Sonnabend Collection Foundation, dedicating himself to preserving what he and Michael had built with her. That work culminated last November with the opening of the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, a dedicated museum housed in the medieval Palazzo della Ragione, where around 100 works from the collection now hang permanently.
The auction series itself unfolds in stages, beginning in October with London’s 20th and 21st Century Evening Sale, followed by a dedicated evening sale of prints and multiples in New York. From there, the collection moves to Paris for the 20th and 21st Century Evening Sale, which includes a section titled Thinking Italian, before culminating in New York during Fall Marquee Week, with placements across both the 20th and 21st Century Evening Sale and the Post War and Contemporary Art Day Sale. Further sales are expected to follow into December.
Taken together, the collection spans the major American and European movements that defined the post-war decades, Pop, Arte Povera, and Conceptualism, with individual works by Jeff Koons, Bruce Nauman, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Gilbert and George, Jean Dubuffet, Anselm Kiefer and Jean Prouvé, among others. Christie’s estimates the total offering will bring in more than $50 million, and notably, two specific paintings, one by Lichtenstein and one by Warhol, have been earmarked specifically to fund the Sonnabend Collection Foundation in the future.
Antonio Phokion Potamianos Homem, speaking on behalf of the family, was candid about the difficulty of the decision. “My father spent his life among these works, and parting with them is not done lightly,” he said, though he framed the sale of the two Foundation-owned pieces as part of a deliberate strategy to build an endowment that would strengthen the organisation’s long-term footing. He spoke warmly of the Mantova museum, noting its recent Gilbert and George exhibition, and mentioned that an ambitious cycle of international exhibitions featuring the family collection and Foundation holdings is set to begin this November with a major show at the Palazzo Esposizioni in Rome. “We proudly carry on Ileana and Antonio’s transatlantic vision,” he said, “ensuring a vital exchange of artists and artworks between Europe and America, and ensuring the eye that assembled this collection continues to be seen.”
Sara Friedlander, who chairs Christie’s Post War and Contemporary Art department, did not hold back on the significance of the name attached to this sale. “Ileana Sonnabend’s role in the trajectory of Post War and Contemporary art cannot be overstated,” she said, noting that Homem Sonnabend himself joined the gallery back in 1968 and went on to help shape what became, in her words, the preeminent gallery of the contemporary era. She described the collection as a direct reflection of that gallery’s programme, an assemblage that was never static, constantly evolving, with individual pieces regularly out on loan to international exhibitions rather than sitting quietly in storage. “It was a phenomenal private collection built in service of the public,” she added, calling it a privilege for Christie’s to once again play a role in stewarding the Sonnabend legacy.
Selections from both the Foundation and the Homem Sonnabend family collection will go on view at the Palazzo Esposizioni in Rome starting November 3, running alongside the ongoing highlights still on permanent display at the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, giving collectors and casual visitors alike two separate opportunities this winter to see, in person, the kind of eye that reshaped postwar art history on both sides of the Atlantic.