MoMA to Present ILEANA SONNABEND: AMBASSADOR FOR THE NEW, 12/21-4/21

The Museum of Modern Art pays tribute to the legacy of the legendary gallerist and collector Ileana Sonnabend (1914-2007) with an exhibition of works reflecting the activities of her galleries in Paris and New York from the 1960s through the 1980s, revealing her remarkably prescient selection of the art of her time. Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New, on view from December 21, 2013, through April 21, 2014, celebrates the Sonnabend family's generous 2012 gift of Robert Rauschenberg's Combine Canyon (1959) to MoMA, and salutes Sonnabend's commitment to introducing groundbreaking art to the public. Some 50 works by 41 artists, including Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Mario Merz, Vito Acconci, Mel Bochner, John Baldessari, and Jeff Koons, are drawn from MoMA's holdings and from other public and private collections, spanning a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, photography, video, and live performance. The exhibition is organized by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, and Claire Lehmann, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture.

During a career spanning half a century, Sonnabend helped to shape the course of postwar art in Europe and North America, championing some of the most significant artists of her time. Opening her first gallery in Paris in 1962 and her second in New York in 1970, Sonnabend displayed a steadfast commitment to exhibiting demanding new art. This interest stemmed from a deep curiosity. Sonnabend once noted, "I like what I do not at first understand," and she was instinctively drawn to art that she considered "difficult to classify on the basis of things already known." Embracing an ambassadorial role, Sonnabend was instrumental in bringing new art across the Atlantic, helping to introduce American Pop art and Minimalism to Europe in the 1960s and Italian Arte Povera to the United States in the early 1970s. In the ensuing decades, she continued to seek out and support work that reinvented the notion of what art could be.