An artistic collection famous across all latitudes, the Sonnabend Collection is the centrepiece of the new permanent exhibition project staged in the renovated Palazzo della Ragione in Mantua. Here is a sneak peek in anticipation of the debut during the 2025 winter season

When we think of collectors who have been able to tap into and promote the most innovative artistic trends of the second half of the twentieth century, it is de rigueur to recall Ileana Sonnabend, champion, along with her husband Michael and her adopted son Antonio Homem, of a collection that has become a precious testament to the creative developments of the last century, in Europe and the United States. And it is precisely the Sonnabend Collection that inspires the project organised by the Municipality of Mantua in partnership with the Sonnabend Collection Foundation and Marsilio Arte. Starting in winter 2025, the renovated Palazzo della Ragione will permanently host the works included in the collection, strengthening the bond that united the Sonnabend couple and Italy, and establishing an effective parallel between the twentieth-century collector and Isabella d’Este, regent of the Marquisate of Mantua between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and a patron par excellence.
The exhibition itinerary will unfold through eleven rooms staged by Federico Fedel, offering the public the opportunity to appreciate the results of Ileana Sonnabend’s efforts as a collector and her tireless support for the work of artists and movements that are key to recent creative production. The protagonists of American art – such as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann – join their Italian colleagues Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mario Schifano, bespeaking an approach that went beyond geopolitical boundaries and established a dialogue between geographies and artistic philosophies. The Minimalism of Donald Judd and Robert Morris “meets” the Arte Povera of Giovanni Anselmo, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini and Gilberto Zorio, whose experimentation got to New York thanks to Ileana Sonnabend’s foresight. Photography and performative language also play a leading role in the collection, as demonstrated by the presence of personalities who were part of different generations – from Bernd & Hilla Becher to Luigi Ontani, from Candida Höfer to Matthias Schaller, from Vito Acconci to Gilbert & George. The pictorial investigation of the 1980s on both sides of the ocean finds a synthesis in the interventions of Jörg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, A.R. Penck, Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach.
The visual itinerary that will take shape in the rooms of the Palazzo della Ragione therefore reflects the gaze of Ileana Sonnabend – born Ileana Schapira in Bucharest in 1914 – on the world of art and the courageous choices she made throughout her career. Having fled Europe due to Nazi persecution together with her first husband Leo Castelli, she settled in New York, where Castelli opened a gallery in their home. After they divorced, Ileana continued to frequent the art scene and, together with her second husband Michael Sonnabend, in 1962 she opened the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris, bringing together American artists and some young Italian ones. With the opening of the New York gallery in 1970, Ileana Sonnabend contributed to redrawing the exhibition map of the Big Apple and definitively strengthened the engagement with the old continent, and with Italy in particular, becoming a fundamental interlocutor for the artists of the time.
As the artistic director Mario Codognato recalls, “Michael and Ileana Sonnabend had a strong bond with Italy of which they were great connoisseurs, with that original and unpredictable gaze that characterised them. It is therefore particularly significant that the new home of their extraordinary collection is in our country, in Mantua. Michael knew and loved Dante like no other person I have met, and that their collection is housed in a thirteenth-century building is almost serendipitous. Ileana was very important for many Italian artists of the post-war generation and that certainly helped to make her known and appreciated in the United States, and therefore this tribute to her as a person and her work is an integral part of her story”.

Arianna Testino

Cover photo: Jeff Koons, Wild Boy and Puppy, The Sonnabend Homem Foundation