Italy / 29’/37′ / Colour / DVD / 2009

Genre Documentary
Director Adriana Polveroni
Screenwriter Adriana Polveroni
Production company VideoNew, Trieste Contemporanea

It is said that he invented Pop Art; it is also said (especially by his envious rivals) that he was the “Machiavelli of Modern Art”. However, painters who passed through his galleries have a complete different opinion: “he is a saint who will make all possible sacrifices for the artists he believes in”. (Rauschenberg dixit).One thing is for sure: Leo Castelli, born in Trieste in 1907 and died in New York in 1999, is a legendary figure in the 20th-century art, who can be compared to Ambroise Vollard, the patron of Impressionism, and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the inventor of Cubism. The main difference is that Castelli not only invented one movement, but several, such as Dada, Pop Art, Minimal Art, Conceptual Art and also Conceptual Art. For more than twenty years (from the late 1950s to the late 1970s), he ruled world art, creating artists, establishing trends and financial strategies; basically he invented the art system. The film presents a continual succession of memories about Leo Castelli, told by some of the most important characters of American contemporary art: piece after piece, the figure of this great gallerist is reassembled, thanks to the original accounts by Dennis Oppenheim, James Rosenquist, Richard Serra and many others.

Supported for the Development