Dealer's weal: Alexi Worth on "From Pop to Now" - Museums - works from Ileana Sonnabend collection

IT IS GENERALLY AGREED that "From Pop to Now: Selections from the Sonnabend Collection," which opens in June at Skidmore College's Tang Museum, represents only the tip of an enormous submerged iceberg of art. Talking to dealers and curators, one gets occasional glimpses below waterline: Neil Printz, coeditor of the Warhol catalogue raisonne, mentions that Ileana Sonnabend, one of the most enigmatic and influential impresarios of twentieth-century art, who also happens to be Leo Castelli's ex-wife, owns some of Warhol's finest drawings. Charles Stainback, the Tang's director, recalls "something like fifty Kiefers." But it's impossible to get an exact sense of the scope of her holdings. As another dealer of her generation remarked, Sonnabend is "a major, major figure--and we don't even know how major because it's all been so discreet." The collection has apparently never been inventoried, and Sonnabend and her gallery's director and legal heir, Antonio Homem, politely decline to offer even a rough estimate.

Given the estimable list of artists Sonnabend is well known to have championed over the years, the Skidmore show begins on a somewhat predictable note, with a roomful of classic works by Johns, Rauschenberg, and Twombly. What follows, though, is both less and more than a trek through (now) established taste. A glance at the checklist reveals obvious gaps (no Frank Stella, no Chuck Close, no Cindy Sherman). Major artists whom the gallery launched but no longer represents (Carroll Dunham, Peter Halley, Terry Winters) are also among the missing. Clearly, "From Pop to Now" isn't intended as a history of contemporary art or even of the Sonnabend gallery. Instead it's a personal recap, a selective memoir. And yet what's striking is how uncannily durable Sonnabend's taste has proved--at least judging from the eighty-two works presented here, which offer a virtual anthology of Pop, Minimalism, arte povera, Conceptualism, and neo-geo. You have to feel a little awed by the shrewdness, not to mention the eclecticism, of Sonnabend's picks. Fifteen years ago, viewing a culling of the collection that toured Europe for the gallery's twenty-fifth anniversary, Robert Rosenblum felt "dumbfounded by how great it was." This update is considerably smaller, but it's likely to prompt similar admiration.

With that admiration come some obvious questions, beginning with the choice of a relatively modest venue. Why the Tang instead of MOMA? Sonnabend is mum about her collection's eventual fate, but when Calvin Tomkins interviewed her for a New Yorker profile a couple of years ago, she said she "wasn't so enchanted with museums" and hinted that her legacy might end up at Sotheby's or Christie's. If that's true, lending this show to the Tang might be a way of avoiding bigger, more expectant institutions. Stainback diplomatically adds that a "young unknown museum" like the Tang might suit Sonnabend's riskiness, her embrace of the new. About the question of the collection's continuity, however, he's more hesitant. Formerly a curator at the International Center of Photography, he suggests that an affinity for photo-based work weaves through Sonnabend's choices, from Warhol up through Gilbert & George and Jeff Koons. Beyond that, he admits that it's hard to locate a connecting thread. Sonnabend herself says little to help pin down her tastes.

Her reticence is in fact legendary. James Rosenquist remembers her staying for hours after a studio visit with Allan Stone in 1960, "just sitting there quietly, smiling." Robert Pincus-Witten, a former director of the gallery, described her as a woman whose "conversation consists mostly in listening." Andy Warhol, in his diaries, recounted a meeting with Mary Boone in which the young dealer sat wordlessly with an "Ileana Sonnabend smile." You might think that Sonnabend's reserve would drop away when it came to talking about the art she owns; instead she "stridently refuses," in Stainback's words, to talk about the collection. About personal matters, on the other hand, she can be memorably blunt. Jeff Koons recalls that Sonnabend was the only person (aside from his father) to try and prevent his marriage to Italian porn star La Cicciolina. "You're making a terrible mistake," she told him. Later, when Castelli raised eyebrows with his third marriage, to a much younger woman, Sonnabend parried reporters' questio ns about her ex with a laconic declaration: "I have many thoughts, but no statement."

Thanks to her more voluble ex-husband, however, the public outline of Sonnabend's biography is well-known. Born Ileana Schapira to a wealthy Jewish family in Romania, she met the Italian-born Castelli in 1932, when she was seventeen. "He was not like the others," she remembered later. "He was on the move." The newlyweds honeymooned in Vienna and settled in Paris. There, on the eve of World War II, Leo opened his first gallery.

When the Germans invaded, Ileana's fortune allowed the couple to migrate to New York in comfort, and they were soon drawn into the circle of Abstract Expressionist painters, whose works Leo began dealing on a private basis. When Leo finally opened a gallery again in 1957, he asked his wife to make scouting trips to young artists' studios. Sometimes, Ileana recalled, she, Allan Stone, and Ivan Karp would start 'around five o'clock, when the galleries closed, and go on until two in the morning."