Antonio Homem
| Antonio Homem | |
|---|---|
| Born | Antonio Esmeraldo Homem October 13, 1939 Lisbon, Portugal |
| 💀Died | March 24, 2026 (aged 86) New York City, U.S.March 24, 2026 (aged 86) |
| 🏫 Education | ETH Zurich |
| 💼 Occupation | Art dealer, gallery director |
| 📆 Years active | 1968–2026 |
| Known for | Director of the Sonnabend Gallery; president of the Sonnabend Collection Foundation |
| 👶 Children | 1 |
| 👪 Relatives | Ileana Sonnabend and Michael Sonnabend (adoptive parents) |
Antonio Esmeraldo Homem (October 13, 1939 – March 24, 2026), known professionally as Antonio Homem and also, after his adoption, as Antonio Homem Sonnabend,[1][2] was a Portuguese-born art dealer and gallery director who spent most of his career at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York City. The adopted son of the dealers Ileana Sonnabend and Michael Sonnabend, he joined the gallery in Paris in 1968, became its director and co-owner, and after Ileana Sonnabend's death in 2007 oversaw the Sonnabend Collection, a major private holding of postwar American and European art. In 2009 he co-founded the Sonnabend Collection Foundation, which he led as president until his death.[3][4][5]
Over some four decades working with Ileana Sonnabend, Homem helped promote Pop art, Minimal and Conceptual art, Arte Povera, and, in the 1980s, artists such as Jeff Koons; the gallery gave early or defining support to figures including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Vito Acconci, and Gilbert & George.[3][1][6] After Sonnabend's death he was, with her daughter Nina Sundell, co-heir to an art estate valued at more than $1 billion, and the two figured in a widely reported dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over the taxation of Rauschenberg's Canyon, which they ultimately donated to the Museum of Modern Art.[7][8] In 2025 he opened a permanent museum for the collection, the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, in Mantua, Italy.[3][4]
Early life and education
Homem was born in Lisbon on October 13, 1939, the only son of an upper-class Portuguese family of lawyers.[1] He was drawn to art through books as a child, at first to Surrealism; he later recalled that a 1954 exhibition of American painting in Paris, where he saw works by Edward Hopper including New York Movie (1939), was an early step toward his interest in Pop art.[1]
In 1956 he left Portugal for Switzerland, where at his father's wish he enrolled at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich to study chemical engineering, a course of study that did not suit him.[4][5][1] In Zürich he spent time at a gallery run by the young dealer Bruno Bischofberger, where he volunteered as an unpaid assistant.[1] In the summer of 1965, at the opening of a Pop art exhibition at Bischofberger's gallery, he was introduced by the Italian dealer Gian Enzo Sperone to Ileana Sonnabend, whose gallery he would join a few years later.[1][9]
Career
Sonnabend Gallery
Ileana Sonnabend and her husband Michael Sonnabend had opened the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris in 1962, where they helped introduce American Pop art to Europe.[10][6] After first visiting the Paris gallery in 1966, Homem formally joined it in 1968, beginning a collaboration with Ileana and Michael Sonnabend that lasted for the rest of his life.[1][5] Described in his obituary as the gallery's "rudder" and as Ileana Sonnabend's close adviser, he became its director and, in time, co-owner.[1][9]
When the Sonnabend Gallery opened its first New York space on Madison Avenue in 1970, Homem and Ileana Sonnabend began traveling regularly between Paris and New York to oversee both operations.[5] In the fall of 1971 the gallery opened a space in SoHo at 420 West Broadway, sharing the building with the dealers Leo Castelli, John Weber, and André Emmerich, in the early days of the SoHo gallery scene.[5][3] Homem later said that he and the Sonnabends often mounted exhibitions for their own sake rather than for sales, recalling that Michael Sonnabend and Leo Castelli would ask, "Why are you doing this? There's nothing to sell!"[1]
Under Ileana Sonnabend and Homem, the gallery's SoHo space opened with a performance by Gilbert & George and presented challenging new work, among it Vito Acconci's Seedbed.[1][11] It helped introduce Italian Arte Povera to audiences in the United States, and from the 1980s it gave early support to Jeff Koons.[6][11] Koons later credited Homem and Ileana Sonnabend with supporting his early work "unconditionally", and the artist Jim Dine called Homem "the nicest person in the virulent art world".[1] The gallery also became known for photography and conceptual work by artists including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer, and John Baldessari.[11]
In 1986, when Homem needed a United States green card, Ileana and Michael Sonnabend legally adopted him. "He's been our son for a long time," Michael Sonnabend said.[1] In May 2000 Sonnabend and Homem moved the gallery from SoHo to 536 West 22nd Street in Chelsea, buying the 12,000-square-foot building for $1.9 million and spending about $600,000 to convert it into exhibition space.[10]
Sonnabend estate and the Canyon tax case
Ileana Sonnabend died in 2007 at the age of 92, leaving her estate to Homem and her daughter, the curator Nina Sundell.[3][11][5] The art in the estate was valued at more than $1 billion; to meet the estate-tax obligation—the federal portion of which was about $331 million—the heirs sold roughly $600 million of works in two private sales, about $400 million to the dealer group GPS Partners and some $200 million of Warhol paintings to Gagosian Gallery.[11][12][13]
The estate also became the subject of a closely followed tax dispute over Rauschenberg's Canyon (1959), a "combine" that incorporates a stuffed bald eagle. Because federal law makes it a crime to sell or possess a bald eagle, the work cannot legally be sold, and the estate's appraisers valued it at zero; Ileana Sonnabend had been permitted to keep it under an informal accommodation from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.[7][14] The IRS nonetheless appraised Canyon at $65 million and sought $29.2 million in taxes plus $11.7 million in penalties.[7][15] In 2012 Homem and Sundell resolved the matter by donating Canyon—which had been on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 2005—to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), with the IRS dropping its claim on the condition that the heirs take no charitable deduction. As part of the arrangement MoMA added Ileana Sonnabend's name to its Founders Wall,[8][15] and in 2013–2014 the museum presented Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New, an exhibition surveying her career.[6]
Sonnabend Collection Foundation
Homem remained director of the Sonnabend Gallery after Ileana Sonnabend's death, continuing its exhibition program until the gallery closed its exhibition space at the end of 2014 and leased the West 22nd Street building to Lehmann Maupin; its last show was an exhibition of work by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher.[10][5] "I am now seventy-five years old and felt I should simplify my life," Homem told Artnet News of the decision, adding that he intended to keep working with the gallery's artists through private dealing.[10]
In 2009 Homem co-founded the Sonnabend Collection Foundation with Nina Sundell, dedicating it to preserving and presenting the collection of works dating from the early 1960s to the end of the 20th century; he served as its president.[5][4] Sundell died in 2014, and Homem's son, Antonio Phokion Potamianos-Homem, became the foundation's treasurer.[5][4] Through the foundation Homem organized presentations of the collection, including a two-part exhibition at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto in 2016 and, in 2019–2020, "The Sonnabend Collection" at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Canada, which comprised more than 100 works and was the largest presentation of the collection in North America up to that time.[11][16] Homem curated the Remai Modern exhibition himself, arranging it by loose groupings of movements while juxtaposing works across periods.[11]
In November 2025 the foundation, together with the City of Mantua and the publisher Marsilio Arte, opened a permanent museum for the collection, the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, in the 13th-century Palazzo della Ragione in Mantua, Italy.[4][3] The inaugural presentation included Johns's Figure 8 (1958), Lichtenstein's Little Aloha (1962), Rauschenberg's Kite (1963), and an installation of Warhol's Screen Tests (1964–1966).[3] Homem, who was made an honorary citizen of Mantua, created the museum as a permanent home for the collection; he died about four months after it opened.[4][1]
Personal life
Homem was briefly married in the mid-1960s and had a son, Phokion; the marriage ended soon afterward. He later lived with Ileana and Michael Sonnabend and, in his words, considered the gallery his home.[1] A voracious reader who spoke five languages, he was described by colleagues as erudite and private[vague]; the former Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman called him "an irreplaceable figure in the art world" who had acted as "consigliere to the great gallerist Ileana Sonnabend for forty years".[1] Homem regarded the Sonnabend Collection as a kind of autobiography, saying that "the collection was an autobiography and an auto-portrait of Ileana, for Michael, for me."[3]
In 2016 Homem recorded an oral history for the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, in which he discussed his childhood in Portugal, his studies in Zürich, and his decades at the Sonnabend Gallery.[9] He was survived by his son, Antonio Phokion Potamianos-Homem; his daughter-in-law, Liz Anne Potamianos Homem; and a granddaughter, Chloe.[1]
Death
Homem died in New York City on March 24, 2026, at the age of 86, after a long illness; his death was announced by the Sonnabend Collection Mantova.[3][1] Mario Codognato of the Sonnabend Collection Mantova said that Homem "guarded and passed on the cultural legacy of Ileana and Michael Sonnabend with intelligence and sensitivity," and that "his passing leaves a great void in the international art community."[3][4] On learning of his death, Gilbert & George wrote, "Goodbye, our dear lovely Antonio ... We miss him very much, especially his laugh."[1]
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 "Antonio Esmeraldo Homem, Obituary". Frank E. Campbell – The Funeral Chapel. March 28, 2026. Retrieved June 30, 2026 – via Dignity Memorial.
- ↑ "Antonio Sonnabend Homem". Sonnabend Collection Foundation. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 Battaglia, Andy (March 27, 2026). "Antonio Homem, Champion of the Ileana Sonnabend Collection, Dies at 86". ARTnews. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 "Farewell to Antonio Homem, president of the Sonnabend Collection". Finestre sull'Arte. March 27, 2026. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 "Who We Are". Sonnabend Collection Foundation. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 "Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New". Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Cohen, Patricia (July 22, 2012). "A Catch-22 of Art and Taxes, Starring a Stuffed Eagle". The New York Times. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Cohen, Patricia (November 27, 2012). "Museum of Modern Art Gains a Treasure That the Met Also Coveted". The New York Times. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 "Oral history interview with Antonio Homem, 2016 March 14–23". Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 Cascone, Sarah (November 21, 2014). "Sonnabend Gallery to Shutter and Lease Space to Lehmann Maupin". Artnet News. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5 11.6 Kinsella, Eileen (October 22, 2019). "Ileana Sonnabend's Son Has Curated a Blockbuster Show in Canada From the Legendary Dealer's $1 Billion Collection". Artnet News. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
- ↑ Vogel, Carol (April 4, 2008). "A Colossal Private Sale by the Heirs of a Dealer". The New York Times. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
- ↑ Picard, Charmaine (May 1, 2008). "Sonnabend estate sold for $600m". The Art Newspaper. Archived from the original on June 23, 2011. Retrieved June 30, 2026. Unknown parameter
|url-status=ignored (help) - ↑ "A Question of Valuation: IRS to Face Off With the Heirs of Ileana Sonnabend". Center for Art Law. July 26, 2012. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 "Robert Rauschenberg's Canyon Donated to MoMA". Artforum. November 28, 2012. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
- ↑ "The Sonnabend Collection launches at Remai Modern with activity-filled opening weekend". Remai Modern. 2019. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
External links
- Sonnabend Collection Foundation
- Oral history interview with Antonio Homem, 2016 – Archives of American Art
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