Ileana Sonnabend

[1] The gallery goes on showing the work of artists who rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s including Robert Morris, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Gilbert & George as well as more recent artists including Jeff Koons, Rona Pondick, Candida Höfer, Elger Esser, and Clifford Ross.

During the 1940s, her mother Marianne Schapira divorced her father and met and married the Russian-born American painter John D. Graham[1] (who was a mentor figure to artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky).

In 1950, the couple curated a show of young American and European painters, which included both Jean Dubuffet and Mark Rothko.

Two years later, they opened Galerie Ileana Sonnabend on Quai des Grands-Augustins [fr] in Paris, where she introduced art by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and others, and helped establish a European market for their work.

At one time, the couple thought that Michael Sonnabend would run the New York gallery while Ileana oversaw their Paris establishment, but he soon found that the art business did not suit him.

[12] Although the family had been in talks with the auction houses, they chose to sell parts of the collection privately because of the uncertainties surrounding the financial markets during the Great Recession.

Backed by members of the Al Thani family,[13] the art-dealers collective GPS Partners purchased $400m of paintings and sculptures dating mainly from the 1960s on behalf of private clients.

This first cache is said to have included Jeff Koons's 1986 sculpture Rabbit, which has been valued in excess of $80 million, as well as Roy Lichtenstein's cartoon painting Eddie Diptych (1962), Cy Twombly's abstract Blue Room (1957) and Andy Warhol's Silver Disaster (1963), one of the artist's paintings of an electric chair.