Antonio Homem-Sonnabend Obituary
March 24, 2026
 

Antonio Homem, who as director of the storied Sonnabend Gallery helped shape the world of contemporary art, died in New York on Tuesday at the age of 86 after a long illness.
 

Erudite to his fingertips, kind, generous, and eternally curious, Homem was, from the time he joined the gallery in Paris in 1968, its rudder. Arnold Lehman, director emeritus of the Brooklyn Museum of Art whose friendship with Homem began at that time, called him an “irreplaceable figure in the art world. As consigliere to the great gallerist Ileana Sonnabend for forty years, his quiet but profound impact on contemporary art of the second half of the twentieth century, while unmarked, is indelible.”
 

Indeed, Ileana and Antonio—as everyone knew them—formed an inseparable unit, promoting and supporting U.S. and European avant-garde art by the newest and, to their minds, most challenging artists. It was that thrill of discovery that drove them, just as it drove the artists they championed who now form part of the Sonnabend Collection: Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Dan Flavin, Mel Bochner, Gilbert & George, Anselm Kiefer, Sol LeWitt, Mario Merz, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Bernd and Hilla Becher, to name just a few.

Jeff Koons credited Antonio and Ileana with quite literally changing his life with their “unconditional love” and material support at a critical early period of his work in the 1980s. But he admitted that attention wasn’t an exception; the pair gave unequivocal support to all the artists in their stable.
 

"My father, Antonio, loved working with the artists of the Sonnabend Gallery and the Sonnabend Collection Foundation,” said Phokion Potamianos Homem. “He was deeply immersed in his appreciation for art in all its forms—whether Classical, Renaissance, Belle Époque, Modern, or Contemporary. For him, every period was grist for the mill, fuelling his understanding of art’s progression and its historical references—a passion he shared with everyone he knew.”

Mr. Homem—Antonio—thought of the art collection that he and Ileana built as an autobiography, or a picture album of their lives. In 2025, he created a home for that collection in Mantova, Italy, in the thirteenth-century Palazzo della Ragione. “The Sonnabend Collection at Mantova was the culmination of this vision,” said Potamianos Homem, “reflecting the lifelong dialogue he, Ileana, and Michael Sonnabend shared with the artists who defined the gallery."
 

Antonio was born in October 1939 in Lisbon, the only son of an upper-class Portuguese family of lawyers and religious zealots whose beliefs ran the gamut from doctrinaire Christianity to spiritualism. Antonio was interested in neither the law nor the spirits—except as intellectual concepts. What did interest him were books, and it was there that he discovered art.

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As a child, he said, it was the story the works told that fascinated him. At first, his interest tended toward Surrealism—the kinds of fantastical works a boy might escape into. Then his father took him to a 1954 exhibition of American art in Paris where he saw Edward Hopper paintings, including the 1939 work New York Movie. “I was amazed to see such themes treated in a painting. I could not imagine an auto being the subject of a painting and also not a movie house or an usherette,” he recalled. “I think that was my first step toward the American Pop Art I saw ten years later.”

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Art did not figure in Antonio’s parents’ plans for him. His father wanted him to work as a chemical engineer in Switzerland, and so the seventeen-year-old enrolled in the ETH in Zürich for a course of studies that did not suit him. Serendipitously, the apartment he soon took in that city was above a gallery run by a young Bruno Bischofberger. Antonio began hanging around the gallery, and then he volunteered to work there as an unpaid assistant. That meant that when, in the early summer of 1965, Bischofberger opened an exhibition of Pop Art on loan from a gallery in Paris, Antonio became part of the festivities. “For me it was a rather glamorous event,” he recalled. “Roy Lichtenstein was there with his girlfriend wearing a dress made in fabric designed by him. There were American gallerists from New York and several European artists.”

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Seated at the end of a table with Antonio during the opening dinner was a small, very unglamorous older woman being flattered by the Italian dealer Gian Enzo Sperone, who told her she reminded him of Emma Bovary. The older woman, amused, looked at Antonio and introduced herself in French (a language they would routinely speak to each other). Her name, she said, was Ileana Sonnabend. He realized that this shy figure was the woman he had read about in newspapers as the source of the uproar at the last Venice Biennale. Her first artistic discovery, Robert Rauschenberg, had won and Ileana was accused of manipulating the outcome.

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Ileana invited Antonio to Paris to visit and there was no doubt in Antonio’s mind at that point that he wanted a life in art. But by then he was married to an art history student and had a young son. He did not imagine that he could work in a gallery and make enough money to support them. He did not leave school; rather his wife Helene went to Paris to work for Ileana. That association ended quickly, as did Antonio’s marriage. When he next arrived at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris in 1966, he was personally and professionally bereft. Ileana and Michael offered a remedy: join them in Venice for the Biennale. He did, but not until 1968 did he join the gallery. This time, he would stay for the rest of his long career.

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The Sonnabends represented everything he had wanted in life. He said he had dreamed of associating with people who, like characters in an Aldous Huxley novel, spoke naturally, without pretence, about the Etruscans at breakfast. That was how Antonio’s mind worked. He had read extensively, spoke five languages, knew art intimately and hungered for more such stimulation. Every conversation at the Sonnabend apartment in Venice, or more often, at the café outside among artists and writers provided it: it was rich with cultural references—and humor. Intellectual stimulation and raucous laughter were essential cohabitants in their circle.

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It was not until 1971, when the gallery returned to New York and opened in SoHo at 420 West Broadway, that Antonio’s mark could truly be detected. By then, he had discovered an underground movement in the city that went unrecognized by other commercial galleries and didn’t register at all with museums. Antonio began to influence Ileana to take on more daring artists, artists whose work couldn’t be sold but who he believed must be shown. That was part of the excitement for both of them. They wanted to share their discoveries with gallery visitors.

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The British artists, Gilbert & George, were not long out of art school when they opened the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo and caused a sensation. There was nothing on offer, to speak of, except ideas. Vito Acconci, with his notorious Seedbed, was another early case in point.

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Leo Castelli, Ileana’s first husband, had a gallery in the building and was perplexed by the work being shown by his ex-wife. “We would do things just for the excitement of doing them. Actually, both Michael and Leo always said, ‘Why are you doing this? There’s nothing to sell!’” On a list of priorities, whether a work sold was near the bottom. What mattered was whether it was interesting.

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Antonio considered the gallery his home; where he slept was immaterial, he said. Eventually, he moved in with Michael and Ileana in an apartment on Lower Fifth Avenue. They were in all but biology a family. So, in 1986, when Antonio needed a Green Card, Ileana suggested she and Michael adopt him. Michael agreed readily saying, “He’s been our son for a long time.”

The art world at that point had begun being referred to as the art market. Money became the measure of success rather than artistic merit. That casino environment was not Antonio’s world. There was a misconception among artists and the broader art world that Ileana was so wealthy she needn’t worry about selling art. That was not true. Everything she had, which meant that everything Antonio had, went into art. It was a constant flow. Part of that investment in art meant that the Sonnabend Gallery had produced a Sonnabend Collection, which was immensely valuable. But not until the late 1980s did Antonio, Ileana and Michael even think of it as a collection. They did so when a French curator asked if he could tour the work internationally. At that moment, the art world became aware of the art story that Ileana, Antonio, and Michael had written.
 

It was a love story: the love of art, the love of possibility; but mostly, their love for each other. Antonio said: “Whatever happened always seemed to me less important than what we all were.”
 

On learning of Antonio’s death, Gilbert & George wrote: “Goodbye, our dear Antonio… We miss him very much, especially his laugh.” Antonio is survived by his son, Phokion Potamianos Homem, his daughter-in-law Liz Anne Potamianos Homem, and his beloved granddaughter, Chloe Potamianos Homem.
 

Mary Gabriel is the author of five biographies, including her most recent, "Madonna: A Rebel Life." Her acclaimed "Ninth Street Women" received the 2022 NYU/Axinn Foundation Prize for Narrative Nonfiction and the 2019 Mary Lynn Kotz Award for Art in Literature, presented by the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

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Download a copy of Antonio Homem-Sonnabend's obituary by Mary Gabriel here.