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Draft:Antonio Homem

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  • Comment: This is deeply indebted to this dignitymemorial.com obituary. But it's most unlikely that the obituary was written independently of both Homem's family and his previous employer. Hoary (talk)WWU 👍︎ 08:48, 3 July 2026 (UTC)
  • Comment: In accordance with Wikipedia's Conflict of interest guideline, I disclose that I have a conflict of interest regarding the subject of this article. Sonnabendcollection (talk) 05:45, 1 July 2026 (UTC)
  • Comment: Note on sourcing: the obituary previously cited via dignitymemorial.com is the same text now cited as published by the Sonnabend Collection Foundation, where it carries an author credit (the biographer Mary Gabriel). Since it is not independent of the subject, its use has been cut to three citations: two quotations attributed to Gabriel by name in the text, and the date and place of death. The funeral notice is cited once, for the subject's full name and birth date. Everything bearing on notability and the career is cited to independent coverage: ARTnews, Finestre sull'Arte, Il Giornale dell'Arte, Artnet News (2014, 2019), The New York Times (2007, 2008, 2012), The Art Newspaper (2008), Artforum (2007), Diário de Notícias (2017), Público (2015), RTP (2015), Forbes (2012), Remai Modern, MoMA, and the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art (including the full 2016 oral-history transcript). Quotations were checked word for word against the cited sources. Eugenem scf (talk) 05:58, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Antonio Homem
Born
Antonio Esmeraldo Homem

(1939-10-13)October 13, 1939
Lisbon, Portugal
DiedMarch 24, 2026(2026-03-24) (aged 86)
New York City, U.S.
EducationETH Zurich
OccupationsArt dealer, gallery director
Years active1968–2026
Known forDirector of the Sonnabend Gallery; president of the Sonnabend Collection Foundation
Children1
RelativesIleana Sonnabend and Michael Sonnabend (adoptive parents)

Antonio Esmeraldo Homem (October 13, 1939 – March 24, 2026), known professionally as Antonio Homem and, after his adoption, also by the surname Sonnabend,[1][2] was a Portuguese-born art dealer and gallery director who spent nearly his entire career at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris and New York. He joined the gallery of the art dealer Ileana Sonnabend in Paris in 1968 and became its director and, eventually, its owner;[3][4][5] in the 1980s Sonnabend and her husband, Michael Sonnabend, legally adopted him.[6][7] After Ileana Sonnabend's death in 2007 he oversaw the Sonnabend Collection, a major private holding of postwar American and European art, and in 2009 he co-founded the Sonnabend Collection Foundation, which he led as president until his death.[3][4][8]

Over nearly four decades Homem worked alongside Ileana Sonnabend as the gallery helped introduce American Pop art and Minimalism to Europe and Italian Arte Povera to the United States; among the artists it presented were Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Gilbert & George, and, from the 1980s, Jeff Koons.[9][3][10][5] 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.[10][11][12] In 2025 he opened a permanent museum for the collection, the Sonnabend Collection Mantova [it], in Mantua, Italy.[3][4]

Early life and education

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Homem was born in Lisbon in 1939.[4][8] He was drawn to art as a child through his parents' art books and was at first fascinated by Hieronymus Bosch and Surrealism; as a teenager he was taken by his father to an exhibition of American art in Paris, where Edward Hopper's New York Movie made a deep impression on him—an early door, he later said, to his interest in Pop art.[5]

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 engineering.[4][8][5] In Zürich he spent much of his free time at the gallery of the dealer Bruno Bischofberger, informally helping to install shows, and at the opening dinner for a Pop art exhibition there in 1965 he met Ileana Sonnabend, whose gallery he would join a few years later.[5]

Career

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Ileana Sonnabend and her husband Michael Sonnabend had opened the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris in 1962 with an exhibition of Jasper Johns's work, and she became renowned for introducing American Pop art and Minimalism to Europe and Italian Arte Povera to the United States.[13][9][14] Homem joined the Paris gallery in 1968, beginning a collaboration with Ileana and Michael Sonnabend that lasted for the rest of his life.[3][4][8] He became the gallery's director and, eventually, its owner;[5][14][13] in her obituary of Ileana Sonnabend, the critic Roberta Smith wrote that Homem had become "something of an alter ego" to her.[13] The biographer Mary Gabriel later wrote that Homem was, "from the time he joined the gallery in Paris in 1968, its rudder."[15]

The Sonnabend Gallery opened its first New York space on Madison Avenue in 1970 and, in the fall of 1971, a space in SoHo at 420 West Broadway, in a building shared with the galleries of Leo Castelli, John Weber, and André Emmerich, in the early days of the SoHo gallery scene; Homem worked alongside the Sonnabends through the expansion.[16][3][4] The SoHo space opened with Gilbert & George's Underneath the Arches;[13][17][5] Sonnabend went on to give early New York shows to Americans including Vito Acconci and John Baldessari and to Europeans including Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, and Bernd and Hilla Becher.[13][5] Among the gallery's most discussed presentations were Acconci's Seedbed and, in 1991, Jeff Koons's Made in Heaven series.[13][10] The gallery championed Koons from early in his career, beginning in the 1980s.[10]

In the 1980s, after nearly two decades of working together, Ileana and Michael Sonnabend legally adopted Homem.[13][18][7] Michael Sonnabend was reported to have welcomed the idea, saying that Homem had in effect been their son for years.[7][19] Homem described the adoption as made for practical reasons, while saying that "Ileana and Michael were very much the real parents for me."[5][3][7] In the spring of 2000 Sonnabend and Homem joined the movement of dealers from SoHo to Chelsea, buying a 12,000-square-foot building at 536 West 22nd Street for $1.9 million and spending about $600,000 to convert it into exhibition space.[13][14]

Sonnabend estate and the Canyon tax case

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Ileana Sonnabend died in October 2007, at the age of 92, leaving her estate to Homem and her daughter, Nina Sundell.[13][6][10] 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.[10][18][17][20]

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.[11][21] The IRS nonetheless appraised Canyon at $65 million and sought $29.2 million in taxes plus $11.7 million in penalties.[11][22] 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,[12][22] and from December 2013 to April 2014 the museum presented Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New, an exhibition surveying her career.[9]

Sonnabend Collection Foundation

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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 its West 22nd Street building to Lehmann Maupin; its final exhibition, of work by Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, closed that November.[14][4] "I am now seventy five years old and felt I should simplify my life," Homem told Artnet News of the decision, adding that the gallery would continue without an exhibition space and that he intended to go on working with its artists.[14]

In 2009 Homem had co-founded the Sonnabend Collection Foundation with Nina Sundell, dedicated to preserving and presenting a collection of works dating from the early 1960s to the end of the 20th century, and he served as its president.[4][8][16] Sundell died in 2014, and Homem's son, Antonio Phokion Potamianos-Homem, served as the foundation's treasurer.[16][4][19] Through the foundation Homem organized presentations of the collection, including Sonnabend. Paris – New York, an exhibition of 49 works from the collection shown at the Museu Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva in Lisbon in 2015,[23][7][19] and a two-part exhibition at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto in 2016.[10][7] From October 2019 to April 2020 the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Canada, presented The Sonnabend Collection, comprising more than 100 works; it was the collection's first showing in Canada and its most comprehensive presentation in North America to that date.[10][24] Homem curated the exhibition himself, arranging it by loose groupings of movements, with a second half reflecting the collection's deep holdings in photography, including works by Gilbert & George, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Bernd and Hilla Becher, John Baldessari, and Candida Höfer.[10][24]

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 [it], in the Palazzo della Ragione in Mantua, Italy.[4][3][8] 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 (1964–66).[3] Homem was made an honorary citizen of Mantua; he died some four months after the museum opened.[4][8]

Personal life

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Homem had one son, Phokion, who became involved in the work of the Sonnabend Collection Foundation.[4][19] He lived for many years in the gallery's former SoHo premises at 420 West Broadway, surrounded by works from the collection.[7][19] In her obituary of Homem, Mary Gabriel wrote that he "had read extensively, spoke five languages, knew art intimately and hungered for more such stimulation."[15] 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."[5][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, his work for Bruno Bischofberger, and his decades at the Sonnabend Gallery.[5]

Death

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Homem died in New York on March 24, 2026, at the age of 86, after a long illness.[15][3] His death was announced by the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, whose director, Mario Codognato, said that Homem had "intelligently and sensitively preserved and transmitted the cultural legacy of Ileana and Michael Sonnabend," adding, "His passing leaves a great void in the international art community."[3][4][8]

References

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  1. ↑ "Antonio Esmeraldo Homem, Obituary". Frank E. Campbell – The Funeral Chapel. March 28, 2026. Retrieved July 14, 2026 – via Dignity Memorial.
  2. ↑ "Antonio Homem-Sonnabend". Sonnabend Collection Foundation. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Battaglia, Andy (March 27, 2026). "Antonio Homem, Champion of the Ileana Sonnabend Collection, Dies at 86". ARTnews. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 "Farewell to Antonio Homem, president of the Sonnabend Collection". Finestre sull'Arte. March 27, 2026. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 "Oral history interview with Antonio Homem, 2016 March 14–23". Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
  6. 1 2 "Ileana Sonnabend (1914–2007)". Artforum. October 24, 2007. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "António foi adotado pela Rainha das Artes e vive na antiga galeria". Diário de Notícias (in Portuguese). December 5, 2017. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Addio ad Antonio Homem, artefice della Sonnabend Collection di Mantova". Il Giornale dell'Arte (in Italian). March 24, 2026. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
  9. 1 2 3 "Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New". Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 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 July 14, 2026.
  11. 1 2 3 Cohen, Patricia (July 22, 2012). "A Catch-22 of Art and Taxes, Starring a Stuffed Eagle". The New York Times. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
  12. 1 2 Cohen, Patricia (November 28, 2012). "MoMA Gains Treasure That Met Also Coveted". The New York Times. Retrieved July 15, 2026.
  13. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Smith, Roberta (October 24, 2007). "Ileana Sonnabend, Art World Figure, Dies at 92". The New York Times. Retrieved July 15, 2026.
  14. 1 2 3 4 5 Cascone, Sarah (November 21, 2014). "Sonnabend Gallery to Shutter and Lease Space to Lehmann Maupin". Artnet News. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
  15. 1 2 3 Gabriel, Mary (March 24, 2026). "Antonio Homem-Sonnabend Obituary". Sonnabend Collection Foundation. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
  16. 1 2 3 "Who We Are". Sonnabend Collection Foundation. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
  17. 1 2 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.
  18. 1 2 Vogel, Carol (April 4, 2008). "A Colossal Private Sale by the Heirs of a Dealer". The New York Times. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
  19. 1 2 3 4 5 Mota Ribeiro, Anabela (February 8, 2015). "O mundo subterrâneo de António Homem". Público (in Portuguese). Retrieved July 15, 2026.
  20. ↑ Novack, Janet (February 23, 2012). "Even Rich Heirs Deserve A Fair Shake From The IRS". Forbes. Retrieved July 15, 2026.
  21. ↑ "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.
  22. 1 2 "Robert Rauschenberg's Canyon Donated to MoMA". Artforum. November 28, 2012. Retrieved June 30, 2026.
  23. ↑ "Galerista António Homem recria em Lisboa o "choque" da arte pop nos anos 1960". RTP (in Portuguese). February 4, 2015. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
  24. 1 2 "The Sonnabend Collection". Remai Modern. Retrieved July 14, 2026.
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