Milan, at Tommaso Calabro gallery exhibition on Alexander Iolas, forgotten gallery owner

Through Feb. 6, 2021, Milan ’s Tommaso Calabro Gallery is hosting the exhibition Casa Iolas. Citofonare Vezzoli, entirely dedicated to Greek art dealer and collector Alexander Iolas (Alexandria, Egypt, 1907 - New York, 1987), curated by Francesco Vezzoli with an installation by Filippo Bisagni. Alexander Iolas was one of the most important art dealers of the second half of the 20th century: among the first to create an international system of satellite galleries, he introduced Surrealism to the United States and organized Andy Warhol’s first solo exhibition. A friend and supporter of some of the greatest artists of his time, Iolas nevertheless began to be forgotten soon after his death. The same fate befell his Athens home, Villa Iolas, whose priceless art collection was looted and largely dispersed.

Resulting from research into the exhibition activities of this visionary art dealer, Casa Iolas. Citofonare Vezzoli intends to evoke the lost spaces of his legendary home. Through the gaze of artist Francesco Vezzoli, the exhibition proposes the rediscovery of a pivotal figure in the twentieth-century art market. Moreover, with this project, Tommaso Calabro continues his exhibition itinerary aimed at highlighting some of the most important but often partially forgotten gallery owners of the 20th century. Iolas House. Citofonare Vezzoli is the second chapter in a journey the gallery started in 2018 with the inaugural exhibition dedicated to the Italian Carlo Cardazzo (Venice, 1908 - Pavia, 1963).

Born in 1907 in Alexandria, Egypt, under the name Constantine Koutsoudis into a Greek family of cotton merchants, Alexander Iolas, as he would later be called, showed a flair for music and dance from an early age. Against his family’s wishes, at the age of seventeen he moved to Paris and then to Berlin, where he worked as a professional dancer. With the advent of Nazism, he moved back to Paris, the city where his first encounter with art took place. In Montparnasse he purchased his first work of art, a painting by Giorgio De Chirico glimpsed in the window of a gallery on Rue Marignan. During his years in the French capital, Iolas became acquainted with the Surrealist current and formed friendships with the most important artists of the time, including Georges Braque, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso and de Chirico himself. In 1944 he moved to New York, where he danced at the Metropolitan Opera. Following a foot injury, he decided to pursue a new career in art by working as Gallery Manager at the Hugo Gallery, which he directed for the next ten years. Here he devoted exhibitions to Surrealist artists he met in Paris, including Max Ernst (1946), René Magritte (1947), and Victor Brauner (1947), and, in 1952, organized Andy Warhol’s first solo show devoted to a series of drawings inspired by Truman Capote’s texts. Thanks to his histrionic personality and unerring business acumen, Iolas soon made his way into the New York art scene, eventually opening his own space in 1955 with former dancer Brooks Jackson, the Jackson-Iolas Gallery. In the following years, he opened an international network of art galleries (Paris, Geneva, Milan, Madrid, Rome, and Athens) where exhibitions of Brauner, Copley, Fontana, Yves Klein, Kounellis, Magritte, Raysse, Matta, Nicky De Saint Phalle, and many others followed one another relentlessly for years. In 1976, upon the death of his friend Max Ernst, Iolas closed all his galleries in Europe, fulfilling a promise he had made to the artist.

In the 1970s, Iolas realized his dream of creating a home in Athens where he could set up his extensive collection. Villa Iolas, built in the working-class neighborhood of Aghia Paraskevi on an expanse of seven hundred square meters and entirely covered with white marble, housed the gallery owner’s priceless collection. In its many rooms, Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Byzantine and Oriental antiquities found space alongside the works of leading modern artists. Following Iolas’s death in 1987, the lack of a written will, discord among the heirs and the local municipality’s never materialized intention to turn the villa into a cultural center condemned it to a sad fate of neglect and vandalism. With the exception of a few works donated by the gallerist to the Centre George Pompidou and forty-four works donated to the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, the rest of his collection was sold or dispersed.

A histrionic man, able to charm international cultural salons in five different languages with an undeniable savoir faire, Alexander Iolas determined the course of the art market of the Second Nocevent. The Tommaso Calabro Gallery evokes his life and personality by exhibiting works by some of the artists he showcased: Victor Brauner, William N. Copley, Giorgio de Chirico, Niki de Saint Phalle, Max Ernst, Lucio Fontana, Paul Klee, Yves Klein, Les Lalannes, Georges Mathieu, Roberto Matta, Eliseo Mattiacci, Pino Pascali, Man Ray, Martial Raysse, Fausta Squatriti, Takis and Jean Tinguely. In the gallery rooms transformed into the rooms of Casa Iolas, Francesco Vezzoli weaves a dialogue with the Greek gallerist’s universe by including some of his recent sculptures, including two previously unpublished ones, and three embroidery works made for the occasion in the exhibition. According to Vezzoli, “Casa Iolas is meant to be not only a tribute to a great and almost forgotten gallerist, but also to a gallery culture based on personal relationships of friendship, trust and mutual esteem, which the contemporary art market system seems to have definitively erased. This is why I wanted to pay homage to the figure of Iolas in his entirety, as a gallerist and collector, as a dandy of the art market and as an aesthete.”

Casa Iolas is thus ideally evoked through an exhibition design that will operate on three levels through the display of works by artists exhibited by Iolas, works by Francesco Vezzoli, and furnishings that echo the aesthetics of the villa. The installation path, which involves all the gallery spaces, is punctuated in each room by focal points where the three levels merge into true scenic installations. Barred windows help create the idea of being inside the house, just before its inevitable devastation takes place. The exhibition is accompanied by a valuable, fully illustrated catalog available in the gallery and on its website. The volume, published by Electa Editore, includes an essay by Luca Massimo Barbero, three interviews with Iolas, a conversation between Tommaso Calabro and Francesco Vezzoli, and a text by Filippo Bisagni on the exhibition layout, along with a rich selection of previously unpublished archival material.

Pictured: a room of the exhibition.

Milan, at Tommaso Calabro gallery exhibition on Alexander Iolas, forgotten gallery owner

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