LONDON.- On 25 May 2017, Sotheby’s London will offer at auction a selection of paintings, sculpture, furniture, prints and jewellery formerly in the collection of Alexander Iolas, the twentieth-century art dealer whose legacy is credited with defining the careers of the leading artists he championed. From mounting Andy Warhol’s first and last gallery exhibitions and introducing an American audience to Surrealism, to shaping the careers and movements of those with whom he forged personal and lasting friendships, Iolas played a vital role in the post-war art world. Over 150 lots will be offered for sale, with estimates ranging from £100 to £150,000.

Georgina Gold, Senior Director, Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Department, London: “In many ways, Alexander Iolas lived a surreal life, and in constantly looking to the future and to the past, he was a Janus-like figure whose imprint on art history should not be underestimated.”

Iolas nurtured connections among artists, gallerists and collectors through his international network of galleries in New York, Paris, Milan, Geneva and Madrid, and collaborations in Rome and Athens. He was a renowned perfectionist and his attention to detail when staging exhibitions was fastidious. Each show was much like a performance for him, a fitting analogy considering his early years as a ballet dancer who toured internationally with Theodora Roosevelt and the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas.

“Each exhibition is like the premiere performance of a ballet,” he told the art historian Maurice Rheims in 1965. “I await the audience, I perform. I don’t consider the gallery as a commercial occupation. It’s a purely artistic occupation. An exhibition has to be a ballet, decorated by Yves Klein, by Max Ernst. It’s a show in which the audience members are the dancers, and the scenery is made by the painter.” Iolas was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1907, into a family of wealthy Greek cotton merchants. Although his parents wanted him to enter the family firm, Iolas defied familial expectations, recalling later that, “they could not take me away from the arts. I didn’t want to become a cotton dealer, not even a rich cotton dealer.”

During his time as a celebrated dancer on the ballet circuit, he developed his eye for art. An encounter in Paris with a painting by Giorgio de Chirico hanging in a gallery window was transformative, in effect sealing his career path as an art dealer. “I was drawn to the picture as if by magic,” he recalled.

Retiring from dance in 1944, Iolas was active in his career as a dealer for 35 years, between 1945 and 1980. He served as the director of the Hugo Gallery in New York for a decade before going on to open his eponymous galleries around the world. Unfairly overlooked in the roster of influential twentiethcentury art dealers, including Ileana Sonnabend and Leo Castelli, in recent years Iolas has been hailed as the “proto-Gagosian” of his day at the dawn of the era of the mega gallery and the celebrity artist.

Iolas had a talent for friendship, maintaining close relationships with some of the most prominent cultural figures of the time, including Warhol, Max Ernst and Rudolf Nureyev (with whom he danced in a Milanese street). His devotion to artists was unwavering, and he came to regard them as his family. Iolas not only extended the hand of friendship and financial support, he also played an important role in the creation of their artistic output, inspiring ideas and themes. From de Chirico, he commissioned costumes and set designs for a ballet production in Athens; in the mid-1980s he proposed to Warhol that the artist create a series of works based on Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ for an exhibition in Milan, a project Warhol relished. He was even one of the few people at the time to fully embrace Picasso’s late paintings, when these works by the artist were undervalued and unappreciated by all but a discerning few.

Iolas staged pivotal exhibitions of new work by Ernst and René Magritte, but also by Victor Brauner, Dorothea Tanning and Leonor Fini. He fostered the talents of artists such as Lucio Fontana and Claude Lalanne, and also connected with the Pop sensibility of Ed Ruscha and the eroticism of Takis, giving shows to both. His eye was informed by intuition, he said, rather than commercial considerations.

The bond between Warhol and Iolas was to prove unbreakable. They met in New York in 1945 when the young illustrator was just 17. By 1952, Iolas gave Warhol his first gallery show: ‘Fifteen Drawings based on the writings of Truman Capote”. The two continued to work together closely until their deaths, only months apart in 1987. Just as Iolas hosted Warhol’s first gallery exhibition, he would also host his last, commissioning a series of works, coincidentally but somewhat poetically based on Da Vinci’s the Last Supper. In Adrian Dannatt’s words, “Andy worked with many other dealers, but Iolas had a special place.”

Warhol produced several portraits of Iolas, testament to their enduring friendship. The gallerist can be seen in a 1972 diptych portrait, where he fades and appears through smudges of silver acrylic paint. Again, in 1974, Warhol immortalised Iolas in a portrait, against a proud blue background, in which Iolas stares straight at the viewer.

Quoted in Interview magazine in March 2014, Adrian Dannatt and Vincent Freemont – who collaborated on the exhibition that year at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York, ‘Alexander the Great: The Iolas Gallery 19551987’, of some 40 works by artists Iolas worked with during his lifetime – describe how Iolas cut a swathe through the art world with his flamboyant persona: “he made up for [his small stature] by wearing shoes with Cuban heels, outlandish furs… if you saw him you would stop and go, ‘Wow, who is this person?’”

His professional achievements were often attached to extraordinary stories – possibly apocryphal – and a legend formed that was in part of his own making. It was said that he had married Theodora Roosevelt to attain a Green Card and that curls of his hair were made into false eyelashes for Marlene Dietrich.

Michel Strauss, former Head of the Impressionist & Modern Art Department at Sotheby’s London, recalls visiting Iolas in 1979: “He opened a drawer which was full of Cartier watches, pulled one out and gave it to me. He had a big drawer full of those watches, which he handed out to his friends like sweets.”

In later life, having closed all but his New York gallery, Iolas concentrated his energy on his home, a marble palace that he built in an unprepossessing working class suburb of Athens. It was, in a way, his last gallery, a domestic space filled with the art that he had loved throughout his career and furnishings that complemented his flamboyant demeanour.

Iolas returned to New York, the setting of many of his greatest triumphs, and he died in Manhattan in the summer of 1987. The New York Times noted that he would be remembered as a dealer who could convince a client with “his hierophantic manner, his often sensational mode of dress and his mischievous and sometimes irresistible charm.”