Glory Years: Collectors, agents, gallery owners
Could you imagine the excitement when artists, who were struggling
to make a living and had trouble selling their work, were told that Dr
Barnes was in the city and buying up almost everything he could find.
He
was an opinionated American, self-made millionaire and collector. He
arrived in Paris in December 1922 and, with dealer Paul Guillaume, he
wanted to visit everyone, everywhere. Sometimes he bought art,
sometimes he didn’t. He was prone to criticize and could be pleasant or
not.
Barnes soon discovered Chaim
Soutine. He had seen Soutine’s, The Pastry Cook, bought it and wanted
more. Guillaume took him to see Leopold Zborowski. He supported Soutine
and was selling his work from his apartment on rue Joseph Bara. Barnes
bought everything available for the (then) gigantic sum of $3000. But
that wasn’t the end of it. By the time he left, he had purchased works
by Modigliani, Utrillo, Soutine, Kisling, Derain, Lipchitz, Marie
Laurencin, Pascin and others.
By 1923, he was constructing The Barnes Foundation and purchased over 900 tons of French limestone. They were adorned with two giant bas-reliefs done by Jacques Lipchitz. Barnes also added Cezanne’s Card Players to his collection in 1925, the same years that he published his first book, The Art in Painting.
Dr Barnes was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Legion d’Honneur by the French Government in 1926 and Officer in 1933. It was he who installed Matisse’s The Dance mural the same year.
Meanwhile, the dealers were doing a landoffice business. Guillaume himself promoted and collected Matisse, Picasso, Derain, and Rousseau, as well as Modigliani, Utrillo and Soutine. He exhibited Matisse and Picasso together as, he correctly felt, they had much in common. Guillaume was also a collector of Cezanne and Renoir. He purchased Cezanne’s Apples and Biscuits, Renoir’s Young Girls at the Pino, Marie Laurencin’s Portrait of Mlle Chanel and Matisse’s Three Sisters.
Of
course, Vollard and Kahnwieller had sold many Picassos as well. As a
matter of fact, when Leo and Gertrude Stein first bought Cézannes and
Picassos, they found them at Abroise Vollards tiny studio.
Cezanne was a magic word for Vollard who had a keen eye for Impressionist art. The Picassos were sold very cheaply but he had not really been discovered yet. The purchaser of Young Girl with Flowers by the Steins started a friendship between artist and Miss Stein. Soon Picasso did a portrait of Gertrude Stein which he gave her as a gift. He explained that in those days there was very little difference between a gift and a sale. Once Gertrude hung the portrait in her well travelMatisse paintings in America.
Two friends of
Gertrude and her friend Alice were the Cone sisters. They too began
collecting the art of the day and returned to Baltimore with some of
the best modern paintings of the day. Claribel was a physician and
pathologist. She and her sister Etta, an amateur musician, were friends
of both Gertrude and Sarah. They too began collecting art for their
respective apartments in Baltimore. Sometimes they would buy sketches
gleaned from the discards on the floor of Picasso’s studio for as
little as $2 or $3 each.
Clarabel knew Gertrude from her John Hopkins days. The Cones had inherited a large sum from the family’s textile business. By the time they were through, they owned about 500 Matisse’s, Gauguin’s Portrait of a Cellist, three Degas bronze ballerinas, including the Little Dancer aged 14, a Renoir, Cezanne’s Bathers and Paul Signac’s Quay at Clichy. They also owned a Dufy, Ernst and Yves Tanguy all worth about $100,000. The collection went to the Baltimore Museum of Art when they died. Today, the museum boasts a special Cone wing which allows one to see their diverse and fascinating collection.
The
collectors often held shows, some of which were stepping stones to the
artist’s fame. The Stein’s collection was on view all the time to those
who were lucky enough to be invited to their soirees on the rue de
Fleurus and rue Madam. Pierre Loeb was also a dealer who helped by
mounting exhibitions of Pascin, Miro, Picasso, Braque, Utrillo, Derain
and the Surrealists. His gallery was at 13, rue Bonaparte.
Berthe
Weill specialized in women artists like Alice Halicka, Hermine David,
Valentine Prax and The Licorne Group, which included Edouard Georg, Per
Krohg and Jules Pascin. She was a passionate supporter of those she
chose to support. Always a popular figure, more than fifty artists
toasted her at a twenty-fifth anniversary party with flowers and
speeches.
Adolphe Rasler, the man with the black umbrella, lived in Montparnasse. He dealt from his apartment until he opened a very conservative gallery in 1929 at 13, rue de Sevres where he concentrated on Dufy and Utrillo.
Pre WWI art was fueled by those who collected and showed in their salons, but after the war, new art and art speculation was taken over by the dealers who became famous and rich. They set up shows and fostered those who would create the new art of the twentieth century.
ed
salon, Picasso’s popularity grew. Of course, it certainly helped that
Gertrude and Picasso had discussed Cubism, not by name of course, but
the portrait was soon followed by Les Demoiselles d’Avignan. Gertrude
kept collecting, and while the collection is not like the Barnes
collection, it was a breakthrough. At the same time, Gertrude’s brother
Michael and his wife Sarah (called Sally) started buying Matisses. They
were the first ones to show
