7

The Chess Player and the Showman

So many people had converged on the Hôtel Drouot, Paris’s main auction house, that even the double-sized room was not large enough to contain them all. It was an unusually distinguished gathering as well. A whole group of German art dealers had traveled to Paris for the sale—from Berlin, Munich, Düsseldorf, and Dresden. Vollard was there, too, along with several members of parliament, a curator from the Louvre, and various figures from the beau monde. Newspapers in the French capital had long been anticipating the event, and several journalists were on hand to watch. “It has piqued the curiosity of the public for nearly a month,” one reported.[1]

Such overwhelming attention was not to Kahnweiler’s taste, and he was glad to remain in the background, though he had offered to make bids for several of his Moscow clients. But he had much at stake. For the first time in its history, Drouot was staging a public auction of modern and avant-garde art, and a number of the nearly 150 lots were by his own artists. Until now, the works of Kahnweiler’s painters had been largely invisible in France, since he shunned exhibitions and catered to foreign clients. But here, alongside works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, and other post-Impressionists, were paintings by Derain, Vlaminck, and Picasso, including several of his most important pre-Cubist paintings. In effect, the sale would be answering the question of whether the new art that Kahnweiler had quietly been backing for nearly seven years had any lasting market value.

Kahnweiler needn’t have worried. Fueled by aggressive bidding from the German contingent, the auction took Paris by storm. “I’m not going to pretend that all of these paintings were equally deserving,” one startled reporter wrote. “But all, or nearly all, of them attained prices that were five or six times what they were originally bought for.”[2] When the auctioneer came to Picasso’s large circus painting Family of Saltimbanques, a Rose period masterpiece from 1905, there was such competition that the winning bid, from the Munich dealer Heinrich Thannhauser, went for about twelve times what the painting had sold for six years earlier. As soon as the hammer went down, Kahnweiler rushed for the exit: He was determined to be the first to deliver the news to Picasso.

By the spring of 1914, Kahnweiler’s attempt to turn the unheralded work of Picasso and his friends into an international boutique business had begun to achieve improbable results. Not yet thirty, the dealer had gained control of a group of highly unusual artists: the explosive Fauvist painters Maurice de Vlaminck and André Derain; the Cubist pioneers Braque and Picasso; Fernand Léger and Juan Gris, with their own variants of Cubism; and the picaresque Catalan sculptor Manolo. Of the figures the dealer regarded as true leaders of the new art, only Matisse, who was slightly older and had an arrangement with another dealer, had eluded him. A century hence, it would be easy to identify these men as the towering figures of the early twentieth century, but at the time he started, Kahnweiler was nearly alone in thinking so.

Within the Parisian art world, the “Kahnweiler Establishment,” as his artists were known, had acquired a mysterious aura. With their exclusive contracts, they were free to follow their art wherever it took them and virtually ignore the conventional art world. Avoiding shows, they hung together and continually challenged one another with their newest canvases. On weekends, Kahnweiler would join Picasso and his friends at the Cirque Medrano or the Lapin Agile, or go sailing with Vlaminck, with whom he shared a small boat. He ran the gallery so discreetly that he didn’t bother installing a telephone; sometimes, there were so few visitors that he would play chess with Braque and Derain in the afternoon. To outsiders, it almost seemed that the public was actively shunned. But by Kahnweiler’s own estimation, the number of people who “got” Cubism was tiny—no more than a few hundred in the entire world, he thought, and that was probably a generous estimate. In any case, popular acclaim was not what he was seeking. “We were sure of victory,” he said. “We were sure of ourselves.”[3]

In fact, his low-key approach, and his concentration on the German and Russian markets, had proven remarkably effective. Though he relied on a small number of specialist clients, he was starting to make money, and, as the Drouot auction underscored, a real market for avant-garde art was emerging—at least in Central and Eastern Europe. In 1913, a Russian collector who was a rival of Shchukin’s paid Kahnweiler 16,000 francs, or slightly more than $3,000, for a single Picasso. Meanwhile, the three Picasso oil paintings that the dealer sent to the Armory Show, priced at a fraction of that amount, failed to sell at all.[4]

What Kahnweiler hadn’t anticipated was that his solitary, single-minded gamble on the new art would draw interest from French society—and from another young entrepreneur with a dramatically different worldview from his own. A small, dark-haired, high-strung man who was not much older than Kahnweiler, he was a Paris-born art trader with a discerning eye and an unusual genius for marketing. He also had significant capital, and shortly before the Drouot auction, he had opened a huge gallery in one of the city’s most fashionable neighborhoods. Here, he was setting out to promote modern art on a hitherto unimagined scale. For the time being, he showed no interest in Cubist work, but his method presented a formidable new challenge. And though Kahnweiler could not know it, this new entrant would one day be vying with him for control over his most important artist: Pablo Picasso.

“Monsieur Paul Rosenberg,” the critic Louis Vauxcelles began his widely read column in Gil Blas, “young and audacious director of the very beautiful gallery that has just opened at 21 rue La Boétie, has kicked off…with a sensational Lautrec show.”[5] Though what he wrote was rarely profound, Vauxcelles was a man of unusual influence. During the years of Picasso’s and Matisse’s first breakthroughs, the sylphlike writer with pince-nez glasses and a carefully groomed goatee lorded over the French art press, contributing to nearly all the major Paris newspapers while editing the art pages of Gil Blas. Such was his authority—and ubiquity—that when he described a new art movement, his words generally stuck. It was Vauxcelles’s cutting remark that Derain, Vlaminck, Matisse, and their fellow colorists were a bunch of fauves, or “wild beasts,” that produced the term “Fauvism”; and it was his jibe, a few years later, that Georges Braque was reducing the world to “cubes” that led to “Cubism.” (Vauxcelles had been reviewing a small Braque show at Kahnweiler’s, and it may have been his caustic remarks, in part, that led the dealer to renounce Paris exhibitions altogether.)

But Vauxcelles could be a powerful advocate when he wanted, and in the early weeks of 1914, what excited him was the huge modern art concern that was improbably taking shape on an elegant street at the heart of the city’s Right Bank. Ostensibly, the critic was writing about Rosenberg’s “wondrous” inaugural show, a major group of paintings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Though the troubled artist had died in 1901 at age thirty-six, he had cast a long shadow over the avant-garde for his frank depictions of the Paris demimonde; Picasso had gone through a Lautrec phase early in his career. Now Rosenberg had gathered, for the first time, many of his most provocative paintings in a museum-like retrospective. To Vauxcelles, the painter’s “drugged out streetwalkers” and “melancholy priestesses of Lesbos” amounted to an astringent commentary on modern city life. “Lautrec depicted what he saw and what he saw was not cheerful,” he wrote. “He is neither moral nor immoral.”

But Vauxcelles was equally impressed by the way these paintings were presented. Situated on a street primarily known for its Old Master dealers, Rosenberg’s gallery occupied a high-ceilinged, marble-fireplaced townhouse that had been carefully outfitted in the most up-to-date style. Shown with the Lautrecs were new sculptures by Alfred Jean Halou, a popular disciple of Rodin’s, as well as furniture and objets d’art by Paul Iribe, a young designer who would later become Coco Chanel’s lover and work in Hollywood with Cecil B. DeMille. Clearly, it was a revelation to see the “Baudelaire of painting”—as another critic described the down-and-out Lautrec—in such a chic setting.[6] The overall message was unmistakable: Even the most outré works of art could be at home in a bourgeois townhouse, or what Vauxcelles called “an abode of modernist elegance.”

Rosenberg had not arrived at this formula casually. Like Kahnweiler, he came from an assimilated, upper-middle-class Jewish background and was precociously assured in his own sense of taste. Like Kahnweiler, he also harbored international ambitions, and saw himself on a larger mission to back the small number of new painters who he felt would be recognized by future generations. He also shared Kahnweiler’s unusual willingness to play a long game, and if necessary hold on to paintings for many years until a market developed. During his apprenticeship, Rosenberg had been stunned to discover how many of the most successful late-nineteenth-century galleries had left no enduring legacy. Many of them had completely vanished, he wrote, and their names were not “linked to that of any great artist.”[7]

Yet in almost every other way, Rosenberg was Kahnweiler’s opposite. Where Kahnweiler actively spurned Parisian society, Rosenberg was a close student of the manners and tastes of the Right Bank social world and believed that it had to be conquered rather than ignored. Characteristically, while Kahnweiler had married a woman from the provinces and by his own admission had no taste for money or luxury, Rosenberg, in the same year that he opened his big gallery, had married into a Parisian family more elevated than his own. Nor did Rosenberg share Kahnweiler’s intellectual proclivities. Where Kahnweiler tracked the minute evolution of his artists’ work and would soon write the first history of Cubism, Rosenberg saw himself as a connoisseur businessman, a man who could tell in an instant if a painting had the intangible qualities of greatness, but who rarely had much to say about an artist’s methods or approach. Above all, the two men held categorically different views about how to build the avant-garde market—and where to build it.

Born in 1881, Rosenberg was Picasso’s exact contemporary, yet he inhabited a world that was entirely unknown to the Spaniard and his bohemian cohort. Together with his brother, Léonce, he had been groomed from an early age to take over his father’s business selling late-nineteenth-century art to the city’s bankers and aristocrats. The Paris of Rosenberg’s youth was a city of bibelot-filled drawing rooms, cultivated manners, obsessive fashions, the opera. It was a culture led by the great Jewish banking dynasties from Central Europe—the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Kanns, the Camondos, the Cahen d’Anvers—whose literary salons and art-filled homes were part of the belle époque world depicted by Marcel Proust.

Rosenberg’s father was not quite part of this set, but he had traded paintings with many of these families and was versed in their tastes. “We had close social and also family ties with Charles Ephrussi, a man with a very artistic temperament and refined taste,” Rosenberg wrote. (It was Rosenberg’s father who acquired Manet’s remarkable still life A Bundle of Asparagus from Ephrussi, a painting that was decades later evoked in Proust’s The Guermantes Way. “There was nothing else in the picture, just a bundle of asparagus exactly like the ones you are eating now,” the Duc de Guermantes exclaims.[8]) He had fallen early and hard for Manet and Renoir as well as several of their more radical successors. In 1892, when Rosenberg was eleven, his father took him to a small gallery to see a group of paintings by an obscure, recently deceased artist. The paintings were violently colored, with thick brushstrokes, and Rosenberg found them somewhat terrifying, but his father, who did not know the artist, was completely taken. In fact, they were attending the first Van Gogh show ever attempted in Paris. Although there was hardly any market for them, he began buying a series of Van Goghs, including the now celebrated interior Bedroom in Arles. Rosenberg’s mother worried that her husband was ruining the family, but these enthusiasms soon proved farsighted, and he was able to pass on to Rosenberg a strong position in the market.[9]

Amid this aesthetic education, the young Rosenberg was also exposed to the rampant anti-Jewish prejudice that coursed through the French art world. A common charge in the late-nineteenth-century press was that “energetic Israelites” were using art to gain entrée to the most aristocratic circles; men like Ephrussi were derided as operators and financiers who manipulated prominent artists to flaunt their own status. Soon the attitude spread to modern artists themselves. By the 1890s, despite the crucial patronage the Jewish elite had given Renoir and Degas, both were openly endorsing the virulent anti-Semitism of the time. When Émile Zola published “J’accuse…!,” his celebrated open letter to the French president defending the falsely convicted Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus, Renoir was outraged. “They come to France to earn money, but if there is any fighting to be done they hide behind the first tree,” Renoir ranted to Julie Manet, the painter’s niece. “If they keep getting thrown out of all countries, there must be a good reason for it.”[10] Decades later, on the eve of World War II, Rosenberg would have to confront the terrifying monster these currents had created. An entrepreneur at heart, however, he did not let politics interfere with the art he loved, or the clients who frequented his gallery. Notably, he became the aging Renoir’s loyal dealer and friend, and would remain so until the painter’s death in 1919.[11]


Finding he had a shrewd mind for the trade, Rosenberg rapidly expanded his father’s business in nineteenth-century art. But he also found it stifling. He had trained in London and was eager to break into new markets abroad; he was also impatient to venture into more daring modern art. “I was tormented by the idea of selling paintings I did not truly like,” he said.[12] By the time he opened his new gallery, in early 1914, he had accumulated significant capital and was ready to explore the riskier terrain of the twentieth century.

At the time, most of the dealers engaged with the new art occupied simple, barren spaces that were as inhospitable as they were austere. Kahnweiler’s gallery was so small he had room to hang only a few paintings at a time; Ambroise Vollard, the gray eminence of modern art dealing, presided over what Kahnweiler himself described as “a funny little hole in the wall with nothing but an old frame in the window.”[13] Most of these dealers didn’t expect—or want—to reach a large audience and felt that connoisseurs knew where to find them.

By contrast, Rosenberg conceived his whole enterprise as a kind of public performance. In a short manifesto he circulated at the time of his Lautrec exhibition, he argued that avant-garde galleries all suffered from the same flaw: The art was presented in cold isolation, without a context to which viewers could relate. The absence of a welcoming setting only made the innovative canvases more unsettling. By evoking what he called “the atmosphere of a private home,” Rosenberg believed his gallery could make challenging art as appealing as the elegant zebrawood furniture he was showcasing alongside it. It was a risky strategy: By presenting the work of avant-garde painters as a kind of “style,” the dealer was in danger of obscuring the radical new ideas and approaches they sought to harness. In later years, Kahnweiler would grumble that his rival was little more than “an interior decorator.” But Rosenberg was more sophisticated than that. He understood that taste for the new was something that had to be nurtured, and saw his own work, in part, as leading the public gently forward.[14]

One way that Rosenberg approached this delicate task was by continuing his flourishing trade in Monets and Renoirs. In part, this was a matter of sheer business calculation. Since the market for new artists was unproven, he needed the reliable profits that his expensive nineteenth-century paintings could bring. But the mix of classic and contemporary artists served another purpose as well: Rather than presenting the newest painters as breaking with the Western tradition, he sought to connect them to it. Such a notion was at odds with the avant-garde purism of Kahnweiler, who couldn’t imagine selling Cézannes, and it also challenged the way that Braque and Picasso thought of themselves. But it was an approach that would prove remarkably effective for modern art in the long run, not least in the United States, where there was very little context for understanding it. Even Quinn would come to realize that the “shock” of the Armory Show was not perhaps the best way to make the new art stick with the public.

But these were matters for the future. For Picasso, Braque, and their fellow artists, Kahnweiler was their uncontested impresario; that Rosenberg, an erstwhile nineteenth-century specialist who catered to an utterly different clientele, might be able to challenge him was not even in question. As the spring unfolded, Kahnweiler had new reasons for optimism. His patient strategy had begun to bring Picasso’s work to cities all over the Continent. His artists, or at least their early works, were for the first time being sold at Paris’s main auction house. And he was beginning to make a little money. Increasingly convinced by the long-term staying power of his artists, he paid no attention to the political tensions and surging nationalism that seemed to be spreading across Europe. As a German Jewish émigré in Paris who sold paintings by a Spanish bohemian to Russian industrialists and Czech connoisseurs, he could not conceive that the cosmopolitan Europe on which his entire business depended was about to be torn apart.

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