Léonce Rosenberg (12 September 1879 in Paris – 31 July 1947 in Neuilly-sur-Seine) was an art collector, writer, publisher and art dealer. He was a supporter and promoter of the cubists, especially during World War I and in the years immediately after.
Early life The son of an antique dealer Alexandre Rosenberg and brother of the gallery owner Paul Rosenberg (21 rue de la Boétie, Paris), Léonce Rosenberg attended the Lycée Rollin in Paris followed by commercial training in Antwerp and London as well as travels to Berlin, Vienna and New York. Léonce Rosenberg took the opportunity to visit galleries and museums to broaden his artistic knowledge and appreciation, and to develop contacts in the art world.
After returning to Paris he worked with his brother Paul in the family business. In 1906 Léonce and his brother took over the running of the family gallery, then on Avenue de l'Opéra and which had been in existence since 1872. It specialised in 19th- and early 20th-century art, including Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings.
The two brothers parted company commercially in 1910, with Paul continuing from new premises at 21 Rue de la Boétie while Léonce opened his own business, called Haute Epoque, at 19 Rue de la Baume, dealing in a range of objects from French antiques to archaeological pieces to Persian miniatures.
Léonce Rosenberg, however, soon began increasingly to be drawn to the avant garde experimentation of which Paris was the centre, and he began acquiring works by Cubist artists, bought mainly from the gallery of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who was at the time the primary dealer and promoter of the Cubists. By 1914 his collection included works by Pablo Picasso, Auguste Herbin and Juan Gris, as well as examples of the types of Asian, Egyptian and African art that were firing the avant garde imagination.
World War I and its aftermath World War I proved to be the defining opportunity of Léonce Rosenberg's career.
Even before the war, growing anti-German sentiment and the role of German dealers in the rise of Cubism attracted hostility and led to Cubism being characterised as a German movement, even though most of the artists were French or Spanish. The outbreak of war also drove many of the artists who made up the avant garde circle to leave Paris. Some were called up to fight. Some left for the south of France while others, especially those with German connections or who were not French citizens, dispersed to Spain, Portugal and even America.
The same was true of many of the collectors and dealers. Galleries closed. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who until the war was the primary dealer for many of the Cubists, was left stranded in Switzerland during the war. As a German citizen he couldn't return to France, and his collection was seized by the French government. It left Kahnweiler's roster of artists without their livelihood.
In stepped Léonce Rosenberg. He had begun to collect avant garde, especially Cubist, art before the war, but he now stepped up this activity with the encouragement of André Level, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, who were all instrumental in persuading him to fill the hole left by Kahnweiler.
Even while serving in 1916 and 1917 as an auxiliary army volunteer based in Meudon and English interpreter on the Somme front, he continued during his periods of leave to buy paintings by Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Auguste Herbin and Fernand Léger. He also began to prepare for the end of the war. By the end of 1916 he had managed to sign contracts with Jacques Lipchitz, Henri Laurens, Diego Rivera, Auguste Herbin, Juan Gris, Jean Metzinger and Georges Braque. Fernand Léger followed later, in 1918. Léonce Rosenberg also established commercial relationships with Gino Severini, Henri Hayden and María Blanchard.
His relationship with Picasso was less formal. Although for a time he bought and sold paintings by Picasso, no contract was ever signed. And although Picasso was among those who had initially encouraged Léonce Rosenberg to step into the breach left by Kahnweiler, Picasso himself decided after the war instead to sign up with Léonce's brother Paul, who had begun to take an increasing interest in modern artists for whom there was already an established demand. It was the start of an increasingly intense commercial rivalry between the two brothers.
Léonce Rosenberg's wartime support, when no one else would take the risk, was a lifeline for many of the avant garde artists, who would have been left without a livelihood following the forced absence from France of Kahnweiler, their previous commercial outlet. Léonce Rosenberg was later able to boast: "During the entire duration of the war and even while mobilized, I subsidized, by continuous purchases, the entire Cubist movement."
Kahnweiler himself later stated that Léonce Rosenberg had taken on "the task that I could no longer fulfill: the defense of Cubism."
It was by no means a straightforward handing over of the baton, however. There was still the matter of Kahnweiler's pre-war stock that had been seized by the French government as a "prise de guerre". Léonce Rosenberg managed in 1921 to secure a role as "expert" in helping to supervise the public auction of Kahnweiler's collection and that of another prominent German collector and dealer, Wilhelm Uhde. Kahnweiler had returned to Paris in 1920 and set up in business again with the help of an old friend. Rosenberg hoped to preserve his newly gained position as the main dealer for the Cubists by preventing his chief competitor from re-acquiring his stock. He also thought that the prices the Cubists could command would rise.
On this last calculation he was sorely mistaken. Around 3,000 items were sold over a series of four auctions from 1921 to 1923 at the Hôtel Drouot, one of the leading Parisian auction houses. They included more than 1,200 works by Braque, Gris, Léger, and Picasso. Bidding was lacklustre, mainly because many of the potential buyers had little money and because the market became saturated through the rapid sale of so many paintings. Although Léonce Rosenberg was able to expand his own stock to some extent at knockdown prices, Kahnweiler managed to pick up most of the works by Gris and Braque that were up for auction.
Léonce Rosenberg's role in all this angered many in the Cubist circle. It alienated some of the very artists who had contracted to Rosenberg during the war but who still felt some loyalty to their original dealer. It didn't help that the auctions also weakened the prices they could command. Braque, Gris and Lipchitz were among those who left Rosenberg in the fallout from the Hôtel Drouot auctions.
Galerie de L'Effort Moderne
In early 1918 Léonce Rosenberg renamed his gallery the Galerie de L'Effort Moderne and recast his business to focus on avant garde art, especially Cubism.
Its inaugural exhibition, from March 1 to 22, 1918 was dedicated to the work of Auguste Herbin. And in the months following the 11 November 1918 Armistice, Rosenberg mounted a rapid succession of high-profile exhibitions showcasing the artists he had signed up. It was the turn of Henri Laurens in December 1918, with Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Gino Severini and Picasso following during the course of 1919. There were also exhibitions outside Paris, including of the L'Effort Moderne Cubists in Geneva in 1920 and the first one-man show of Picasso's work in the United Kingdom, in 1921.
This campaign had to do more than simply market a commercial product. There were those who actively sought to have Cubism - or at least the L'Effort Moderne brand of it - wiped from the artistic map. A concerted assault was mounted by hostile critics including André Salmon and Louis Vauxcelles, through the pages of journals such as Le Carnet de la Semaine. It was a battle as much for the minds of those who influenced taste and trends in the Parisian art market as for the pockets of those with the money to spend in that market.
In mounting the first post-war Cubist exhibitions at L'Effort Moderne, Léonce Rosenberg managed to re-establish Cubism as a force within avant garde art, in the face of claims to the contrary by hostile critics. According to art historian Christopher Green, "this was an astonishingly complete demonstration that Cubism had not only continued between 1914 and 1917, having survived the war, but was still developing in 1918 and 1919 in its 'new collective form' marked by 'intellectual rigor'. In the face of such a display of vigour, it really was difficult to maintain convincingly that Cubism was even close to extinction".
Rosenberg had set out to present Cubism after the war as a "collective synthesis" rather than merely a group of disparate though visually similar artists assembled by a dealer. They had a clear theoretical framework. Juan Gris was the intellectual driver, Rosenberg the publicist, simplifying and amplifying the message. In Cubisme et tradition, published as a preface to an exhibition of L'Effort Moderne Cubists in Geneva in 1920, Rosenberg associated Cubist art with Plato's eternal forms, "beautiful in itself". He sought to tie Cubism firmly to a French classicism, traced back through Cézanne and beyond, rather than something foreign, or worse, German.
L'Effort Moderne was not just a dealer's gallery. It was also an umbrella for a wide range of related activities aimed at raising the profile of its artists. There were regular literary and musical events designed to draw in the Parisian cultural elite. The first of these, a reading by Blaise Cendrars and performance by Erik Satie, took place in February 1919 during Fernand Léger's exhibition.
Most notably, L'Effort Moderne was also a publishing house, Éditions de L'Effort Moderne. This published a series of books featuring not only the gallery's artists, including Braque, Gris, and Léger, but also closely associated avant-garde poets such as Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and Blaise Cendrars. 1924 saw the launch of an illustrated art journal, Bulletin de l'Effort Moderne. By 1927, when it ceased publication, it had run to 40 issues. It was a platform not only for Rosenberg's own views and the promotion of his artists but also a forum for critical debate and the theories underpinning the artists' work. Contributors included Piet Mondrian, Gino Severini, Giorgio de Chirico and Albert Gleizes among others. The poet Pierre Reverdy and the critic and propagandist for Cubism, Maurice Raynal, also wrote for the publication. The brightly coloured, art deco-inspired covers were designed by Georges Valmier, who also wrote for the journal and Rosenberg had begun to represent in 1920.
Although several of the leading Cubists defected from Léonce Rosenberg in the 1920s, some of them to his brother Paul, Léonce continued to represent a variety of modern artists including Giorgio de Chirico, József Csáky, Jean Metzinger, Léopold Survage, Francis Picabia and Fernand Léger. By 1927, however, Léger had also moved across to Paul Rosenberg.
In 1928 there were solo exhibitions for de Chirico, Jean Metzinger, and Georges Valmier. The exhibitions became more erratic after that, although Francis Picabia had two significant shows at L'Effort Moderne in 1930 and 1932.
Business practices