Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (25 June 1884 – 11 January 1979) was a German-born art collector, and one of the most notable French art dealers of the 20th century. He became prominent as an art gallery owner in Paris beginning in 1907 and was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubist movement in art.
Early life Kahnweiler was born in 1884 in Mannheim, Baden to a prosperous Jewish family.DANIEL-HENRY KAHNWEILER –. (21 September 2017). PATRONS. https://patrons.org.es/kahnweiler-daniel-henry/ His family had previously moved from Rockenhausen, a small village in the Palatinate. Kahnweiler grew up in Stuttgart and was trained to study finance and philosophy. Through contact with his great-uncle, Joseph Goldscheider, he was introduced to music and painting, encouraging him to visit European museums, where he discovered Boucher, Chardin, Rembrandt and Cranach. His upbringing and education at a German Gymnasium prepared him for his life as an art connoisseur and pragmatic businessman. Early employment in the family business of stock brokerage in Germany and Paris gave way to an interest in art collecting while Kahnweiler was still in his twenties. In 1902, he came to live in Paris and frequented the Louvre and the Luxembourg museums. At this time, Kahnweiler discovered Impressionist painting and in particular Cézanne, whom he valued as the beginner of a new style of painting. He became convinced that he wanted to be an art dealer, somebody like Ambroise Vollard. In 1904, he met his future wife, Lucie Godon (1882-1945), with whom he lived in a common-law relationship, her family being opposed to the marriage. He opened his first small art gallery (4 by 4 meters) in Paris in February 1907 at 28 rue Vignon, at age 23. There was a family precedent for such an enterprise, since his uncle Joseph Goldscheider, who ran a famous stock brokerage house in London, was a major art collector of traditional English art works and furniture.
Art dealer
Kahnweiler is considered to have been one of the greatest supporters of the Cubist art movement through his activities as an art dealer and spokesman for artists. He was among the first people to recognize the importance and beauty of Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and immediately wanted to buy it along with all of Picasso's works. Picasso wrote of Kahnweiler, "What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn't had a business sense?" Kahnweiler's appreciation of Picasso's talents was especially gratifying to the artist, since he was largely unknown and destitute at the time when many of his most famous works were created.
In his gallery, Kahnweiler supported many of the great artists of his time who found themselves without adequate recognition and little or no interest among collectors. Initial purchases included works by Kees van Dongen, André Derain, André Masson, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Maurice de Vlaminck and several other artists of the same generation. To use his own word, Kahnweiler wanted to "defend" great artists, but only those who had no dealers and of whose talents he was convinced. Rather than exhibiting appealing works by established artists from the past and present, Kahnweiler championed burgeoning artists who had come from all over the globe to live and work in Montparnasse and Montmartre at the time. Thus Paul Cézanne, although a great artist, was considered too old to be represented, and his work was already represented by the dealer Ambroise Vollard in any case.
Along with such men as Alfred Flechtheim, Paul Cassirer, Daniel Wildenstein, Léonce Rosenberg and Paul Rosenberg, Kahnweiler was one of the influential art connoisseurs of the 20th century. As a businessman, Kahnweiler pioneered many new methods of working with artists and art dealing; these are now established practices in the industry.
In 1907, when there were only half a dozen viable galleries in Paris, he made contracts with artists to buy all of their work in order to free them from financial worries and permit them to concentrate on their creative work. First meeting Picasso a few months after his gallery was launched, he became acquaintaned with Max Jacob, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Guillaume Apollinaire. He met with them daily to discuss their work, photographed each work they produced (he felt it imperative to have a record), held exhibitions of their work and promoted their work internationally. Since he considered himself friends with many of them, he co-owned little sailing boats with his artists.
As part of his activities in promoting the work of emerging artists, Kahnweiler sponsored the first exhibition of the work of Georges Braque. He encouraged the practice of publishing Beaux Livres (beautiful books), in which a contemporary artist would illustrate a work of a contemporary writer. He expanded his presentations by bringing together artists, writers and poets to produce their works as a joint project in more than 40 books. Picasso, for example, illustrated the works of Max Jacob. As a publisher of art with literary works, he had no equal, and was the first to sponsor publications by Max Jacob, Guillaume Apollinaire, André Masson, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and many others. In doing so, he launched many literary careers.
Kahnweiler's entrepreneurial abilities were so acute that by the 1950s his art gallery was among the top 100 French companies in terms of export figures.
Kahnweiler and Hermann Rupf In 1903, Kahnweiler got acquainted with the Swiss-born Hermann Rupf (1880-1962) as they were both training at the same bank in Frankfurt. When Kahnweiler opened his first gallery in Paris in 1907, Rupf who was working then in his family textile business in Bern, became one of Kahnweiler’s first clients, and remained in close contact with him all his life. The correspondence between Hermann Rupf and Kahnweiler lasted till Rupf’s death in 1962, numbering about 700 letters and postcards.Pierre Assouline, L'Homme de l'art. D.-H. Kahnweiler (1884-1979), Paris, éd. Balland, 1988. Pp.38-39.
The couple of Hermann Rupf and his wife Margrit became the first Swiss private collectors to engage intensely with abstract art. Through Kahnweiler, they acquired works by Fauve artists (Othon Friesz and André Derain), the Cubists (George Braque, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger) and works by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Laurens and André Masson. Apart from their collecting activities, Hermann and wife Margrit Rupf also championed artists and advised and supported many Swiss and French artists. In his capacity of art critic, Rupf played an important role in the dissemination of contemporary art. Since 1954, Hermann and Margrit Rupf collection is located at the Kunstmuseum Bern.Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics, and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market between 1910 and 1930, Londres, Garland, 1981. Pp.27-29.
Art history Although the financial support for artists was an important contribution to art history, he was also a significant figure for his work as an art historian and eyewitness to the emergence of Cubism during the period 1907–1914. When working in Paris, his spare time was devoted to reading and understanding the history of art and aesthetics. He also spent his time visiting the city's museums and art galleries. Besides the museums in Paris, he took trips around the European continent to see what was being shown in museums and art galleries outside France. He gave his first interview on Cubism in 1912, and it was actual historical events that led to his career as a historian. There is a view that Kahnweiler's sensibility was such that his gallery, and the way he styled and developed it, was as much a Cubist gallery as were the paintings by Picasso and the other Cubist painters. Kahnweiler became the promoter of the “four musketeers of Cubism”: Picasso, Braque, Gris and Derain.Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics, and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market between 1910 and 1930, Londres, Garland, 1981. Pp.35-36 In 1913 Derain painted a portrait of Lucie called “Portrait of Madame Kahnweiler” Diehl, Gaston (1977). Derain. Crown Publishers, Inc. ISBN 0517037203. pp. 83-84 He was the first, with Wilhelm Uhde, to perceive the force of Picasso's “Demoiselles d'Avignon”, the founding canvas of Cubism which he saw in July 1907 in the studio of the Bateau-Lavoir Roland Penrose, Picasso, Éditions Flammarion, coll. «Champs» (no. 167), 1962, p. 161.
The gallery had a clear aesthetic position, uncompromising integrity, financial stability and creative development. During the years 1907-1914 his gallery was a central cradle for Cubism, not only to display the works, but where one also met the artists.
Concurrently, the primary means for avant-garde painters and sculptors to show their works to a wider audience remained the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne. Kahnweiler forbade his 'gallery Cubists' from exhibiting at these major Salons,Michael Taylor, 2010, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Modern and Contemporary 439, Metzinger - Tea Time (Woman with a Teaspoon), 1 Audio Stop 439, Podcast and by so doing, actually removed them from public view. From the viewpoint of the general public, Cubism came to be more associated with the 'Salon Cubists', such as Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia.Steve Edwards, Paul Wood, Art of the Avant-gardes, Yale University Press, 2004,
During World War I
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 not only ruptured the Cubist experiments in art, but also forced Kahnweiler to live in exile in Switzerland. Not believing the war might break out, he did not follow Picasso's encouragement to become naturalized in France. When war was declared on August 3, 1914, he was on vacation in Rome, which he extended, disobeying his order to enlist in the German army. Then he also refused to fight for his adopted country, and, declared a deserter, fled to Switzerland with his partner Lucie Godon, to live in Bern in the premices provided by his long-time friend Hermann Rupf. Due to his German citizenship, he was considered an alien under French law.
Many German nationals living in France had their possessions sequestered by the French state. Refusing to take a position between the French and the Germans, he was considered an enemy of France and as a result, Kahnweiler's gallery and the collection of paintings were seized on December 12, 1914 as "prise de guerre" (“war trophy”), to be sold at auction in order to raise funds for the state. What was confiscated in 1914, was later sold by the government in a series of four public auctions supervised in part by Léonce Rosenberg (first three sales) and held at the Hôtel Drouot between 1921 and 1923. Approximately 3,000 items were sold, including 1,219 works by Braque, Gris, Léger, and Picasso.Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics and Collectors of Modern Painting; Aspects of the Parisian Art Market Between 1910 and 1930, Courtauld PhD Dissertation 1977, p. 25Kahnweiler collection: Catalogue des tableaux, aquarelles, gouaches et dessins. Part II, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, November 17-18, 1921
Among these was Pablo Picasso's "Buffalo Bill," which Kahnweiler acquired from Picasso in 1912 and was auctioned at Hôtel Drouot in the "Fourth Sale of Sequestered Art," May 7–8, 1923, and a century later bought in auction at Christie's for $12,412,500 on Nov. 17, 2022.