Rogues' Gallery by Philip Hook

Rogues' Gallery by Philip Hook

Author:Philip Hook
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781615194285
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2017-03-14T04:00:00+00:00


Kahnweiler: “the strictness of a Prussian schoolmaster.”

Nor was there aggressive selling from Kahnweiler. His view of the paintings he handled was that they should circulate without artificial promotion. He didn’t praise or bargain. The fact that he had chosen them to offer for sale to his clients was recommendation enough. If the visitor to his gallery wanted more information about a prospective purchase, it was up to him as the buyer to initiate a dialogue with the dealer, which in itself must have been challenging. “His intention was to transform a commercial success into a moral triumph,” says his biographer, Pierre Assouline, by which he means there was a sense of mission about Kahnweiler’s art dealing that transcended grubby considerations of money. Such high-mindedness can of course itself become a compelling commercial strategy.

The great Russian collectors of the early twentieth century, Ivan Morozov and Sergei Shchukin, bought extensively from Kahnweiler. He would send them small black-and-white photos of the latest Picasso he had for sale, usually accompanied by a brief letter. These letters were the reverse of a heavy sell, just stating with a certain finality “This is an important painting.” He would quote a price, which he liked to feel was nonnegotiable. But occasionally he would unbend sufficiently to come down a bit, “just to make you happy,” although the implication was that in forcing such a concession out of him the client had in some way acted dishonorably. Henri-Pierre Roché, another pre–First World War client, records: “In the beginning of Cubism, Kahnweiler in his small shop introduced me to Cubist Picassos and Braques without saying a word. He introduced me, and his manner said it all. He had the simple authority of someone who announces. For him, Cubism, newly created, was already a classic.”

There was indeed a heroism to Kahnweiler in his early support of Cubism against a background of almost universal incomprehension of what the movement was about and consequent public unwillingness to part with money to acquire it. There was also something of the afflicted hero of Greek tragedy in what he had to suffer at the hands of unkind fate in two world wars. At the outbreak of the First World War he went into exile in Switzerland, and left behind his gallery and stock in Paris. He could have got his stock out to New York at this point, but felt it was unnecessary as, in common with most people, he expected the war to be over in a matter of months. As it turned out everything was sequestered by the French authorities as “enemy property,” because Kahnweiler, despite his total absorption into French art and culture, had never bothered to renounce his German nationality. He came back to Paris in 1919 and mounted a campaign for the restitution of his property, but he never got his stock back, and had to witness a soul-destroying sequence of public sales of 800 of his precious paintings, often at ridiculously low prices because the market was flooded.



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