(Illustrated with 20 plates in color and black/white. Acco...)
Illustrated with 20 plates in color and black/white. Accompanied October 22-December 7, 1985 exhibition. Giacomo Manzu (1908-1991) was an Italian sculptor. 20p. Measures 9 inches square.
Paul Rosenberg was a French art dealer. He represented Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henri Matisse. He was also a president of the French Art Dealers' Association.
Background
Paul Rosenberg was born in Paris, France. He was the son of Alexandre Rosenberg and Mathilde Jellineck Rosenberg. His father, a successful dealer of antique furniture, also acquired paintings for sale, including those of the Impressionists. (He once bought Cézanne's Man in a Blue Cap, a purchase considered an act of pure folly by his wife. )
Education
Paul Rosenberg attended the College Chaptal in Paris until he was eighteen.
Career
Paul then worked as a dealer with his father, beginning by assisting with purchases of antiques in England. In 1902 he settled in London with his own firm, which lasted three years. By 1911 he had opened a Paris art gallery with his father. They offered for sale some old master paintings, but mostly nineteenth-century artists, the Barbizon school, and the Impressionists.
Rosenberg served as an enlisted man in World War I but was discharged for reasons of health in 1916. After the war, Rosenberg established his own firm in Paris. He had difficulty at first, because established houses such as Georges-Petit, Durand-Ruel, Bernheim-Jeune, and others dominated the market, and the best art gravitated to them. Rosenberg nevertheless developed a reputation as an astute dealer in modern art.
Later he obtained an exclusive contract with Pablo Picasso, serving as his dealer from 1918 to 1940. In 1922 Georges Braque joined Rosenberg, as did Fernand Léger in 1926 and Henri Matisse in 1933. Rosenberg recognized the stature of these artists early in their careers. His enthusiasm for Picasso led him to commission him to paint his wife. Picasso was not her favorite artist; she told him that she preferred the society portraitist, Boldini. Picasso therefore not only painted her seated on a decorative chair with her child on her knee, but also obliged with a small pastiche in the bravura Boldini style, with plumes, parasol, pearls and other jewelry and signed "Boldini. " In 1921 Picasso made a line drawing of Paul Rosenberg after the manner of Ingres. In 1935 Rosenberg opened a branch in London with his brother-in-law, Jacques Helft, an expert on French antique silver and the author of a monumental work on that subject.
Rosenberg played an active role in the 1930's in opposing the Nazi government's sales of socalled entartete kunst, or "degenerate art, " much of it by modern German masters such as Emil Nolde and Georg Grosz. Rosenberg waged an effective campaign among art dealers to boycott these sales, undoubtedly assisted by his position as president of the French Art Dealers' Association in Paris. Having thus aroused the animosity of the Nazis, when the German army invaded France in 1940 it was essential that the Rosenbergs leave before the Germans took Paris. Although he had most of his works of art transported to London and New York, his archives and records left behind were destroyed or dispersed by the Germans.
In 1940 Rosenberg established a gallery in New York City. After the war he never reestablished his European galleries, although he maintained close contact with the European art world and with members of his family in Paris. In 1953 Rosenberg became an American citizen. Although most of the artists he represented were European, he began to exhibit Americans regularly, and he had under contract Max Weber, Karl Knaths, Abraham Rattner, and Marsden Hartley. Rosenberg did not represent surrealists because he considered the movement essentially literary; abstract painting, he thought, was out of the mainstream. The last artist he placed under contract was Nicolas de Staël.
He had a high regard for American artists and predicted they would be an important international force, but he did not live to see their emergence in the 1960's and 1970's. Rosenberg held benefit exhibitions nearly every year. He was very generous in giving art to museums in the United States as well as in Europe. He avoided publicity about himself and his family and never wrote a memoir, considering such an activity self-serving, vulgar, and irrelevant to his function as a dealer. A respected connoisseur, he believed that a dealer's main duty was to maintain high standards and to assure authenticity, and that much of his success was due to his policy of never trying to sell anything.
In November 1953, Rosenberg exhibited his private collection of paintings. Works by Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Léger, Bonnard, and Braque were prominent. (He had begun to collect seriously about 1939. ) The critic Henry McBride wrote that the collection was "destined ultimately to be a legacy and a safeguard for his family. " Rosenberg died in Paris.