Oscar Ghez

Oscar Ghez de Castelnuovo (born 1905 in Sousse , French North Africa ; died February 20, 1998 in Geneva ) was a Tunisian entrepreneur, art collector and patron. After the First World War , he and his brother built a factory in Italy to manufacture rubber products , which established the family fortune. After emigrating to the United States during the Second World War , he returned to Europe in 1945, where he continued to expand the company. In 1960 he sold the company and devoted himself to collecting art on a large scale. Oscar Ghez mainly acquired works by French artists or those who worked in France from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. He was the founder of the Musée du Petit Palais in Geneva, which opened in 1968 in a city villa he acquired. In 1978 he also donated more than 100 works of art to the University of Haifa .

Family and youth

Oscar Ghez was born in Sousse in 1905 to the Tunisian entrepreneur Angelo Ghez and his wife Corinne. His mother, who came from Florence, was the daughter of Baron Giacomo di Castelnuovo , the personal physician of King Victor Emanuel II. His uncle Arturo di Castelnuovo was a member of the Italian Parliament. Oscar Ghez's siblings were the older brother Henri and the sisters Odette and Ketty. The family left Tunisia and moved to Marseille when Oscar Ghez was ten years old. Here he first attended the Saint-Charles high school before moving to the École Supérieure de Commerce. He graduated from this business school with honors at the age of seventeen.

Construction of a rubber factory

After the First World War, Oscar Ghez went to Italy to live with his brother Henri, who had trained as a chemist. Together they founded a factory for the manufacture of rubber products near Rome. While Oscar Ghez took care of the company's financial affairs, his brother Henri was responsible for production supervision and the development of new products, for which he was able to register several patents. During the period of successful company development, Oscar Ghez married Nella Treves from Turin in 1937, the sister of the painter Dario Treves .

Since the father of the Ghez brothers was Jewish, the Italian race laws ( leggi razziali ) introduced in Italy in 1938 forced them to leave the country with their families. Through negotiations, Oscar Ghez succeeded in swapping the factory near Rome for a factory belonging to the Italian Pirelli group near Lyon. Here the Ghez brothers were able to successfully continue the company and developed the first assembly line system for the production of boots and pipes made of rubber.

Exile and return to France

After moving from Italy, Oscar Ghez's family first lived in Switzerland, where his son Claude was born in 1939. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Oscar and Henri Ghez fled with their families to the United States via Spain and Portugal. Here the income from their patents enabled them to enjoy a modest standard of living. Oscar Ghez later worked for the United States Department of Defense as an advisor on Italian affairs. In this capacity he was involved in planning the landing of American troops in Italy.

Shortly after the war ended, the Ghez families returned to Lyon in 1945. In the years that followed, the two brothers were able to build on the company's pre-war success and expand the business further. In the 1950s, Nella, the wife of Oscar Ghez, and his brother Henri died. He was then forced to continue running the company on his own, which eventually led him to sell it in 1960. He then withdrew completely from business life and settled in Geneva, where he lived until the end of his life.

Building the art collection

Since the 1950s, Oscar Ghez has devoted himself to building up his own art collection. In addition to old books and handicrafts made of ivory, porcelain and Chinese jade, he first acquired paintings by Italian artists who worked in the period between the First and Second World Wars. There were also some French artists of the 19th century, such as Jean Jacques Henner . A little later, Ghez concentrated on the group of artists in Montmartre , some of whose works he was able to acquire for only a few 100 francs at the time. These included in particular works by Maurice Utrillo , Alphonse Leon Quizet and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen , from whom Ghez acquired a larger block of works. A little later extended Ghez his collection to works by artists of the late Impressionism , Fauvism and later under the name École de Paris summarized artists of Montparnasse . Ghez got to know some of the artists still living at that time, such as Kees van Dongen , Emmanuel Mané-Katz , Moise Kisling and Tsuguharu Foujita , and some of them bought works directly from their studios.

To get an overview of the ever-growing collection, Oscar Ghez's sister began to systematically catalog the works of art in the late 1950s. Oscar Ghez's passion for collecting increasingly focused on works from the late 19th to the middle of the 20th century. For Ghez, the main reason for purchasing works of art was his own taste. For this reason, the collection lacks any kind of abstract art . In addition, Ghez found that some artists were overpriced on the art market, which is why, for example, works by artists such as Pablo Picasso or Henri Matisse only made it into his collection to a limited extent. Instead, he collected works of art from artists all the more intensely, which the art market had largely ignored. This included works by Gustave Caillebotte , Charles Angrand and Louis Valtat . As one of the first collectors, he also recognized the artistic value of the paintings by artists such as María Gutiérrez Blanchard and Marie Bracquemond .

By chance, Oscar Ghez came across works of art by Jewish artists who had perished in the Holocaust in Paris . The artists, also known as Peintres Juif à Paris , mostly came to Paris between the two world wars from Central and Eastern Europe and formed a community through the common Yiddish language . For his collection, Ghez looked specifically for works by these artists, who had initially been forgotten after 1945. In 1978 he donated 137 works of art from 18 of these artists who died in extermination camps to the University of Haifa .

Foundation of a museum and last years of life

After selling his company in 1960, Oscar Ghez devoted himself almost exclusively to his art collection. In 1965, he presented parts of his collection at the Musée Rath in Geneva, initially with no suitable exhibition facilities . In the same year he acquired a neoclassical city villa on the edge of the old town in Geneva as a suitable setting for a permanent presentation of his collection. On November 18, 1968, he opened the Musée du Petit Palais in this villa . In addition, he regularly lent works of art for exhibitions and steadily expanded his collection. In 1972 Oscar Ghez married his second wife Nicole.

In the last years of his life Oscar Ghez received numerous international awards. After he had already been appointed Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in France in 1957 , he was later named Officier de la Légion d'Honneur . He was also appointed Chevalier des Arts et Lettres . In Italy he was appointed Commendatore della Repubblika and had been a member of the Accademia Tiberina since 1976 . He also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Haifa and, in 1993, the highest distinction of the city of Geneva, the Genève Reconnaissante Medal .

Oscar Ghez died in Geneva on February 20, 1998. His museum has been closed to the public since his death. Heir to the art collection is his son Claude Ghez , who works as a professor of neuroscience at Columbia University in New York . Since then, Claude Ghez has regularly shown parts of the art collection at international exhibitions. Among other things, works of art from the Oscar Ghez collection were on view in Paris 2003, Rotterdam 2004, Québec 2006, Lodève 2007, Athens 2008 and Jena 2008/09 and 2011/12.

The art collection

Gustave Caillebotte:
Le pont de l'Europe

In more than 30 years, Oscar Ghez collected more than 5000 works of art. In addition to paintings, watercolors and drawings, there are also sculptures in this collection. Among the oldest paintings are works by the Barbizon School , such as Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot's picture Peasant Woman in the Field from 1866 . Followed by the works of a Henri Fantin-Latour , the works of art of Impressionism follow. In addition to pictures by Frédéric Bazille , Marie Bracquemond , Edgar Degas , Jean-Louis Forain , Armand Guillaumin , Henri Jean Guillaume Martin , Édouard Manet , Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir , it is above all a larger number of paintings by Gustave Caillebotte that this Represent style in the collection of Oscar Ghez. This also includes one of Caillebotte's major works, Le pont de l'Europe .

The late Impressionism in this collection with works of art by Charles Angrand , Paul Gauguin , Louis Hayet , Maximilien Luce , Henri Moret , Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec , Nicolas Tarkhoff , Louis Valtat , Félix Vallotton and Henry van de Velde represented. There are also works of pointillism by Henri Edmond Cross , Théo van Rysselberghe and Paul Signac . The subsequent art movements of Synthetism are with pictures by Émile Bernard , Symbolism with paintings by Maurice Denis , Paul Ranson , Paul Sérusier and Édouard Vuillard and Fauvism with works by Charles Camoin , Auguste-Elysée Chabaud , André Derain , Kees van Dongen , Raoul Dufy , Louis Legrand , Henri Charles Manguin , Albert Marquet , Henri Matisse , Jean Puy and Maurice de Vlaminck can be seen in this collection.

Oscar Ghez also collected works of art that were created in Paris between the two world wars. His collection includes works by Maurice Utrillo , Alphonse Leon Quizet , Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen , André Utter and Suzanne Valadon from the artist circle of Montmartre . The artist circle of Montparnasse is represented with paintings by Tsuguharu Foujita , Max Jacob , Michel Kikoïne , Pinchus Kremegne , Emmanuel Mané-Katz , Moise Kisling and Chaim Soutine . Also find themselves with works by Jules Pascin works of Expressionism , with works by Marc Chagall and Ossip Zadkine works of primitivism and works by Mikhail Larionov of work Rayonism in the collection Ghez. There are also works of Art Deco by Tamara de Lempicka , individual works by Pablo Picasso and Giorgio de Chirico, as well as cubist works by María Gutiérrez Blanchard , Jean Metzinger and Léopold Survage .

In 1978, 137 works were donated to the University of Haifa of the Peintres Juif à Paris . Artists in this group were Naum Arenson , Georges Ascher , Abraham Berline , Jacques Cytrynovitch , Henri Epstein , Alex Fasini , Adolphe Feder , Jacques Gotko , Nathan Grunsweigh , Karl Haber , Joseph Hecht , Max Jacob , George Kars , Moise Kogan , Nathalie Kraemer , Roman Kramsztyk , Joachim Weingart , Leon Weissberg .

honors and awards

• 1982 Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic

literature

• Oscar Ghez, Francois Daulte, Ezio Gribaudo: Paintres de Montmartre et de Montparnasse de Renoir a Valtat . Musée Rath Geneva, Edition d'art Fratelli Pozzo, Turin 1965.
• Rainer Budde (ed.): Impressionist imagery, masterpieces from the collection of the Petit Palais, Geneva . Exhibition catalog Cologne, Seemann, Leipzig 1994, ISBN 3-363-00628-4 .
• Sanford Sivitz Shaman: University of Haifa Oscar Ghez Collection, eighteen artists who perished in the Holocaust . University of Haifa, Haifa 1996.
• Manfred Fath (ed.): From light to form. Treasures of French painting from the Petit Palais Geneva . Exhibition catalog Mannheim, Prestel, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-7913-1841-1 .
• Gilles Genty: De Caillebotte à Picasso, Chefs-d'œuvre de la collection Oscar Ghez . Exhibition catalog Paris, Association des Amis du Musée du Petit Palais de Genève, Geneva 2002, ISBN 2951891105 .
• Luciano Caramel: Da Caillebotte a Picasso, i capolavori della collezione Oscar Ghez dal Museo del Petit Palais di Ginevra . Exhibition catalog Brescia, Mazzotta, Milan 2003, ISBN 88-202-1629-9 .
• Benno Tempel (ed.): Schilders van Parijs, 1870-1940, de verzameling Oscar Ghez . Exhibition catalog Rotterdam, Terra, Warnsveld 2004, ISBN 90-5897-190-2 .
• Maïthé Vallès-Bled, Gilles Genty: Chefs-d'oeuvre de la collection Oscar Ghez, Musée du Petit Palais de Genève . Exhibition catalog Lodève, Musée municipal Fleury, Le Vigan 2007, ISBN 978-2-911722-46-2 .
• Erik Stephan (ed.): From Manet to Renoir, treasures of French painting from the Petit Palais, Geneva . Exhibition catalog Jena, Städtische Museen Jena, Jena 2008, ISBN 978-3-930128-95-2 .

Web links

• Ghez Collection in the Hecht Museum of the University of Haifa (English / Hebrew)
• Exhibition with works from the Ghez Collection in Jena