Paul Rosenberg (art dealer)

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Paul Rosenberg among colleagues, tenth from the left (1938)

Paul Rosenberg (born December 29, 1881 in Paris , † June 29, 1959 in Neuilly-sur-Seine ) was a French art dealer and gallery owner . He directed the Paul Rosenberg & Company galleries in Paris, London and New York.

Life

Memorial plaque for Paul Rosenberg's gallery, 21 rue La Boétie in Paris

Rosenberg came from a Jewish family who had emigrated to Paris in 1859 from Pozsony (Bratislava) , which was then Hungarian . He began his career in the antique shop founded by his father Alexandre Rosenberg (around 1850-1913) on Avenue de l'Opéra in 1870, together with his older brother Léonce Rosenberg (1878-1947). From 1902 to 1905 he worked in Great Britain and in 1911 opened his own art gallery in Paris in prestigious rooms at 21 rue La Boétie. He was particularly committed to the young artists Pablo Picasso , Georges Braque , Fernand Léger and Henri Matisse , with a contract He already closed Marie Laurencin in 1913. In order to spread the commercial risk, he also had works by Edgar Degas , Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Auguste Rodin in stock, which were already considered safe values.

In 1918 he separated from his brother Léonce, who opened his own gallery de L'Effort Moderne in the neighboring Rue de la Beaume . Paul Rosenberg represented Picasso (whom he amicably called Pic and he in turn referred to as Rosi ) worldwide together with the art dealer Georges Wildenstein . They bought a significant number of his paintings each year. Picasso created numerous paintings and drawings that were based on members of the Rosenberg family. Picasso's connection with Rosenberg lasted until 1939, that with Wildenstein until 1932.

Starry Night (1889) by Vincent van Gogh was sold to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through Rosenberg in 1941.

Rosenberg opened another branch in London in 1935. He also loaned some of his pictures to the USA, for example to his moma , with whose first director Alfred H. Barr he was close friends. In 1940 the north of France with Paris was occupied by German troops ; Rosenberg was expropriated by the Vichy government because of his Jewish descent , he had to flee France and his French citizenship was revoked in 1942. Leaving his collection behind, he went to New York and again founded a gallery there on East 57th Street, which represented contemporary American and European art. The Institut d'Etudes des Questions Juives , the National Socialist Institute for Jewish Research, which ran anti-Semitic propaganda under its director Theodor Dannecker , moved into its looted gallery space on rue La Boétie .

After Rosenberg's death in 1959, his son Alexandre took over the management of the gallery until his death in 1987. Alexandre Rosenberg's widow, Elaine, handed over the archive with correspondence and photographs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2007 .

The journalist Anne Sinclair is a granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg. In 2012 she published the first biography of her grandfather, 21, rue La Boétie at Grasset , which was translated into German in the following year under the title Dear Picasso, where are my harlequins. My grandfather, the art dealer Paul Rosenberg , appeared.

The art collection

When Paul Rosenberg managed to escape via Spain after the German troops marched into France in June 1940 , he had to leave his art collection, which consisted mainly of works of Impressionism and Modernism , behind. The Nazi regime, or the task force Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), confiscated more than 300 works of art from his Paris apartment as well as from bank vaults and a store near Paris . In September 1940 the ERR acquired another hundred paintings stored in Castle Floirac . In March 1941 a German foreign exchange protection command tracked down a safe at a bank in Libourne where Rosenberg had hidden 162 works. The value of this bundle was estimated at seven million francs. It was brought to Paris in September 1941, collected in the Jeu de Paume and from here sold, distributed or brought to the German Reich . After the war, the art dealer received only a small part of his collection back.

Claude Monet: Water lilies 1904 from the Paul Rosenberg collection

The looted art expert Hector Feliciano described in his book The Lost Museum , published in 1998 , that between 1940 and 1944 203 collections with almost 22,000 works of art were confiscated in France alone, and went into detail about the Rosenberg collection. As a result of the identification of the paintings, the Seattle Art Museum had to publish the painting Odalisque by Henri Matisse and the Center Pompidou in Paris Woman in Red and Green by Fernand Léger to the heirs of Paul Rosenberg. Feliciano also successfully researched the whereabouts of a painting by Claude Monet and Pierre Bonnard . More works followed, but 64 works of art from the Rosenberg Collection are still considered lost.

Among other things, the case of the painting Water Lilies by Claude Monet in 1904 received public attention . It was confiscated in Floirac in 1940 and reached the Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop via the Jeu de Paume ; the Allies found it with Ribbentrop's furniture in Hamburg in 1945. Some time later it was sent to France via the Central Collecting Point , was exhibited in the Louvre from 1950 and in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen from 1974 . When the painting was loaned to a retrospective by Monet in Boston in 1998 , Rosenberg's heirs were able to identify it and make a claim for return. On 29 April 1999 restituted the French state the image to the heirs.

On November 5, 2013, the Augsburg public prosecutor presented a painting by Henri Matisse at a press conference on the Schwabing art discovery . It is a portrait of a seated woman that was confiscated from Paul Rosenberg's bank vault in Libourne in 1942 by Reichsleiter Rosenberg's operational staff ; his granddaughter Anne Sinclair claimed that the painting should be returned. It was restituted on May 15, 2015.

literature

  • Hector Feliciano: The Lost Museum. About art theft by the Nazis . Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 978-3-351-02475-8 (English).
  • Anne Sinclair: 21, rue La Boétie . Grasset & Fasquelle, Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2-246-73731-5 (French, German translation: Dear Picasso, where are my harlequins. My grandfather, the art dealer Paul Rosenberg . Kunstmann, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-88897 -820-3 ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Paul Rosenberg gw1.geneanet.org, accessed on January 14, 2013
  2. ^ Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalyn Deutsche, Walter Grasskamp, ​​Hans Haacke: Hans Haacke: for real: works 1959-2006 , Richter, Berlin, 2007, ISBN 978-3937572598 , p. 316
  3. ↑ Among others: Portrait de Madame Rosenberg et sa fille , Biarritz, 1918 (Micheline Sinclair-Rosenberg Collection)
  4. ↑ A present for the Musée Picasso in Paris . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of January 23, 2009
  5. ^ Artforum International, June 22, 1995 , accessed on August 27, 2010
  6. ↑ Information about the painting on the website of the Museum of Modern Art
  7. ^ A b Rachel Donadio: The lady reappears , International New York Times , September 13, 2014, p. 18, p. 20
  8. ^ Paul Rosenberg and company , The Paul Rosenberg Archives moma.org, accessed April 1, 2013
  9. ^ Thomas Buomberger: Looted art - art theft. Switzerland and the trade in stolen cultural goods during the Second World War, Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-280-02807-8 , p. 41
  10. ↑ zeit.de, No. 33, 2001 : Finder's fee required , accessed on August 26, 2010
  11. ^ Art Kunstmagazin, Issue 3, 1999: Travel ban for the water lilies  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed January 22, 2012@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.art-magazin.de  
  12. ↑ Munich art find of exceptional quality. Little clarity about ownership structure , Neue Zürcher Zeitung of November 6, 2013
  13. ↑ Strauss-Kahn's ex-wife demands painting back , welt.de, November 8, 2013, accessed on November 8, 2013
  14. ↑ Much criticism of dealing with Nazi-looted art . deutschlandradiokultur.de, accessed on December 17, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Rosenberg, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French collector and art dealer
DATE OF BIRTH December 29, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH June 29, 1959
Place of death Neuilly-sur-Seine