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.
Kahnweiler was born in 1884 in Mannheim, Baden to a prosperous Jewish family. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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. In 1913 Derain painted a portrait of Lucie called “Portrait of Madame Kahnweiler” 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
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.