Flechtheim, Kahnweiler, and Art Patronage at a Crossroads
Art critics consider Daniel Henry Kahnweiler the greatest art dealer of the 20th century, namely because of his “discovery” and promotion of Pablo Picasso. Alfred Flechtheim shared a reverential passion for Cubism alongside Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and, together, they were instrumental in the promotion and elevation of seminal twentieth-century artists such as Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris. Kahnweiler was among the first to see in Flechtheim a gifted, passionate art connoisseur. In turn, at his professional zenith in 1927, Flechtheim credited Kahnweiler for having been a “decisive,” role model and a mentor who “influenced me to become who I am today…”13 In his biography on Kahnweiler, Pierre Assouline portrayed the Kahnweiler–Flechtheim collaboration as a long-term friendship with great affinities that even extended into joint art ownership, including Paul Klee paintings.14
Kahnweiler and Flechtheim honed their generation’s conception of “art dealership” as métier, one in which friendship, trust, and mutual valorization of their respective roles characterized the contractual bonds between artist and patron. Contracts in the art world at the time often lacked any legal paperwork, and litigation was very rare.15 The two men’s relationship was based entirely on trust. Flechtheim’s behavior after World War I suggests how deep the trust and collaboration went. As a German citizen residing in France during the war, Kahnweiler’s artwork had been confiscated by the French state. Flechtheim was one of the four Grassat syndicate investors whose efforts and financial risk allowed Kahnweiler to find his footing thereafter by “reacquiring a good proportion of his prewar stock [before World War I].”16
Flechtheim and Kahnweiler operated at the tail end of a radical change in the art world begun by French Impressionists. The latter had successfully shaken off the regulatory power of the French Academy and become art entrepreneurs who sought “commercial and critical system to support their art” and, in doing so, found that “growing networks of dealers began to respond.” 17 The support received by the Impressionists included stipends and solo shows organized by dealers and gallerists, most notably Paul Durand Ruel and Georges Petit.18 By furthering the path begun by Impressionists and their dealers, Kahnweiler and Flechtheim took the art world to new marketing heights in the immediate prewar years and, after the war, into the 1920s.19 Yet in their own professional lifetimes, both Kahnweiler and Flechtheim witnessed rapid changes in the ethos and modus operandi of artworld trade and business. They decried not only what they perceived to be shallow pretentiousness and crass pursuit of profit but also the soullessness and absence of passion, knowledge and engagement with art itself among the proliferating numbers of art dealers.20
In his 1960s interviews, Kahnweiler remarked on people’s surprise –a sign of changed times–when he mentioned that his prewar contractual agreements with artists were based exclusively on trust (including those between him and Flechtheim).21 Flechtheim, on his part, observed ruefully in 1937 that the art world had become the purview of opportunist dealers. He wrote, “But the Paris of today is not pre-War [World War I] Paris. It was beautiful and young, that pre-War Paris, full of fight and struggle, an art centre of the world in which the approaching triumph of the Impressionists was stimulating a new generation, the Fauves and the Impressionists, to fiercer action. Every lover of art, European or American, serious or snob, collector, writer or painter, would spend a few days there, a few months or a few years. For the time being, at least, he became a Parisian…” and “There, at the Café du Dome, le cerveau du monde [the brain of the world], he entered into discussions lasting from morning until deep into the night, on the subject of who was the greater—Cézanne or Van Gogh—just as later the odds would be placed between Matisse and Picasso.”22 However, he continued, “The discussions are over. Paris seems middle–aged and self–satisfied and speaks less about pictures than about prices. Everyone is an art dealer nowadays, whether he understands anything about art or about business.”23
In the 1960s interviews given by Kahnweiler, he only mentioned Flechtheim as someone whom he had been “in touch” with while he had the Flechtheim Galleries and to whom he had provided with paintings. Given their long collaboration and friendship, to say nothing of the debt of gratitude Kahnweiler owed Flechtheim with the Grassat syndicate, this shallow assessment of his relationship with Flechtheim is perplexing.24
El rinconcito levantino 