Paul Rosenberg (art dealer)
Paul Rosenberg ( born December 29, 1881 in Paris, † June 29, 1959 in Neuilly -sur -Seine ) was a French art dealer and gallery owner. He led the galleries Paul Rosenberg & Company in Paris, London and New York.
Life
Rosenberg was born into a Jewish family from the Slovak Pressburg ( Bratislava), who emigrated to Paris in 1859. He began his career in the antiques business was founded in 1870 his father Alexandre Rosenberg ( about 1850-1913 ) on the Avenue de l' Opéra, along with his older brother Léonce Rosenberg ( 1878-1947 ). From 1902 to 1905 he worked in the UK and in Paris in 1911 opened his own art gallery in representative rooms in the rue La Boétie No. 21 Its use was particularly true of the young artists Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Henri Matisse, a contract with Marie Laurencin he concluded already in 1913. to scatter the mercantile risk, he also had works by Edgar Degas, Pierre- Auguste Renoir and Auguste Rodin in stock that already were considered a safe level.
In 1918, he parted with his brother Léonce, who opened modernity in the neighboring Rue de la Beaume own Galerie de L' Effort. Paul Rosenberg represented Picasso (whom he called Pic amicably and in turn was referred to by him with Rosi ) from worldwide in 1918 together with the art dealer Georges Wildenstein. They bought each year a significant number of his paintings. Picasso created numerous paintings and drawings, the members of the Rosenberg family had to the subject. The connection to Picasso Rosenberg lasted until 1939, up to Wildenstein 1932.
Another branch opened Rosenberg, 1935 in London. 1940 Northern France was occupied after the success of the western campaign by German troops; Rosenberg was forced to flee because of his Jewish ancestry from France. He left, leaving behind his collection to New York and founded again in the East 57th Street gallery, representing contemporary American and European art. In his robbed Gallery rooms in the rue La Boétie pulled the Institut d' Etudes of Questions Juives, the National Socialist Institute for Jewish Research, a that, under its director Theodor Dannecker operational anti-Semitic propaganda.
After Rose 's death in 1959 his son Alexandre took over the management of the gallery until his death in 1987. Alexandre Rosenberg's widow, Elaine, gave the Archive 2007 with correspondence and photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The journalist Anne Sinclair, the former wife of Dominique Strauss- Kahn, is a granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg. They publish 2012 Grasset a first biography of her grandfather, 21, rue La Boétie, which in the following year in German translation under the title Dear Picasso, where are my Harlequins. My grandfather, the art dealer Paul Rosenberg appeared.
The Art Collection
As Paul Rosenberg in June 1940, after the invasion of German troops in France managed to escape to Spain, he had his art collection, which consisted in particular of works of Impressionism and Modernism, leave. Both of his Paris apartment, like bank vaults and buying stock near Paris confiscated the Nazi regime, respectively insert rod Reich Leader Rosenberg ( ERR), more than 300 works of art. In September 1940, the ERR brought another 100 embedded in Castle Floirac painting itself. In March 1941, a Devisenschutzkommando the Germans felt a vault at a bank in Libourne, in the Rosenberg had hidden 162 works. The value of this ensemble was estimated at seven million francs, it was brought to Paris in September 1941, collected at the Jeu de Paume and sold from here, distributed or brought into the German Reich. After the war, the art dealers got back only a small part of his collection.
The stolen art expert Hector Feliciano described in his 1998 book The Lost Museum, were that between 1940 and 1944 in France alone confiscated 203 collections with nearly 22,000 works of art and went here in detail to the collection Rosenberg. As a result, the identification of the paintings the Seattle Art Museum had to issue the painting Odalisque by Henri Matisse and the Centre Pompidou in Paris Woman in Red and Green by Fernand Léger to the heirs of Paul Rosenberg. In addition, Feliciano researched successfully the whereabouts of a painting by Claude Monet ever and Pierre Bonnard. Other works followed, but are 64 works of art from the Rosenberg collection continue to be lost.
Under the public's attention was the case of the painting water lilies 1904 by Claude Monet among others. It had been confiscated in 1940 in Floirac and came across the Jeu de Paume in Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Allies found it with Ribbentrop furniture in Hamburg in 1945. About the Central Collecting Point, it was later returned to France for some time, was exhibited in 1950 at the Louvre and in 1974 at the Musée des Beaux- Arts de Caen. When the painting was awarded in 1998 as a loan to a retrospective of Monet in Boston, there were the heirs Rosenbergs identify and presented a claim for return. On 29 April 1999, the French government restituted to the heirs of the image.
On 5 November 2013, the Augsburg public prosecutor's office at a press conference Schwabing Art Fund before a painting by Henri Matisse. It is the portrait of a seated woman, which had been seized in 1942 by the Operations Staff Reich Leader Rosenberg from the bank vault Paul Rosenberg in Libourne; his granddaughter Anne Sinclair lays claim to return the image.