René Gimpel

René Gimpel (1881–1945) was a prominent French art dealer, friend and patron of living artists and collector. He was the son of a picture dealer and the brother-in-law of Sir Joseph Duveen. His witty and acerbic Journal d'un Collectionneur, translated and published as Diary of an Art Dealer,[1] is a primary source for the contemporary history of modern art and of collecting between the World Wars.

Trained in the classic traditions of connoisseurship, a great admirer of Chardin, Gimpel had an instinctive sympathy for the modern contemporaries among whom he moved: Georges Braque, Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and above all, his intimate friend Marie Laurencin. The friend of Anatole France, and Marcel Proust in his last years, he had a selective high regard for many museum professionals but a loathing of the experts who provided attributions and certificates of authenticity for paintings in the market, above all, for Bernard Berenson, deeply embroiled with Duveen.

In 1907 he had an option with Nathan Wildenstein to buy the collection of Rodolphe Kann, with what were considered in those days ten Rembrandts; bringing in Duveen, the consortium bought the entire collection for $4.2 million, split it up and made vast profits. Repeated trips to the United States garnered him further fortunes from sales to American collectors, whom he skewered in his private diaries, as showing off all their pictures "like rich children showing off their toys". In May 1919, three weeks of concentrated trading resulted in sales of five paintings, including Rembrandt's Portrait of Titus to Jules Bache, a tapestry and a Houdon portrait bust, for $730,000.[2]

During World War II Gimpel was interned by the Vichy authorities for his activities in the Resistance, released in 1942, but then re-arrested. In confinement he taught English to his fellow prisoners, in preparation, he said, for their coming liberation. He was sent to Neuengamme concentration camp, Germany, where his health gave out under the strenuous conditions under which he was held.[3]

Notes

  1. ↑ Gimpel, Joseph Rosenberg, tr. Diary of an Art Dealer (New York:Farrar, Straus & Giroux) 1966, with an introduction by Sir Herbert Read; it covers the years 1918-39.
  2. ↑ Gimpel 1966:98-100.
  3. ↑ Read, "Introduction" 1966.