Full Description
Before the tragedy of the Holocaust, many of the leading art and antiques dealers across Europe were Jewish, establishing dynamic cross-Channel, international and transatlantic networks. Aside from a few famous examples, however, we are only at the beginning of exploring the diversity of Jewish dealers' commercial and cultural worlds, and reflecting on the particular conditions that made possible their dramatic expansion within the profession.
Adopting a wider geography than any previous study, this book brings together a team of distinguished international contributors to consider Jewish art dealers as an interconnected cohort, tied together by common strategies and a shared vulnerability. After an extended historiographical introduction, the volume presents case studies and trends from 1860-1940, including: Jewish family businesses in Western Europe; the role of Jews as mediators of art from East Asia; the antisemitism and suspicion faced by Jewish dealers; Jews as theorists, exhibition makers and promoters of modern art ; and the geographical mobility and professional reinvention of Jewish dealers in times of economic and political crisis.
With a wide variety of illustrations, including paintings, decorative arts, historic photographs and archival material, the volume adopts a mix of methodological approaches to analyse a key chapter in Jewish cultural history and in the history of the international art market.
Includes Afterword by Charles Dellheim, author of Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern (2021).
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: What Makes Jewish Dealers Jewish?, Tom Stammers (The Courtauld Institute of Art, UK) and Silvia Davoli (Strawberry Hill House and garden/Oxford University, UK)
1. Art Dealing in "the hands of Abraham's posterity": Jewish Art Dealers in Victorian London, Krystyna Matyjaszkiewicz (Independent Scholar, UK)
2. Moisè Michelangelo Guggenheim (1837-1914) in Venice: Dealer, Manufacturer, Decorator, Collector and Philanthropist, Nicholas Penny (Former director of the National Gallery, UK)
3. Mannheim, Father and Son, in Paris (1817-1910): From German Jewish Immigrant to Leaders of the Art Market, Camille Mestdagh (Université Lumière Lyon2, France) and Léa Saint-Raymond (Sorbonne Université, France)
4. 'The Only Man in Europe': Charles Davis, an Anglo-Jewish Dealer, and the Commercial Cousinhood, Diana Davis (Buckingham University, UK)
5. The Samuel Family as Dealers in East Asian Art and Curios, 1878-1926, William Clarence Smith (London School of Economics, UK)
6. Florine Ebstein Langweil: Jewish Networks in the East Asian Art Trade, Elizabeth Emery (Montclair University, USA)
7. Antisemitism and the Jewish Art Dealer: The Case of Siegfried Bing and Julius Meier-Graefe, Gabriel Weisberg (Minnesota University, USA)
8. Exterminating Cubism: Bochisme, L'Art Juif and the Vilification of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Fay Brauer (University of East London School of Art, UK)
9. Léonce Rosenberg's Cubism: Jewish Mediterraneanism and the Question of Assimilation, Giovanni Casini (University of Turin, Italy)
10. Alfred Flechtheim and the Flechtheim Galleries, 1913-1933, Malcolm Gee (Northumbria University, UK)
11. A Parisian in London, and New York: Genesis of a Modern Art Dynasty, Gimpel Fils, Diana Kostyrko (Australia National University, Australia)
12. Conflicted Modernisms: Martin Birnbaum's Transnational Exhibitions, 1910-26, Julie Codell (Arizona University, USA)
13. Rags to Riches: Becoming Leo Nardus, Esmee Quodbach (Independent scholar, USA)
14. The Mysterious Birtchansky Brothers: Moscow-Paris-The French Riviera, Shlomit Steinberg (Israel Museum, Israel)
Afterword, Why the Jews?, Charles Dellheim (Boston University, USA)
Index
