Philippe Guimiot: expert par excellence

In this talk, I present a comparison of the auction sales of the two greatest eighteenth-century collectors of drawings: Pierre Crozat's in 1741 and Pierre-Jean Mariette in 1775. The transformation is dramatic; notwithstanding inflation (and market bubbles), the value of Old Master Drawings rose exponentially. I argue that Pierre Crozat was pivotal to this transformation, making Old Master Drawings a critical and central aspect of magnificence.

The Burlington Magazine, 2015

WHEN THE JOURNAL of René Gimpel was first published in Paris in 1963, Gaston-Louis Vuitton (1883–1970), Gimpel’s second cousin and the president of the famous Vuitton luggage enterprise, was initially in ‘a state of euphoria’. On closer reading, however, his reaction was less sympathetic: ‘you must have edited it, and you did well to do so. I would even say that you did not go far enough’, he wrote in a letter to the dead author’s youngest son, Jean Gimpel. Vuitton was correct on one point at least. René Gimpel’s journal, kept more or less continuously from 1918 until 1939, had been edited not only by its author during his lifetime, but by several subsequent editors. This article examines the genesis of the journal and its significance as an art-historical document.

Journal of Art Historiography, 2020

Review of: The Journal of a Transatlantic Art Dealer. René Gimpel, 1918-1939, by Diana J. Kostyrko, London, Turnhout: Harvey Miller/ Brepols Publishers, 2017, 360pp., 53 b. &. W. illus., €100 hdbk, ISBN 978-1-909400-51-1. A prominent art dealer operating between Paris and New York during the interwar years, René Gimpel (1881-1945) kept a diary which was first published in 1963 and then republished in an extended version in 2011. Using the diary as a tool, albeit acknowledging its sometimes problematic nature as literary object, Diana J. Kostyrko seeks to frame Gimpel’s life and business activity in a vast transdisciplinary account. This valuable book, the second in Harvey Miller’s series on Collectors and Dealers, fills some important historiographic gaps in the history of collecting, the history of the art market and more broadly sheds light on the rise of modernity.

2024

This international three day colloquium will investigate the role played by auctions, dealers, collectors, and museums in the circulation of the decorative arts from 1792 until 1914. Beginning with the ‘ ventes des biens des émigrés’ in Revolutionary France and ending with the onset of World War I, these were years of seismic political and socio economic change that revolutionised the art market. It was during the nineteenth century that the decorative arts, originally described as ‘curiosities’ and then ‘antiques’, became the subject of intellectual curiosity. The period under review saw the emergence of a more scholarly approach and publications , the development of the antiques trade and of museum collections devoted to the decorative arts, facilitated by the expansion of global trading networks, extended by colonisation and encouraged by international travel and wo rld f airs . London and Paris led the growth of this market, but economic downturn in Britain and France resulted in the mass export of art to the Americas from the 1880s. At the same time, a new cosmopolitan elite stimulated purchase across Europe, competing with museums for prize objects. These developments were first charted by Gerald Reitlinger in "The Economics of Taste: The Rise and Fall of the Objets d'art Market since 1750" (1963) and then by Clive Wainwright in "The Romantic Interior" (1989). Art market historiography has increased exponentially over recent years with scholarship on dealers ( Lynn Catterson , Paola Cordera, Charlotte Vignon, Mark Westgarth), collectors and museums (Julius Bryant, Ting Chang, Suzanne Higgott, Sophie Le Tarnec, Pauline Prévost Marcilhacy), collecting culture (Elizabeth Emery, Tom Stammers, Adriana Turpin) and markets and networks of trade (Anne Helmreich, Léa Saint Raymond), among others as well as a dedicated Journal for Art Market Studies This has been augmented by the Getty Provenance Index, Bloomsbury Art Market, the Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America, the creation of specific publishers’ series (from Brill and Bloomsbury) the digitisation of auction and two programmes initiated by INHA (one on ‘Connoisseurs, Collectors and Dealers of Asian Art in France, 1700 1939 ’, and the other on ‘Sales of antiquities in nineteenth century'. To date, however, scholarship has largely centred on the fine arts. This conference will focus on the commerce and global circulation of the decorative arts in order to open new perspectives and approaches that will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the art market. ‘Decorative arts’ are taken to include furniture, metalwork, clocks, silverware, ceramics and glass, enamels, small sculpture, hardstones, ivories, jewellery, textiles, tapestries, and boiseries, from Ming dynasty porcelain, Mamluk glass, and Augsburg Kunstkammer objects to Boulle furniture and Thomire bronzes, not to mention the contemporary Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements. We hope to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue among participants specialising in art history, material culture and economic history.

Journal of the History of Collections, 2022

This paper reports the first academic research on the collection of Yan Xinhou (1838–1906), a prominent gentry–merchant from the second half of the nineteenth century. It presents the Yan collection, now housed at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, and tells a fascinating story of the Yan family and how their collection came to the United States during the early twentieth century. More importantly, it provides a starting point for future explorations of the taste, collecting practices and social relations of the late Qing merchants. The collection contains thirty-two works of Ming and Qing dynasty painting and calligraphy, including calligraphy items by Zhang Ruitu (1570–1641), Jiang Chenying (1628–1699) and Qian Bojiong (1738–1812); paintings by Wang Shimin (1592–1680), Xiao Yuncong (1596–1673), Wang Wu (1632-1690), Ma Quan (active 1800s), Shangguan Zhou (1665–c.1749), Zheng Xie (1693–1765), Hua Yan (1682–1756), Xi Gang (1746–1803), Pan Simu (1756–after 1843), Zhao Wei (1746–1825), Qian Du (1764–1845), Gai Qi (1773–1828) and Wu Xizai (1799–1870).

Art History and its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, 2002

In today's art world scholars and dealers seem, on the face of it, to occupy spheres that scarcely intersect. Many scholars avoid contact with dealers and auction house staff, known collectively as "the trade." Some scholars feel ill at ease in what they perceive as the socially forbidding ambience of commercial old master galleries, preferring emulsion and denim to damask and pin stripes. Many feel far less exposed on a concrete campus than in Bond Street or the upper east side. Some give their unease a political explanation, seeing dealers and auction house specialists as commercial fetishists and the toadies of plutocrats. Be this as it may, the interests of every participant in the art world, whether abstruse theorist or rank salesman, are intimately intertwined. 1 The matter that concerns the trade most urgently is attribution, for a work that is supposed to be by a given artist, but is not, is worth infinitely less than a work that actually is by that artist. Who has the right to decide? Right has nothing to do with it, for this concerns the mechanisms of capitalism. Those who decide are those who can command confidence, irrespective of an often fugitive truth. Thus although there might well have been an oeuvre created firsthand by, for example, Rembrandt van Rijn, it remains in practice beyond our grasp, while each generation, by means of its own chosen scholarly means, defines for itself the Rembrandt oeuvre it deserves. * Many dealers and auction house specialists have been generous to me by sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm over the years, none more so than Edward and Anthony Speelman whose enlightened endowment of the Speelman Fellowship of Wolfson College, Camdridge has directly supported a number of scholars in the field of Dutch and Flemish art, myself among them (1983-87). I therefore dedicate this paper to the memory of Edward Speelman, scholar-dealer par excellence.

In contrast to the single paper archival label that the art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler affixed to the versos of the artworks that passed through his Galerie Simon and Galerie Louise Leiris, his methods and formats for recording archival information on the versos of his gallery stock whilst at Galerie Kahnweiler were inconsistent and involved a rather perplexing array of different paper labels, stencils, and handwritten notations that could be placed anywhere on the verso canvas, outer frame edge, or inner wooden stretcher. This paper analyses Kahnweiler's various means of recording the stock number, photograph number, artist's name, artwork title(s), artwork completion (or anticipated completion) date, and artwork medium as extant on the backs of Galerie Kahnweiler inventory. This analysis is rich in illustrated examples of versos of the paintings and drawings of Picasso, Braque, Derain, and Léger that taken together give visual evidence that Kahnweiler was quite fluid and changeable in how he recorded inventory information whilst he conducted business at 28 rue Vignon.

The Burlington Magazine, 2009

The writers examine the annotations made by famed connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette to the catalog of the sale of the art collection of Jean de Julienne. Mariette extensively annotated copies of the catalogs for the sales of two highly regarded 18th-century collections: that of the duc de Tallard in 1756 and that of De Julienne in 1767. Mariette's comments on the quality, attribution, and authenticity of the works, or asides about their price and provenance, are frequently essential in understanding the true content of these collections which, however prestigious, often included copies. The writer presents and comments on a full transcription of Mariette's annotations to the paintings in the Julienne sale, concluding that the annotations bear witness to his sustained practice of connoisseurship, whereby he articulated his empirical judgments on individual artworks and his keen understanding of the art market.

Further to my lecture at the 2017 research workshop The Cosmic Movement: Sources, Contexts, Impact (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 20-22 March 2017), additional information on the art dealer and enthusiast Eugène Blot (1857-1938), whose daughter Claire Eugènie (1883-1966) married Moyse Themanlys of the Idéal et Realité Group in Paris. Blot was an avant-garde art dealer and ran a foundry for bronzes, where he featured Camille Claudel. He was founder and treasurer of the Société desAmis du Musée du Luxembourg, now the Musée nationale d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou, and President of the Salon d'Automne (1903). Among the artists whose works he acquired - Armand Guillaumin, Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, Degas, and more. SEE ALSO LECTURE PRESENTATION AND WORKSHOP PROGRAM ON THIS SITE