2 The tale of the bear that turned into a bull

Delving into the sunken resources of the Schwartzlist, a column on the undying marriage of the market and modern art (next year is the 110th anniversary), followed by a cry of pain.


The market for modern art had roots in a high-risk venture-capital scheme. On February 24th, 1904, a consortium to speculate in contemporary art was founded in Paris.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of André Level, 20 January 1918

The chief agent was a financial official named André Level, who brought in twelve relatives and friends on the deal. The thirteen men agreed to spend 2,750 francs per year on recent paintings and drawings for a period of ten years and then to sell the collection. They named their company La Peau de l’Ours – the hide of the bear. The ironic reference is to a fable by La Fontaine, in which two friends get into bad trouble by selling the hide of a bear before they have caught it.

Émilie Charmy, Portrait of Berthe Weill, 1910–14
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Photo MMFA, Julie Ciot

At the time, the work they bought was virtually unsaleable. Only one small, struggling gallery in Paris, that of Berthe Weill, was specialized in art of the new century. Picasso and Matisse were happy when they were able to sell a painting for 100 francs (20 dollars). In the summer of 1903, Matisse attempted in vain to put together a group of collectors prepared to buy 24 paintings a year from him for 2,400 francs. As late as 1906 Picasso was unable to get more than 2,000 francs for 20 canvases in his first major sale to the dealer Ambroise Vollard.

The purchases of La Peau de l’Ours were a major factor in changing all of that. Its visible support of the Fauves, Nabis and Cubists raised their market value to the point that after 1910 the consortium was unable to buy much of anything for 2,750 francs. Level shifted his concentration to the forthcoming sale, and to boosting the reputation of the masters the consortium already had in stock.

Deciding on a public auction at the Hôtel Drouot, the  speculators were able to reserve the most glamorous rooms in the house for the viewing days and the sale. They published a lavish catalogue and marshalled all their contacts in the press. On March 2, 1914, the hall filled with the cream of the Paris art world.

Pablo Picasso, Family of Saltimbanques, 1905
Washington, National Gallery of Art, Chester Dale Collection

The results were impressive. The 145 lots were sold for 116,545 francs, more than four times the sum invested. The main item, Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques, bought in 1908 for 1,000 francs, fetched 12,650 francs. The success of the sale vindicated to the world the value of modern art. The fact that members of the consortium were driving prices up by bidding themselves did not detract from the effect.

Despite its frankly speculative purpose, La Peau de l’Ours took it upon itself to pay the artists 20 percent of its profit, establishing a precedent for the practice, controversial to this day, known as droit de suite. Even for Picasso, who by 1914 was the most successful of the group, this windfall amounted to 17 percent of his earnings for the year.

Entering at sub-basement level a small, controllable market that was destined to grow, and subsequently making all the right moves, the Peau de l’Ours was able to realize considerable gains. In fact, it creamed that market, earning a higher annual return on its investment – perhaps 25 percent –  than any later owners of the same works. Items from the sale whose history can be traced did not appreciate after 1914 at a higher rate than 7 or 8 percent. It is doubtful whether the artists were cut in on these modest gains.

Whatever else may have helped the rise of modernism, some clever market manipulation didn’t hurt.


© Gary Schwartz 1996. Published in Dutch in NRC Handelsblad, Cultureel Supplement, 19 July 1996, p. 3. Published on the Schwartzlist on 17 October 2024

See Michael Cowan Fitzgerald in Art in America, February 1992.

A groundbreaking exhibition on Berthe Weill has finally been mounted at the Grey Art Museum in NYU. If the link opens for you, see this review in the New York Times. There I was pleased to read in the opening paragraph: “A collection of paintings isn’t like a stock portfolio,” the Parisian art dealer Berthe Weill declared in her 1933 memoir, Pow! Right in the Eye! The tone of my column sounds rather approving, though four years earlier I had advised art buyers not to sell their bearskins, in a small book that I wrote for the Pierson Heldring & Pierson bank: How to buy art not as an investment. 


Attentive readers of the Schwartzlist have long wondered why the unbroken sequence begins with column number 268, with only a smattering of lower numbers. This is because before November 2006 the columns went off in a different form, beginning as emails. Now that installment 432 has been delayed the wait for certain permissions, I am taking the opportunity to start filling in the gaps.

There is another reason. I could not keep myself from feeling some pride that Berthe Weill was a (poor) Jew. (As I do concerning her hypercommercial colleague Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, a rich one.) This is a purely tribal reflex, of which I think I should not be proud. Yet it seizes me, in plain contradiction to my resistance to bonding with the extreme-right Israelis who claim to be committing their crimes against humanity in my name. Out of the jumble of family ties, personal history, remnants of religion, allegiances, convictions and emotions that have been tormenting me in the past year, I wish I could agree more wholeheartedly with Benjamin Moser, in his courageous, well-argued op-ed in the Washington Post, “Anti-Zionism isn’t the same as antisemitism. Here’s the history.” History or no history, events of the past year have made that distinction moot for much of the world. That goes even for being a non-Zionist Jew or Israeli. To be a Jew, however critical you may be of how other Jews behave, now associates you in the minds of many with the mass murder and displacement of Palestinians.

Moser feels akin to anti-Zionist Jews with a “commitment to universalism.” I do too, but I’m afraid that this is a kind of ethically sanitized Judaism, available only if you pick and choose the parts of the Bible, Talmud, prayerbook and Jewish history that you like. Those who go to the synagogue, at least the Orthodox ones that I know, pray to a God not only of mercy (for the forgiveness of Jewish sins) but of vengeance, who takes unforgiving revenge on his and Israel’s enemies. Even in the reading on Purim of the one Bible book that does not mention God, the Book of Esther, worshippers gleefully spin noisemakers and cheer as the ten sons of Haman are impaled and the Jews of Persia massacre tens of thousands of civilian “enemies” and those who hate them. (Esther 9.) It hurts me deeply to say this, but the God I was brought up to fear, in the yeshivas of New York, was the God of Itamar ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. I cannot just walk away from this, but do not know what to do about it, either.


Take it as a symptom of a disruptive condition that I started writing about art investors in 1904 and in two steps ended up in Israel at war.


Responses in the Reply box below (these will be viewed by all visitors to the site) or personally to Gary.Schwartz@xs4all.nl are always appreciated and will be answered.

So will donations. Your donations help defray the costs of the Schwartzlist and encourage Gary Schwartz to write more columns. .Donate Button

9 thoughts on “2 The tale of the bear that turned into a bull”

  1. Gary, thanks so much for reading my article. You are, of course, right about the punitive and indeed occasionally genocidal God of the Hebrew Bible: we first encounter the Jewish people in Egypt, heading toward a Promised Land that is already inhabited by another people, the Canaanites, who are swiftly dispatched to make room for the Children of Israel. Yet that God is arguably at his most violent toward the very Jewish people themselves. The God of the prophetic literature is quite different from the God of the earlier books. He quickly ends their kingdom and exiles them from the land for their impiety and failure to respect the Torah. And the Jewish tradition is not a single tradition. There are more rabbis who derive from Torah a lesson of humility and pacifism — of repentance, charity, and prayer — than those who reduce Judaism and the Jewish tradition to a matter of racism and real estate as we see today, chas v’chalila.

    1. Dear Benjamin,

      What brought this on is that I went to Kol Nidrei services in the Utrecht Orthodox synagogue of which Loekie and I are members and to which we never go. It’s probably because being Jewish has been so fraught for the past year that I felt an urge to go. I found myself telling God hundreds of times how great he is, feeling like a Donald Trump sycophant. I begged him to forgive not only my sins but, hypocritically and with idiotic pretension, the sins of all Jews. And I praised him for destroying the enemies of the Jewish people and asked him to keep on doing it. That is why I wrote not about reading the Bible but going to synagogue. Purim is the clearest case of cheering on mass murder, but in the daily prayers there is also a lot of vengeance. I have never looked into movements like Reformed or Reconstructionist Judaism, which I assume delete these passages and soothe these sentiments. But that is not what being a Jew meant to me. Although Jews who lost their faith were still called Jews, for those who stayed in the fold it was the whole package or nothing. Departures from orthodoxy are so far from being accepted as Jewishness in Israel that weddings officiated by rabbis in these denominations are not recognized as legal. Netanyahu has nothing to do with that. When does the time come when, calling yourself a Jew, you come to terms with these things? And how do you do it?

      About going to the prophets – and this is addressed to Bill Alschuler as well – if you are looking for inspirational texts to live the good life, you don’t need them.

      Zei gezunt,
      Gary

  2. Gary – Many thanks, and extremely interesting. I’ve always been worried by the fact that almost the whole history of 20th-21st century art has been written by the commercial interest – mainly the dealers, aided and abetted by related collectors. Maybe with time, the tide will turn and new heroes will be championed above those of today.

    I hope most people won’t blame ALL Jews for what is happening in and around Israel. But I suppose you could convert, as my grandfather did, so that my father never once visited a synagogue and then married a very Christian Scot! So I am OUT; and over time (but not simultaneously) I have married two Christian women; and one of my two sons is a churchwarden…

    1. Dear Martin,

      The tide is always turning, but you can never count on it turn your way. It’s nice that this time it has. It’s just such a lovely thing to imagine, a small gallery taking on those difficult artists, making the first sales in Paris of work by Picasso and Matisse. But the upshot, as Wikipedia tells it, is awful: “notwithstanding the number of luminary artists that passed through her gallery, she remained poor and destitute her whole life and after her death was almost forgotten.” All right, “In 1946, many painters who she had championed over the years came together and held an auction of their donated art work, the proceeds went to support the dealer, so she could live in some comfort for the last years of her life.”

      But you would think that in their glory years, those artists would have let her share in their booming market.

      Next time we get together, I’ll tell you the great Dutch conversion joke.

  3. I share your outrage with what the right wing Israelis are doing, and unhappiness that they can find justification in the Torah and Prophets….I always look to the Prophet Micah, who says that God requires that we act justly, love mercy and walk with humility…

  4. Dear Gary, I commend you for being true to your beliefs; right or wrong…whom am I to judge. It’s good to know where one stands. What annoys me is these people that claim to be Christian on one hand when it’s convenient for them but then again Jewish when it fits the bill. Either you are or you’re NOT one or the other.

    Just my 2 cents worth! Vickie

    1. Well, I do have all these identities refusing to fit together and sometimes even to talk to each other. None of them is Christian, which is a relief.

  5. Oh Gary! I’m with you about Israel. In the Tanakh, after God gives the Israelites the promised land, they certainly squander it, by many “smiting” of their various enemies during the period of the Kings. There’s something strangely prescient about modern Israel too–the Israelis were given their promised land back not by God, but by England during the time of heyday of Empire. How did the Canaanites feel about being displaced? Probably no worse than modern Palestinians, I would guess. I’ve been trying to define my Judaism all of my life (I had Jewish-Socialist upbringing) and delved into the study of it as profoundly as I could. but the killing of 30,000+ Palestinians has no more justification for me than the slaughter of Dinah’s husband’s people, even after they agreed to be circumcised. I’m still Jewish, but I can’t currently talk to so many of the Jewish people I know!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *