Seized, scattered, saved

In August 1914 the First World War broke out, and France and Germany were suddenly enemies. Kahnweiler — still, after all these years in Paris, a German citizen — happened to be on holiday outside France when it started. That was a catastrophe. A German national could not simply cross back into a France now at war with Germany; he would have been arrested on sight. So the dealer who had built Cubism was locked out of his own gallery, and overnight he became, in French eyes, an enemy alien — a citizen of a country yours is now fighting. The French state reached into his shop and sequestered his entire stock — that is, legally seized it and held it — as “enemy property.” Hundreds of Cubist paintings, this portrait of him among them, now belonged, in effect, to the government he had fled.

When the war ended, the state did the single cruelest thing it could to a market built on scarcity: it dumped the lot, all at once, in public. Between 1921 and 1923 the confiscated Kahnweiler holdings — roughly three thousand works — were auctioned off in four forced sales at the Hôtel Drouot, Paris’s big central auction house. Everything Kahnweiler had so carefully hidden to build value was now shoved onto the open block, fast and cheap. Cubist prices cratered. Years of patient market-making collapsed in a few hammering afternoons.

The painters were furious — these were their own canvases being sold out from under them for nothing. At the first sale, by several accounts, Braque squared off against Léonce Rosenberg, the dealer running the auction, and punched him; the story is reported rather than documented, but it captures the mood in the room exactly. Out of that wreckage Kahnweiler clawed his way back. He returned to Paris and reopened — but not under his own name. With anti-German feeling still raw, a gallery called “Kahnweiler” was a liability, so he reopened under the name of a French partner, as the Galerie Simon, and quietly started again. He went on dealing, and writing about his painters, into his nineties.

This very portrait went under the hammer as lot 84 in the first of those sales, in June 1921, and was carried off by the Swedish painter Isaac Grünewald. From there it wandered: to the Philadelphia collector Earl Horter around 1929, on to Mrs. Goodspeed — later Chapman — in Chicago in 1934, and at last, in 1948, as her gift to the Art Institute of Chicago. The man Picasso dissolved into facets in 1910, scattered by a war and an auction, ended up one of the most secure objects in an American museum — the likeness taken apart, kept safe at last.