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- Herausgeber: Halban
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Michel Strauss embarked on an enduring love affair at the age of six when he saw for the first time paintings by Manet, Monet and Degas: the passion aroused by these artists never left him. This passion, this 'eye' as he calls it led to his becoming Head of the Impressionist Department at Sotheby's where he remained for forty years. He describes the personalities he met along the way: the collectors, the dealers, the colleagues and even the forgers, as well as the clients who shared his passion. There were times of boom and times of recession, there were very difficult times -in particular the anti-trust era -and there were times that brought great delight and a sense of achievement, in particular the British Rail Pension Fund sale which Michel had helped set up and which exceeded all expectations. An authoritative and highly respected figure in the art world, Michel Strauss has handled the greatest of all Impressionist works, some of which it was thought had been lost forever.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Pictures, Passions and Eye
A Life at Sotheby’s
MICHEL STRAUSS
For my mother Aline, Sally and Andrew
All prices are hammer prices and do not include the buyer’s premium, unless otherwise stated.
An eye to perceive a heart to enjoy
From William Wordsworth,A Complete Guide to the Lakes, 1846
His collection nourishes his mind, strengthens his soul and brings pleasure to his heart… he does not collect only for the pleasure to be derived from beauty, but in order to preserve examples of perfection for the future…The progress of all useful arts…must be one of the most noble occupations and pastimes of an honest man.
By Abbé Dulaurens, quoted in The Robert von Hirsch Collection, the Collector, his Houses, his Bequests, Sotheby’s 1979, p.22
Qu’est-ce donc le goût?
Une facilité acquise par des expériences réitérées,
A saisir le vrai ou le bon, avec la circonstance
Qui le rend beau, et d’en être promptement et
Vivement touché.
Denis Diderot, found on a wall in the Musée des Art Décoratifs, Paris
Contents
Preface
Writing a memoir is something I never conceived of tackling, but then, as so often happened when relating anecdotes concerning Sotheby’s to others, it was suggested I should put pen to paper. About four years ago, I began to take the idea seriously and started on the lengthy task. Although I have an excellent visual memory for the pictures I have seen and the prices they have sold for, my recollection of events and conversations was much vaguer. Yet, as I started writing, more and more memories began to surface and, to help me further, I recorded numerous conversations, mainly with my mother, Aline Berlin, my son Andrew, other family members, friends and former colleagues.
Having fallen in love with art at the age of six when living in New York, I was to discover my grandfather’s identical passion when I returned to Paris after the Second World War. Since that time I have been conscious both of the genes I inherited from him and how my life has been inextricably linked with his, in spite of the fact that he died when I was still very young.
It was not only my grandfather’s passion for works of art that I inherited, but also his quest to hunt them down. A constant search for something new and unusual, something to excite the senses, the thrill of chasing after a rare object or painting, the pursuit of the finest quality and for fascinating historical associations, are what marked out Jules Strauss as a very special and much admired collector. All these elements have been passed on to his descendants: my father André, who also died when I was very young, me and my son Andrew. Four successive generations have nurtured identical passions and deep feelings for paintings and works of art. What we all share is a highly tuned, intuitive ‘eye’, an instinctive notion of excellence in art, fostered by learning and experience. We all strive to test that ‘eye’ and knowledge, to keep on learning and discover new information, artists, movements and cultures.
There is one difference between Jules and myself: whereas he loved buying, selling and swapping, I find it difficult to part with anything, loving the buying but not the selling, unless I am trading up. For me, an acquisition becomes part of the fabric of the house or, as I have always said, ‘one of the family’. From early beginnings in my teens, this predilection has evolved in me, as it did in Jules, and will continue to do so to the last of my days.
Having realised quite early on that the academic life wasn’t for me, once my studies were sufficiently complete I determined to follow the dream I had had since childhood of working in a museum. When a position became available at the National Gallery in London I applied, but was unsuccessful and then, perhaps in what might be called a twist of fate, I fell almost by chance into Sotheby’s. There I soon realised that what I really loved was the physical presence of paintings, the ability to look and touch them in the most direct manner. It was this synergy between art history and collecting and organising sales that became the perfect life for me, and in doing so I found in myself a previously inert ambition to succeed in all my endeavours.
These memoirs are not a history of the Impressionist and Modern Art market during the last fifty years, nor an exposé of any doubtful deeds in the world of auction houses, but much more a recollection of events that have touched me the most: the colleagues, the pictures, the collectors, the dealers and the sales, and how the guiding light of my eye and my passions have been inspired by my parentage.
Art and commerce have forever been inextricably linked: no artist can live without a market for his works and people have always had a very high regard and love for art which can transcend all boundaries and somehow raises their spirit to higher levels. Art is the expression of man’s soul, emotions and beliefs and since pre-historic times has realised its potency, whether it be by means of cave paintings, Medieval altarpieces or the beauty of Impressionist paintings. In today’s market such large sums of money are tied up with art, but as my step-father Isaiah Berlin once said to my mother when she complained that it’s not proper to talk about money, he, the consummate intellectual, replied that money is the most interesting subject in the world: I believe art is the second.
CHAPTER ONE
The British Rail Pension Fund Sale
There was a definite buzz of excitement in the air as people took their seats to attend the landmark sale at Sotheby’s in London one evening in April 1989.
Amongst the significant events during my life at Sotheby’s, there have been none so far-reaching in the time spent and sense of fulfilment achieved as the saga of the British Rail Pension Fund’s investment venture into the art market. It all began following the 1973 Arab-Israeli/Yom Kippur war that prompted OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), to announce an oil embargo: they would no longer supply oil to those countries that had supported Israel. This in turn led to a global recession. Towards the end of 1974, the annual rate of inflation in the United Kingdom was 30%. Stock Markets had suffered heavy falls, the property market had collapsed and the art market was equally affected. We soon felt this in our sales – the price of many pictures slumped and quite a number did not find buyers at all. It was a difficult time for everyone and I remember hanging a sign which read ‘THE DEPRESSIONIST DEPARTMENT’ on the door leading to our offices. It stayed there until there were signs of real improvement at the end of the seventies.
However, for those who had money and a willingness to buy, there were some amazing bargains to be snapped up. It was then that Christopher Lewin, one of the executives responsible for the British Rail Pension Fund and an actuary by profession, as well as a collector of antiquarian books, decided to act. With an inbuilt comprehension of the collecting world, he was aware that the prices for such books were out-stripping other capital investments at that time and he had also spotted that works of art could be bought in New York, for instance, without being penalised by the dollar premium which then ran at 58%. Art was a commodity that had unparalleled freedom of movement and international appeal. In the light of the economic climate, and keen to safe-guard the Pension Fund’s investments, Mr Lewin put forward a plan to the trustees that they diversify into Fine Art and that an approach be made to Sotheby’s to act on their behalf. He was given the go-ahead on the proviso that there should be a reasonable prospect for long-term capital growth which would at least equal inflation and, further, that there would be the possibility of an increase in real value in excess of inflation.
Accordingly, Christopher Lewin had a series of meetings with Peter Wilson, Chairman of Sotheby’s, and, after much discussion, they agreed on ways to proceed which were approved by their respective boards. The Pension Fund made the decision that it would be better to buy in almost every field of art so that the funds available were spread widely – in a way covering their bets – and also not to buy any works dating beyond 1900 as they mistakenly thought Modern Art, even that of the early twentieth century, was too speculative. In retrospect, what a colossal mistake they made.
Needing a manager to run the project with Sotheby’s, the Fund, at the suggestion of Peter Wilson, appointed Annamaria Edelstein, an Italian living in London, who was married to Victor Edelstein, a well-known couturier and one of Princess Diana’s favourite designers. For some years she had edited Art at Auction, Sotheby’s annual review, and thus was familiar with the departments and their experts, as well as having a broad knowledge of the many areas covered. The way the system operated was that prior to each relevant sale, the expert head of that department would propose a group of items considered suitable for the Fund. One of the problems was to get all the departments to say what they actually would like to recommend – and as is so often the case in life, some were tremendously enthusiastic and thorough, which resulted in marvellous sales, while others showed little interest and did less well.
Each expert had to make their proposals in writing accompanied by a description of the work’s physical condition, quality and importance, a justification of the estimate and a suggested bid. Before all this was presented to Christopher Lewin and his committee, that expert had to make a presentation to a small group of colleagues, chaired by Annamaria, who would accept, modify or reject the proposals. Personally, I tended to steer the Pension Fund towards quite characteristic, fine quality examples by major artists and having to pass them by Annamaria certainly made me concentrate my mind on what was real quality as against what was superficially pretty. Under pressure from all sides, she was undoubtedly good at separating the expert’s desire to sell what they had from what was a good investment and, despite the Fund’s embargo on works created after 1900, I was able to slip in an early coloured drawing of 1904 by Picasso, and a Matisse bronze of 1906.
Although the majority of the purchases were bought at Sotheby’s, we were also instructed to consider Christie’s sales and to buy from private collections (for example Picasso’s 1905 gouache, Le Garçon Bleu) and from the trade when the right opportunities arose. A major element of the contract was that we had to guarantee the authenticity of all works purchased at auction. It was agreed that we would not charge the Pension Fund a fee for buying at auction, whether it was at Sotheby’s or Christie’s, but when it came to purchases from dealers we would charge them a five per cent commission since we had to guarantee the authenticity of those purchases.
The Pension Fund committee, taking into account our suggestions and relative enthusiasms, considered which works they wanted to bid on but did not let us know their decision or the size of their bids. Sometimes they would place lower bids, sometimes higher, sometimes they bid on works that we suggested, sometimes they did not. So as to further maintain an ‘iron curtain’ between us, they gave their bids to outside people to prevent us knowing when they were part of the action on any particular lot.
Annamaria’s role was an enormously responsible one. As she did not have the depth of knowledge about specific markets, she had to exercise her own judgement after listening to the experts and before being cross-examined by the Pension Fund. We in the Impressionist and Modern Art department tended to propose sensible bids within the estimate range which Annamaria almost always accepted and, as the quality of the works the Pension Fund was bidding on was usually high, certainly as far as the Impressionists were concerned, they in fact only succeeded in obtaining between half and a third of what they bid on. Sometimes this was no bad thing, as that left more to be spent on subsequent sales as well as demonstrating to them that the bids were in line with the market and were not being ramped up.
During the late 1970s, at the height of their spending on art, the amount invested represented only 2.9% of the total assets of the Fund. Between 1974 and 1980, having spent a total of £40 million pounds on 2,425 works of art, the Pension Fund decided that was enough; there would be no more purchases. They had obviously begun to realise that such a large quantity of works of art was a nightmare to store, to value annually for the auditors, and on top of this, they had to keep track of the many items that were sent on loan to museums and exhibitions.
Ten years later, when the art market had fully recovered, the Pension Fund, listening to our recommendations, decided it was a good time to start selling. By the terms of the contract, they had to sell at Sotheby’s, either at auction or by private treaty, and as such it was agreed initially that our standard commission rate of 10% would be reduced to 5%. However, in 1975 we had introduced the non-negotiable, buyer’s premium of 10% and I could understand why the Pension Fund refused to pay the agreed commission: why should we have an additional 5% from them, which they saw as a direct erosion of their profit? As a result the decision was made that the Fund would pay our expenses, but not a seller’s commission.
By 1989, the Impressionist market was in the middle of a massive boom, fuelled by intensive buying from Japan, and with this in mind the Fund’s holdings in that field were one of the first sales. The sale was quite heavily promoted internationally and included pre-sale travelling exhibitions to New York, Tokyo, Zurich and Paris. This not only had a promotional effect on Sotheby’s image as the major auction house, but it also allowed buyers who might not be able to attend the sale in person to view the works themselves and subsequently bid by telephone. If a particular very important collector or institution was a potential buyer, but unable to go to one of these viewings, we were prepared to send one or more of the paintings to any destination in the world. For example the Getty Museum, then still in its original building in Malibu, was interested in Renoir’s La Promenade. I asked my number two in the department, Melanie Clore, who was still in her twenties, to take the finest pictures from the Fund’s collection to exhibit in our offices in Los Angeles. Accompanying these fabulous works and staying in the Beverly Hills Hotel, she later told me she thought she had died and gone to heaven. At a dinner there, she was placed next to George Goldner, then curator of paintings and drawings at the Getty Museum, who became a firm friend of hers and when, a short time later, the Getty decided to deaccession some of its Impressionist paintings, he contacted Melanie. The resulting sale took place in London in November 1989, just a few months after the Fund’s own sale.
Finally, after months of preparation, the night of the sale had arrived–the final denouement. As in so many of the great sales I have organised, the months of catalogue preparation, travelling the paintings around the world, the week long view in London and the paraphernalia of a sale were all in place. The gallery staff was primed and ready, the paddle registration desk was in order and all were nervously waiting for the excited mass of people to shove their way into the packed saleroom and the adjacent galleries.
During the weeks leading up to the sale, the department had been talking to all potential buyers, some like myself, quietly informative and persuasive, whereas a few members of staff tended to be over-enthusiastically pushy, an attitude that I did not approve of. An hour before the sale was due to start, there was nothing more to do; I was sitting quietly in my office, tensely waiting for the main door to open at 6.30 when the crowds would be let in. At 7 o’clock sharp, I watched as Julian Barran (a senior colleague in the department and head of Sotheby’s France at the time), our regular auctioneer, mounted the rostrum, welcomed everyone to the sale and began taking bids. The first lot, L’Entrée du Port du Havre by Eugène Boudin, made a disappointing £68,000, below the estimate, as did the next two before the action really began to gather pace when a fine watercolour, Les Avocats by Honoré Daumier made a substantial price. Thereafter, the bids rocketed up.
As with all these great sales over the years, it was fascinating to watch the bidding progress, people in the room indicating their bids by a wave of their paddle, by a discreet raise of the finger or by a simple nod of the head or lifting of the eyebrows. To the side of the saleroom, serried ranks of staff on their telephones were quietly relaying bids from collectors at the other end of the telephone who didn’t wish their identities to be known. In the room itself, seasoned dealers, some nosier than others, were shuffling around in their seats, chatting amongst themselves (in later years talking on their mobiles), desperately trying to see who was bidding against them.
I watched intensely the toing and froing of Julian taking all these bids, gesturing from one side of the saleroom to the other, his eyes flicking forwards and sideways, into the middle of the room and to the back, just like an umpire in a game of tennis. But what was most exciting for me was to be bidding on the phone with a collector who might be sitting in his office on the other side of the world, sunning himself on his yacht off the coast of Turkey, or who had woken up in the middle of the night in a different time zone. Perhaps I would be bidding against another colleague, Andrew or David Nash, for example, themselves on a line to one of their own clients, for one of the highlights of the sale, pushing up the price, bid after bid, to unheard of record heights – another game of tennis, a very personal one, another match won or lost. The rush of adrenalin was extreme as the sums went higher and higher, repeating the bids to the client on the other end of the phone, saying, ‘It’s now at £4.8 million – do you wish to bid?’, perhaps extracting another bid, nodding to the auctioneer, and so on till towards the end, as another collector bid again, I asked, ‘One more bid?’, trying to persuade him to go further, or, at times even advising him to stop if, in my opinion, the price became ridiculously high.
Finally, the last lot was knocked down, the sale was over and applause reverberated around the saleroom. The hordes of press gathered around to hear the statistics of the sale and bombarded us with questions about the identities of the buyers (always anonymous unless instructed otherwise) and what percentage were American, European or Japanese. A sense of great satisfaction washed over me, but gradually, as the excitement died down, this feeling was replaced by one of almost sadness that this great sale was over.
This Impressionist painting sale on behalf of the British Rail Pension Fund in April 1989 was one of the most exciting and personally satisfying events of all my time at Sotheby’s. I was so proud of the final outcome which was a vindication of my knowledge, my taste and my eye. The fact that the sale realised so much for the Pension Fund was fantastic: their original outlay was £3.4 million and the resulting sale made them £34,869,000, some 70% above the pre-sale estimate; some of the works fetched twenty or thirty times their original purchase price from only ten or fifteen years earlier. I believe that part of the success was due to the fact that these pictures were my own personal choice – I would have been more than delighted to have had any one of them on my own walls – and this gave the group the character of a private collection, a factor that obviously appealed to buyers, as well as the fact that they had been acquired during a low point in the market and had been unseen for more than ten years.
At the same time as the British Rail Pension Fund was buying, some other great collections had come up for sale, notably the Robert von Hirsch collection from Basel in 1978, from which they acquired Camille Pissarro’s 1871 portrait of his friend Paul Cézanne for £300,000. This was sold for £l.2 million. The Fund had also bought another portrait of Cézanne in a sale at Sotheby’s in New York in 1976, a pastel by Pierre-Auguste Renoir executed in 1880, which was a much softer and sweeter work than the Pissarro. It made £1.3 million against a purchase price of $124,000. I was delighted to see these fine portraits of Cézanne, painted by his two friends, hanging together on the red baize-covered walls in the Entrance Gallery in New Bond Street, and it was so rewarding that they were both bought by the same British collector, Laurence Graff, the diamond merchant. He later sold the Renoir as he didn’t think it was strong enough, but he still owns Pissarro’s famous portrait which is on loan to the National Gallery in London, when it is not travelling to some Pissarro or Cézanne exhibition in Paris or New York.
Among other works from the Robert von Hirsch Collection, there was a fabulous Paul Cézanne watercolour, Nature Morte au Melon Vert, for which the Fund had paid £300,000 in 1978. This went to another distinguished London collector for £2.3 million, who subsequently sold it at Sotheby’s in 2007 for $22.75 million. The third von Hirsch purchase was a very strong, Vincent van Gogh reed pen and sepia ink drawing of fishermen’s cottages at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue, which realised £2.1 million as against a purchase price of £205,000, this time acquired by an American collector.
A picture that I really loved in the group was of a splendid, brilliantly coloured view of the church of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice, painted by Claude Monet in 1908, during the two months he spent there painting. Monet, like John Singer Sargent a few years earlier, lodged in the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal and from there painted some of his thirty-seven canvasses of Venice. There are six variations of the same view of Santa Maria della Salute which he apparently painted while standing on the steps of the Palazzo, hopefully at low tide and undisturbed by the swell of water thrown up by passing gondolas. The Pension Fund received £6.1 million for this work, which I was particularly excited by and which I had first seen in a collector’s house in Germany. I was delighted when he agreed to give it to us for sale in 1979 and even more so when the Fund decided to bid on it and successfully bought it for £230,000.
I was quoted, at the time, as saying that people had collected paintings from every period in Monet’s œuvre, but they had done exceptionally well when they bought colourful, sunlit and appealing subjects such as the Venetian views. This applied to most of the works the Fund purchased. For example, the 1870 Renoir, La Promenade, in which George Goldner of the Getty Museum was so interested, is a beautifully painted representation of a fashionable gentleman helping a young lady in a pretty, white summer dress up the bank of a river. Of superb quality, it was painted when Renoir was at the height of his powers and is one of the great works of his early period. La Promenade had been in the Spingold Collection, a fine American collection, and realised £620,000 when it was sold to the Pension Fund in London in 1976. The Getty Museum paid £9.4 million and this is still, some twenty years later, one of the highest prices ever paid for a painting by Renoir. As for the important 1906 Matisse bronze, Deux Négresses, one from an edition of ten casts which I had managed to persuade the Pension Fund to buy for $100,000 in 1977, by selling for £1.6 million, it showed the greatest capital appreciation of all.
When I think that my grandfather, Jules Strauss, had begun boldly collecting a hundred years earlier what was then contemporary art by the leading Impressionist painters, the Pension Fund, by limiting itself to pre-1906 works, was playing very safe. They were extremely lucky to have begun buying at such a low point in the economy, brought about by the oil crisis, and then to have sold at such a high point in the late eighties boom, fuelled mainly by the Japanese speculative bubble economy. Interestingly, all the works in that 1989 sale were bought by American and European collectors and none by Japanese buyers. It would appear that although the Japanese were a huge buying force in the Impressionist and Modern market, these paintings were not to their taste which ran to pretty Renoirs, of which there were truck loads, boring Monets, colourful, repetitive Chagalls, tanker-loads of paintings by the artists of the School of Paris, Utrillo, Vlaminck and, of course, their own artist, Tsuguharu Foujita who spent almost all his working life in Paris.
In other areas, Chinese porcelain did exceptionally well and the Pension Fund also had moderate success with Old Master paintings and Medieval manuscripts, but in some fields such as Tribal Art, they barely recouped their money, as was the case with Printed Books, Christopher Lewin’s own collecting field. With hindsight, if the Pension Fund had collected in only a few areas, including the twentieth century, they could have had a much greater overall success, but as has been said, they believed in a wide spread as they always did with their other investments in financial markets.
The Pension Fund had decided to invest only a tiny percentage of their members’ annual pension contributions in art, but even so there had been an enormous amount of negative comment from the press and from within the art world at the time, and how ill-founded that criticism proved to be. Members of the Train Drivers’ Union had also objected initially, but some were pleased and I remember one engine driver telling a journalist how proud he was to own a painting by the famous Renoir. What is so interesting is that over the years the term ‘a British Rail picture’ has become an accolade and an enhancement to any provenance.
CHAPTER TWO
My Ancestors
Jules and Marie-Louise Strauss
On one of our regular visits to the Louvre in 1947, when there were few other visitors around, my grandmother, Marie-Louise Strauss, whom I affectionately called Mémé, told me that it was important to actually feel the physical surface of the pictures, that I should touch the surface very lightly with the back of my little finger. So I did. A guard rushed up to us, ‘Madame, Madame, c’est défendu, vous devez l’empêcher!’ (‘That is forbidden. You must stop him!’) A small, quite formidable lady who always dressed in black with a matching black hat, Mémé stabbed her umbrella at him and said, ‘Je suis Madame Strauss…’ at which he retreated, grumbling, finally recognising her.
Mémé had proprietorial feelings about the Louvre, treating it as if it were her own drawing room, no doubt because my grandfather had given the museum many important period frames. Jules Strauss loved Paris’s museums, particularly the Louvre and, during his visits there, had observed that the great Italian pictures – the Raphaels, the Leonardos, the Titians – had inappropriate, ugly, 19th-century frames. One day in 1935, as he was passing by Lebrun, the famous dealer of antique frames, he noticed a very fine 16th-century Italian frame, recently bought in Florence, and knew it was exactly what was needed for Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks. Taking the frame to the Louvre, he tried it out with the curator of the Painting department and both were delighted with the result. For a few years after this, he continued to look for the right antique frames, making a gift to the Louvre of as many as fifty-six for Italian Renaissance and French 18th-century paintings by, amongst others, Mantegna, Raphael, Leonardo, Titian, Velasquez, Vermeer and Watteau; all quite remarkable, considering he must have found them in the short space of time between 1935 and the start of the Second World War. He also donated to the museum a number of 18th-century French paintings as well as making gifts to the Château de Versailles.
The value he placed on the role of frames is certainly a trait I share with him, believing that as the beauty of a woman is so often enhanced by the quality of the clothes she is wearing, so too are pictures shown to their best advantage by the frames they are ‘wearing’. In the same way, Renaissance paintings look their best in period frames, Impressionists are much enhanced ‘dressed in’ Louis XIV, XV and XVI frames, while 20th-century pictures are so often shown to advantage in simple but bold 16th- and 17th-century Italian and Spanish frames. After Jules died in 1943, Germain Bazin, the curator of the Painting Department at the Louvre, wrote in his condolence letter to Mémé, ‘Certain collectors like to have their name attached to their gifts so as to be noticed by the public but M Jules Strauss, with a modesty that deeply touched us, preferred to make his gifts in a more discreet way which was no less appreciated by us.’
Whatever paintings have passed through my hands – mostly during my professional life at Sotheby’s – I have touched the surface very lightly with the back of my right index finger, feeling if there is much impasto as evidence of the artist’s original surface, or whether the paint has been ironed flat during a relining of the canvas, although this technique for long-term conservation is, today, much less favoured by museum curators, collectors and dealers. Sensing the thickness and tightness of the canvas in this way can often tell you whether the picture has been relined or not, if it is in good or doubtful condition: that is something which I learnt from Mémé and which would prove to be a vital tool of my trade in years to come. In the same way, I have always felt a need to run my hands over sculpture (except in museums!), feeling the fineness of the chiselling, the quality of the patina as indications of age and authenticity and the forms revealed by the genius of the sculptor.
Mémé, née Marie-Louise Kahn, was born into an upper-middle-class Jewish family in 1872. The Kahn family originated in Frankfurt, although my great-grandmother, Adelaide Kahn, came from Leeds and, keeping her surname, married her first cousin Julius who lived in Paris. The Kahns were known to be outspoken and Mémé, who was born in Paris, was very much in the family mould. Unconventional, as a very pretty young woman she had courted disapproval by, for example, wearing a shocking red hat. Although she aged into quite a formidable old lady, Mémé was really sweet to me, one reason being that when I was two and a half years old, her only adored son, my father André Strauss, had died at the age of thirty-five; the fact that I was his son meant a great deal to her.
Ironically, although I had happily inherited my grandfather’s genes, it was Mémé who taught me how to look at art, to appreciate and develop critical faculties. She introduced me to paintings, furniture, silver and porcelain, in museums such as the Musée Carnavalet (the museum of the history of Paris) and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs which was to instil in me a love of furniture, objets d’art and textiles. We visited the Jeu de Paume where the great collections of Impressionist paintings were beautifully exhibited in an almost intimate setting until, deplorably, they were moved to the cavernous gloom of the Musée d’Orsay in 1986. We wandered happily through all the galleries of the Louvre – the paintings and sculpture of the French and Foreign Schools, the antiquities of Egypt, Greece and Rome, Medieval art and the treasures of the Cabinet des Dessins. She also taught me that the quality of a great artist could be recognised by the skill with which he painted hands; I find this is something I am still very aware of when looking at portraits where, so often, hands play an important, expressive role. One of the lasting memories is of the day she told me to feel the surface of a painting with the back of my index finger, in particular, touching, very gently, the dark, quite heavily varnished surface of a Renaissance masterpiece, Raphael’s majestic portrait of Balthasar Castiglione. That was, without doubt, the moment I discovered a special love for portraiture as a great artistic expression of a person’s character.
My grandfather, Jules Strauss, the son of a banker, was born in Frankfurt in 1861. He developed an early passion for art and, from a very young age, his dream was to leave Frankfurt and Germany, where he felt Jewish life and the local German culture were too restrictive and narrow minded, and go to Paris. In 1880, when he was eighteen, he had the good fortune to be sent there as a trainee at the stock-broking firm, Daniel Dreyfus, and, by the time he and Mémé married in 1897, he had his own modest company, Société Strauss et Compagnie, a private bank at 13 rue Taitbout in the 9ème arrondissement. In 1904 they moved into a large apartment on the third floor of 60 avenue du Bois de Boulogne (renamed avenue Foch after the First World War), which they took over from the playwright Georges Feydeau.
It was his habit each morning to visit the dealers around the rue Taitbout, in particular one nicknamed ‘Le Brigand Sympathique’ (the charming bandit) and, in later years, Nicolas Landau with whom he shared a similar vision and taste for rare and unusual objects. In the afternoons he would make his way to the nearby auctions at the Hôtel Drouot or the Galeries Georges Petit, where he bought numerous works at the Degas atelier sales of 1918–19, and at least three times a week he visited his beloved Louvre. My father, André, who was born in 1903, showed similar artistic sensibilities and from a very young age Jules often took him along on his daily visits to the auctions.
By 1884 my grandfather was already collecting art for which he had a natural instinct. He bought Dutch and Flemish Old Masters, and especially French pictures of the 18th century. He had a particular passion for the paintings of Antoine Watteau, owning several pictures by him and his followers, as well as putting together a considerable archive of documents and related books, even writing several articles on Watteau which were published in art historical journals. Collecting rare, interesting pieces of furniture from the Louis XIV, Régence and Louis XV periods that had a special quality and meaning to him, in addition to sculpture, porcelain, unusual collector’s cabinet objects such as 17th-century babies’ coral rattles, bronze fire irons by Cheniller and illustrated books were all part of this passion. He was incapable of resisting the temptation of acquiring any object of great curiosity and quality that crossed his path. They came and went because he disposed of as much as he bought; this came about as his tastes changed and evolved, sometimes through necessity, but often just for the simple pleasure of swapping one object for another with friends. His friend Nicolas Landau, a dealer in the finest Renaissance and Baroque Works of Art from the 1920s till his death in 1979 and known in Paris as Le Prince des Antiquaires, described ‘le goût Strauss’ as ‘a unique object of special quality, fascinating as long as you knew how to understand its merits. It is, for example, the coffee service that belonged to the Marquise de Pompadour, of which the cups are enamel “because”, Jules Strauss explained, “Louis XV was too clumsy to be served with porcelain.”’
Although his real love was for the Venetians –Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese – he was also drawn to those contemporary artists whose work was readily seen in several Paris galleries and available at the moderate prices he could afford. By the very end of the 19th-century, he had acquired a considerable number of Impressionist works, which included six Monets, three by Degas, a Manet, two Cézannes, fifteen Sisleys and a group of Renoirs which were mostly hung one above the other in his study. After twelve years of avid collecting, Jules decided to put up for auction his first collection of seventy-one Impressionist paintings and a further fifteen works on paper. Prior to the auction he explained to a journalist, ‘I have no place left in my study, frames touch each other, covering all the walls, and I am even obliged to leave some of my paintings on the floor, stacked against the wall.’ ‘Catalogue des Tableaux Modernes et Aquarelles composant la Collection de M Jules Strauss’ announced the sale which took place at the Hôtel Drouot on 3 May 1902. In the preface to the catalogue, Arsène Alexandre, the highly respected art critic of the time and author of Monet’s first biography, describing Jules’ confident and excellent taste, predicted that this, combined with his preference for quality over quantity, would ensure that the Strauss sale would be a milestone in the annals of Impressionism and Modern Art. ‘All these paintings have different characteristics, but with their own individual intensity, they hold up admirably against each other. When such a homogenous collection comes up for sale it is an education for all. It is for us to enjoy the generosity of a collector, who has had the exquisite pleasure of having had them in his own house for a time.’
He may have decided on the auction in order to raise capital, but it would seem likely that he saw it as a way of testing the growth potential of this relatively new market as other collectors of Impressionist paintings of their time, such as Eugène Blot and the Prince de Wagram had recently done, and with success. Whatever the reason, this sale was to make him even better known among dealers and collectors: all but a few works, which he kept back when they didn’t reach their reserve price, were sold.
Jules’ passionate collecting at this time places him in the third wave of Impressionist collectors, the first being a few devoted French collectors, mainly friends and critics of the artists in the 1870s. The second comprised those American collectors who had access to the finest Impressionist landscapes and portraits, thanks largely to the Impressionists’ dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, who opened a gallery on New York’s 5th Avenue in 1886, and to the influence of Mary Cassatt, the American painter who befriended Degas and had a close circle of friends, in particular the sugar king, Horace Havemeyer and his wife Louisine. The third wave, to which Jules belonged, consisted of European buyers prior to 1900.
As a great admirer of Sisley, the best of my grandfather’s fifteen examples of the artist’s work was the 1876 Inondation à Port Marly. Among the several Monets, Les Pins Parasols, Cap d’Antibes was bold and striking, but, looking through his beautifully produced catalogue, the painting I would most like to have inherited is Débacle, Monet’s depiction of ice flows smashing into each other on the Seine during the harsh winter of December 1879. A desolate picture, you can feel nature gripped by the great freeze. Sadly it will never be mine as it is now in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, bought by the eclectic Armenian collector in 1925.
The most ravishing picture of all was Renoir’s La Pensée, an oil painting of 1876 representing a seated young woman, deep in thought. Renoir objected to the name saying,‘Why has this title been given to my canvas? I wanted to portray a lovely, charming young woman without giving a title which would give rise to the belief that I wished to depict the state of mind of my model… that girl never thought, she lived like a bird and nothing more…’ Fifty-six years later, La Pensée was one of the famous seven paintings sold for an unprecedented amount at the Jakob Goldschmidt sale held at Sotheby’s in 1958, a sale I regretted not attending as I was still at Harvard.
The new artists at the turn of the century, Picasso, Matisse, the Fauves or the Cubists, did not seem to have attracted Jules as a collector. However, he must have been impressed by these younger artists as, during a journey to Moscow in 1914, where he visited the famous contemporary art collection of Sergei Shchukin, Jules, astonished by what he saw, wrote ‘In the music room, twenty Matisses, brutal, captivating, Asiatic, in the dining room, twenty Gauguins, finally in the bedroom Picassos.’ Now shared between the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, these extraordinary collections include many of the greatest works by Gauguin, Picasso and Matisse produced during that revolutionary upheaval of the arts between 1900 and 1914.
Believing that everything you could possibly want to see in the world existed in his adopted city, my grandfather often repeated, ‘You only travel in Paris.’ However, he visited Italy every year, but, according to the notes he made of all his purchases, he only bought works by Tiepolo while there. Amongst other purchases abroad, he negotiated with the Berlin dealer Paul Cassirer and brought back to Paris a famous portrait of Richard Wagner which Renoir had painted in Palermo in January 1892. Wagner had at that time just finished writing his opera Parsifal.
Jules relentlessly sold, bought and exchanged works of art. After his death Mémé gave me his fascinating notebooks in which he describes his buying and selling activities. These, together with the catalogues of his two sales, reveal that, over more than forty years of collecting, my grandfather owned more than 200 Impressionist paintings. Between 1902 and 1932 he began another collection, this time more interesting and varied, adding Bonnard and Vuillard, but still rooted in the tradition of late 19th-century painting. Then, distressingly, in 1932, he had another sale of his Impressionist paintings. His two sons-in-law had the misfortune to get into financial difficulties during the Depression, and in order to bail them out and preserve the family honour, he felt obliged to sell his whole Impressionist collection of eighty-five works. If I had been in his shoes I would have been devastated to part with my treasured Impressionists but, in the end, would probably have done so for the sake of my children’s well-being. Given the timing, the sale was certainly perceived as a sensational event in the art world, although the prices were disappointing – not only was it the talk of the town in Paris, but it was also featured in New York’s Art News magazine at the time.
The highest price achieved was for Manet’s ravishing portrait of Berthe Morisot (an Impressionist painter married to Manet’s brother Eugène), which made the highest price of 360,000 francs (now in the Cleveland Museum of Art). Included were twenty works by Degas, many of which came from the Degas atelier sale of 1918–19, paintings by Bonnard, Delacroix, Sisley, Vuillard and Renoir, whose portrait of Richard Wagner was bought by the famous pianist Alfred Cortot, who bequeathed it to the Louvre, eventually ending up in the Musée d’Orsay.
My first cousin, Nadine Baer, remembers so clearly how our grandfather would leave his apartment in the avenue Foch each morning with an object in his pocket and return each evening with something quite different. After my grandmother complained that he was spending too much money buying art, Jules started locking his surreptitious purchases away in a large cupboard in his study or would store them in dealers’ shops rather than take them home. She would also send their chauffeur, Robert, to collect Jules from one of the dealers, perhaps in order to curtail his collecting activities, but Jules, with his well-tuned antennae, would decline the lift saying he preferred to walk or take a taxi.
For almost fifty years this tall, grey figure with a distinctive German accent, was a familiar sight in galleries such as Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard in the rue Lafitte and the salerooms of the Hôtel Drouot. He wore old-fashioned round-rimmed glasses, and a Gauloise cigarette permanently hung from the side of his mouth, as he lit one from the butt of another, resulting in him sporting a nicotine-stained moustache. My grandfather made a good recovery following a heart attack in 1939 and ceased smoking from one day to the next, although he continued to suck on a Bakelite cigarette which infuriated Mémé.
Even though he loved chocolate éclairs, something I must have inherited from him as well, my grandfather remained as thin as a rake. He adored young people and especially, in later life, his grandchildren. He would fetch my cousin Nadine from school each day and take her to a patisserie for a cake before lunch. Sometimes they would visit the Louvre together or he would spoil her by taking her to eat her favourite delicacy of caviar with slices of grapefruit in a restaurant on the Place Beauvau, opposite the Elysée Palace.
Jules adored women and had long-term mistresses, including Mme Léon-Paul Fargue (wife of the poet) and, more importantly, Olga, the wife of André Wormser. Both Mme Wormser and her husband, André, were close friends of my grandparents. It comes as no surprise that Jules played a modest but key role among his collector friends for he was much admired for his knowledge and eye for quality and thus became an informal advisor to family members and close friends, including the Wormsers. Over the years he advised them on acquiring a fine, collection of Impressionists, including works by Monet, Degas, Renoir, Vuillard and Bonnard. The Bonnard, Les Promeneurs sur la Digue, painted in 1906 and bought on the advice of my grandfather only four years later, is an example of his appreciation of certain contemporary artists. Over the past twenty years, my son Andrew, who joined Sotheby’s in 1983, and I, have sold several paintings for the family, including the Bonnard, and their Monet, Glaçons, environs de Bennecourt, which made £340,000 in June 1996. It is true to say that, even now, after all these years the name Jules Strauss found in the early provenance of a painting somehow adds cachet to its history.
When he died in 1943, he left neither land nor a significant portfolio of shares, but hundreds of works of art which had been put in storage at Tailleur’s warehouse in Paris. They miraculously survived the war and were eventually recovered by my grandmother Mémé after the Liberation of Paris.
Emile Deutsch de la Meurthe
On my mother’s side, her maternal great-grandfather, Alexandre Deutsch was born in 1815 in a village in Lorraine. He too, like Jules, moved to Paris and, starting from scratch, founded a vegetable oil refinery in 1845 at Pantin on the outskirts of the city. In 1861, after he heard of the opening of the first oil well in Pennsylvania, Alexandre ordered a shipment in order to examine its properties and quickly realised its potential for providing brighter and cleaner lighting for oil lamps, the principal form of general lighting until the development of electricity. With his two sons, Emile and Henry who joined their father in 1866 and became partners in the firm of A. Deutsch et Fils in 1877, Alexandre eventually built two large oil refineries near the Atlantic coast and began importing oil from America, so moving into oil refining and distribution. In 1879 the family joined forces with the Rothschild brothers in Paris to take over the Spanish market and their business quickly spread into Russia and Austro-Hungary. By the end of the century, they were amongst the first to realise the potential of petrol refined from oil in the development of the combustion engine.
Alexandre’s sons both married into affluent Jewish families in 1877 and later changed their name to Deutsch de la Meurthe, named after the département in Lorraine from which the family originated. They were known for their patriotic sponsorships and philanthropy. After the death of his wife Louise in 1914, my great-grandfather Emile founded the Cité Internationale Universitaire in Paris in her memory in 1922, the first university campus in France. His brother, Henry, a member of the French Aero Club was fascinated by the possibility of air travel in which he also saw a future market for the family oil company. As an incentive to the development of air travel, he offered a prize of 100,000 francs to the first airship pilot to complete the 11 km flight from the Club’s Parc d’Aerostation at St. Cloud, round the Eiffel Tower and back to the Club in less than thirty minutes. The prize was won on 19 October 1901 by the famous Brazilian aviator, Alberto Santos-Dumont.
In the years preceding the First World War, Henry successfully lobbied for an air force as he feared Germany’s superiority in this new form of warfare. During the war, the Deutsch firm supplied oil and explosives to the French government, which from that point on tried to take control of the business. Shortly after the end of the war Henry died in a motorboat accident. Emile continued to run the company on his own until 1921 when, given the fact that all eight daughters of the two brothers had married charming men with no interest in business whatsoever, together with pressure from the French government to nationalise the business during the First World War, he decided to sell the company to Royal Dutch Shell, with whom he already had a close relationship. Emile remained a member of the board until his death in 1924.
Emile had married into the Halphen family and of his four daughters, Yvonne (born in 1882), who was to become my grandmother, and her sister Lucie, the baby of the family, had little interest in art, but the other two sisters, Valentine Esmond and Marie Goldet, collected fine examples of 18th-century and Impressionist paintings and several 20th-century works by artists such as Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse.
On my maternal grandmother’s side of the family, the best known collector was Alice Halphen who owned one of my favourite paintings by van Gogh, La Sieste, d’après Millet. It depicted two harvesters dozing in a haystack, after a print by Millet, and was painted when van Gogh was being treated in the Hôpital St. Paul at St Rémy in Provence in 1889. Alice gave it to the Louvre in 1952 and it was one of the many masterpieces transferred to the Musée d’Orsay.
