Art: Dealer’s Choice

In his 55 years as a canny and tasteful buyer and seller of art, Paul Rosenberg has made a fortune. Unlike those dealers who consider it unethical to buy anything for themselves, he has also amassed for his own enjoyment one of the world’s finest private collections of modern French art. Last week Rosenberg’s personal trove was on public view for the first time.

Crowded into two rooms of his elegant new Manhattan gallery were 89 pictures, most of them by three artists—Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse —whom Rosenberg has helped make famous in the past half century (and who have made Rosenberg rich in return). Rosenberg has had exclusive buying arrangements with all three painters during much of their creative lifetimes, and every painting in his collection was bought directly from the artist.

Token from the Master. The star of the show was Rosenberg’s old friend and exact contemporary, Picasso (they were both born in 1881). The 43 Picassos on view included such masterpieces as Woman with Mandolin, Harlequin and Open Window, plus nine superb drawings. Among them: a sketch of sharp-eyed, sensitive-faced Paul Rosenberg, done in 1921 as a token of friendship.

The Rosenberg collection of Braques was also outstanding; it included a series of peaceful still lifes and such stimulating arrangements as Pink Tablecloth and Blue and Red Guitar. Matisse was represented by eight works, notably a riotously colored Odalisque with Flowers and a small, masterfully composed Open Window at Etretat. There were also excellent pictures by other artists in whose work Rosenberg has dealt: Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat and Pierre Auguste Renoir, whose appetizing La Source—an amply bosomed nude sitting beside a running fountain—showed the luscious tints and easy symbolism that make Renoir popular even with beginners in art appreciation.

No Salesmanship. Rosenberg started his art-buying career at 18 when he went to England for his father, a successful Paris art dealer. Among his first wise investments were two Van Gogh drawings for $20 each. Edouard Manet’s Portrait of Victorine Meurend for $200. (In 1928, Rosenberg rebought the picture for $40,000, sold it again at a profit. It now hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Art). At 20, he took over his father’s Paris salon. By paying better prices than competing dealers, Rosenberg kept artists like Picasso, Matisse, Braque and others in his stable, built his business into one of Paris’ top dealerships. When France fell in 1940, Rosenberg fled to the U.S., opened a gallery on Manhattan’s 57th Street. The current show of his private collection was to celebrate his move to new quarters and the 75th anniversary of the Rosenberg family’s start in the art business.

Rosenberg, now an agile 72, credits his success as a dealer to a policy of never trying to sell anything. Says he: “Salesmanship is useless when you are an honest man and want to sell the best. Great pictures sell themselves . . . I don’t sell anything I wouldn’t like to keep myself.” Of the things he has kept, Rosenberg says all the money in the world could not buy a single one: “They are the expression of my life.”