Käte Perls

The existence of the Perls galleries spanned almost a century through various iterations in Berlin, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. Their owners—Hugo, Käte, and sons Frank and Klaus—played a major role in the dissemination of European modernism and helped shape countless collections. Their own pioneering holdings, started when names like Pablo Picasso barely rang a bell, remain legendary to this day.

Käte Perls, née Kolker, originated from a family for whom art was paramount: her uncle was famed modern art collector Hugo Kolker, whose daughter Else married art historian and curator Curt Glaser. In 1910, Käte married the magistrate Hugo Perls (a cousin of Glaser's), and soon after the couple and their two eldest sons lived in a house commissioned from the young architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, at Hermannstrasse 14–16 in Berlin-Zehlendorf, with dining room murals by Max Pechstein. It was there that they built a substantial art collection. In the course of their regular trips to Paris beginning in 1910, Hugo and Käte acquired paintings by such artists as Paul Cézanne, Honoré Daumier, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, from Paul Durand-Ruel and other dealers. They discovered Picasso through the dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and bought their first painting by the artist in 1912. A year later, in Moss, Norway, Edvard Munch painted three portraits of the red-haired Käte, and two portraits of the couple. During World War I, facing financial troubles, they sold their house and collection and subsequently lived at Margaretenstrasse 8.

Between 1923 and September 18, 1931, Käte and Hugo owned an art gallery in Berlin, Kunsthandlung Hugo Perls, at Bellevuestrasse 10, which specialized in Old Masters, German painting, French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Their stock included numerous Blue and Rose Period paintings by Picasso, as well as other works acquired in the 1920s from dealer Ambroise Vollard. Several paintings that passed through the gallery are today in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, including Cézanne’s Antoine Dominique Sauveur Aubert (1866) and House with the Cracked Walls (1892–94); Degas’s Three Jockeys (ca. 1900); and Picasso’s La Coiffure (1906).

In 1930–31 Hugo and Käte liquidated their gallery stock, sold a large part of their private collection, divorced on October 10, 1931, and moved to Paris. Käte opened an eponymous gallery in Paris at 13 rue de l’Abbaye in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which she ran from 1932 to 1940. As the primary dealer for Raoul Dufy, Marie Laurencin, Chaim Soutine, and Maurice de Vlaminck, Käte’s contracts with these artists gave her right of first refusal; she was also involved in the secondary art market. Her eldest sons, Frank and Klaus, both apprenticed in their mother’s gallery.

Käte knew Picasso well and they met regularly in Paris. Frank would later recall meeting Picasso and photographer Dora Maar in 1936 at the Café de Flore, while his mother was preparing an exhibition titled “Picasso 1900 à 1910” that took place in the summer of 1937. That same year, Käte and Frank witnessed the production of Guernica, and she acquired the study Weeping Woman with Handkerchief (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Several paintings that passed through the Galerie Käte Perls are today in the collection of the Met, including Picasso’s canvas The Actor (1904–5), the watercolor Jardin de Paris (1901), the canvas Man with a Lollipop (1938) and a related drawing, and the painting Guitar and Clarinet on a Mantelpiece (1915).

As the Great Depression led to a decline in the Parisian art market throughout the 1930s, Käte and her sons considered their options. In October 1935, Klaus settled in New York, where he peddled his mother’s stock for a few hundred dollars. Two years later, in October 1937, Frank joined his brother and they opened the Perls Galleries at 32 East 58 Street. The plural “Perls Galleries” encompassed both the Paris and New York operations, and the letterhead listed Käte Perls, Franz R. Perls, and Klaus G. Perls. Between 1937 and 1939, Käte sent her Paris exhibitions to New York, including a series of School of Paris group shows titled “For the Young Collector,” “Modern Primitives of Paris,” and “Picasso before 1910.” While they had very little competition, there was not much demand for the European avant-garde at the time, with the notable exception of the industrialist and collector Walter P. Chrysler Jr., who was a client of the gallery.

In the spring of 1939 Käte embarked for New York with her youngest son, Thomas Alfred, then sixteen years old, who would eventually obtain a PhD in Physics from Yale in 1945. Not foreseeing the imminent outbreak of war, she returned to her gallery in Paris. The German Jewish Käte was arrested and sent to a series of French internment camps for enemy nationals and refugees: in Gurs (May–July 1940), Toulouse, Foix, then the Centre Bompard in Marseille (September–October 1940), where she awaited her authorization to emigrate. Her sons, meanwhile, did their best to get their mother out through Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee. They sold a half share of a Picasso their father owned to Carroll Carstairs (which Hugo later got back) to pay for her passage from Europe to Cuba where she was to await a U.S. visa, thereby preventing her from being sent to an extermination camp. She managed to embark on a ship bound for Havana, where she was exiled until December 1942, finally reaching New York in 1943.

During the German Occupation of Paris, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg seized Käte’s possessions at 20 rue de la Paix. Her ex-husband Hugo, who had fled occupied France himself via Cuba in 1941, claimed them on her behalf after the war. During the Vichy regime, moreover, an interim administrator in charge of liquidation, J. Clavière, was appointed by the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives to aryanize Galerie Käte Perls (13, rue de l’Abbaye). The gallery was liquidated on February 18, 1942 and the proceeds of the sale placed in a Nazi bank account. The gallery stock was purchased by Jean-François Lefranc and Maurice Engrand, against whom the Perls brothers would file a successful restitution claim on behalf of their mother. Sadly, having just survived the war, Käthe died of cancer in New York, at age 56, on August 23, 1945.