Léonce Rosenberg

Léonce Rosenberg was a French art dealer who championed modern European art in the years around World War I, providing crucial support for the Cubist artists in a period of great political and personal turbulence. First independently and then under the auspices of his gallery L’Effort Moderne, which he opened in March 1918 during the last months of the War, Rosenberg became an important collector, dealer, and advocate of Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Picasso.

The son of an art and antiquities dealer, at the age of thirty-one Rosenberg opened his first gallery, Haute Époque in 1910 at 19 rue de la Baume, Paris, specializing in French antiques, Chinese art, and Persian miniatures, among other things. His personal taste, however, increasingly tended toward the most audacious developments in modern painting, and he began in the years before World War I to build a collection in works by the Cubists, bought primarily at the Galerie Kahnweiler. When as a German national Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler was forced into exile by the war, leaving the artists he represented without a means to make a livelihood, Rosenberg’s dedication to these artists provided much needed support. In the depressed wartime art market, Rosenberg was a dependable buyer of Cubist art, to the point where he could later boast, “During the entire duration of the war and even while mobilized, I subsidized, by continuous purchases, the entire Cubist movement.” Rosenberg was a volunteer member of the auxiliary army, principally stationed in Meudon, and also worked as an English interpreter at the Somme front in 1917. However, even while mobilized in the war, he actively pursued and signed contracts with Braque, Gris, and Léger between 1916 and 1918. (Picasso would sign with his brother, the important art dealer Paul Rosenberg.)

In March 1918, Rosenberg renamed his gallery the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, and went on to stage ambitious exhibitions of modern art with a focus on Cubism. In 1924 Rosenberg also began to publish the Bulletin de l’Effort Moderne, a lavishly illustrated art journal released ten times a year until 1927. In this publication, he sought not only to promote his gallery, but also to host critical debates about the most recent developments in modern art, from Cubism to Purism and abstraction, by publishing writing and reproducing art by figures as diverse as Piet Mondrian, Gino Severini, and Albert Gleizes.

Kahnweiler later affirmed that Rosenberg “assumed during the war—and this will be his lasting honor—the task that I could no longer fulfill: the defense of Cubism.” Yet the relationship between the two dealers was fraught. In 1921 Rosenberg was appointed the “expert” to appraise and to organize the public auction of the Cubist collections that had been seized by the French government from Kahnweiler and from the important German collector and dealer Wilhelm Uhde. These historic sales, which ran until 1923, provoked much criticism in the art world, infuriating Braque, for example, who saw them as an affront to Kahnweiler, as well as the source of a deflation in his prices. Rosenberg, however, was undaunted, and defended himself in the first issue of his Bulletin, writing that the works sold in the auctions were “juvenilia—beautiful fruit still a bit under ripe” and that recent works on sale in his gallery by the same artists, were “infinitely more evolved, [and] would attain prices four times higher.” With Kahnweiler’s return to Paris in 1920, Braque, Picasso, and Gris each renewed their contracts with their first dealer. Rosenberg continued to run the Galerie de l’Effort Moderne and to successfully exhibit and represent artists of a variety of post-Cubist tendencies, including Diego Rivera, Giorgio de Chirico, and Francis Picabia. The gallery persisted as a hub for modern art in Paris until it was closed in 1941 due to the anti-Semitic policies of the occupying Nazi forces. Following this persecution, Rosenberg was not able to reopen his gallery and died in 1947.