Curt Valentin

German Jewish art dealer Curt Valentin’s promising career in the Berlin art trade was cut short during the Nazi regime, but after emigrating to New York he maintained the business relationships he had established in Europe from the early 1920s on. Henceforth he became an important conduit of European modernism in postwar New York, and helped build some of the most significant collections of modern art in the U.S.

At the onset of his decade-long career as an art dealer at the Berlin gallery of Alfred Flechtheim, Valentin trained with Flechtheim’s friend Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler at Galerie Simon in Paris, ca. 1923. Valentin continued to work closely with the Paris gallery in the following years, as Kahnweiler and Flechtheim owned significant stock in co-shares. Some of the best modern art from Germany and France passed through Flechtheim’s Berlin gallery, including works by Fauve, Cubist, and German Expressionist artists.

After Flechtheim closed the gallery and left Germany in 1933, Valentin worked for Karl Buchholz in Berlin, operating an art gallery above the Buchhandlung Karl Buchholz on Leipziger Strasse from 1934 to 1936. Because of the anti-Semitic National Socialist laws preventing Jews from practicing their professions in Germany, Valentin was dismissed at the end of 1936, but sent to New York where he opened the Buchholz Gallery in September 1937, at 3 West 46 Street. In 1939 the gallery relocated to 32 East 57 Street. From 1951 to 1955 it operated under the name Curt Valentin Gallery, still specializing in modern French and German art.

In New York Valentin was a key figure in the dispersal of so-called “degenerate” art (that is, banished modern artworks that were legally removed by the elected government from German state-owned museums in 1937 and sent abroad for sale. This resulted from Karl Buchholz (still in Berlin) being one of four dealers—together with Ferdinand Möller (Berlin), Hildebrand Gurlitt (Hamburg), and Bernhard A. Böhmer (Güstrow)—tasked by Hitler’s Propaganda Ministry with the disposal of such art for profit. Many such works were sold between 1937 and 1941 through Valentin’s midtown Buchholz Gallery. After the U.S. declared war on Germany in December 1941, Valentin was forced to sever ties to Buchholz. Valentin was considered an enemy alien and, pursuant to the Trading with the Enemy Act, the Alien Property Custodian seized approximately 400 artworks from his gallery stock on May 29, 1944. The works were sold at auction in January 1945.

Buchcholz was not Valentin’s only source, however. The latter continued to rely on Kahnweiler’s stock, and traveled regularly to Europe after the war to acquire new art. In the 1940s Valentin mounted solo exhibitions for such artists as Max Beckmann, Lyonel Feininger, Juan Gris, Paul Klee, Jacques Lipchitz, Franz Marc, and Pablo Picasso; and in the 1950s he added the work of Jean Arp, Alexander Calder, Mary Callery, Marc Chagall, Lovis Corinth, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Marino Marini, and Henry Moore to his roster. The dealer died of cardiac arrest in the summer of 1954 while traveling in Italy, and his gallery closed the following year.