René Gimpel [Fig. 1] was born in Paris to a family of Jewish art dealers originally from Alsace [Fig. 2]. His father, Ernest Nathan Gimpel, co-founded the business, E. Gimpel & Wildenstein, in New York in 1902 [Fig. 3]. Following his father’s untimely death in 1907, Gimpel, at the age of 25, succeeded him at the helm of the transatlantic art dealership. In 1912 he married Florence Duveen (1886-1978), with whom he had three children, Charles (1913–1973), Peter (1915–2005) and Jean (1918–1996). In 1918, Gimpel’s Parisian gallery was located at 57 rue de la Boétie; between 1934 and January 1938, the gallery was situated at 8 Place du Vendôme with storage on rue de la Sourdière.
Gimpel boasted great lineage in the art and business worlds. He was related to Louis Vuitton (1821-1892) on his mother’s side and to the French art dealer Nathan Wildenstein (1851–1934) on his father’s side. Through his marriage, he became the brother-in-law of British art dealer Joseph Duveen (1869–1939). With his cultured and connected approach, Gimpel embodied the spirit of art dealing in the early and inter-war decades of the 20th century.
Fluent in both French and English, Gimpel established a very successful art dealership between Paris and New York, often sourcing works in Europe and selling them in the United States. His links to a new age of American collectors mean that, today, works handled by Gimpel can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Frick Collection. Gimpel’s primary focus was 18th-century French decorative and fine arts, but he also dealt in modern art.
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[28 June 1926] ‘At Claude Monet’s. - I have bought two canvases from him for 200,000 francs. They are among Monet’s masterpieces. They are not actually a pair, but both depict women in boats. What a book could be written on the subject of fine Sundays in nineteenth-century French painting! The impressionists are particularly great there, reaching the summit of their art when they paint our French Sundays, so typical of our people. There is candor in them and gaiety, color, a gracious ease, tenderness and silences and clear intelligent faces’
ARTISTIC ENGAGEMENT
Gimpel was an active member of the Parisian cultural intelligentsia in the early 20th century. His circle included Marcel Proust, whom he met in 1907, and other notable writers as well as artist contemporaries such as Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Marie Cassatt, Jean-Louis Forain, Chaïm Soutine and Abraham Mintchine. The artist Marie Laurencin was a close friend and painted several members of the Gimpel family [Fig. 5]. Gimpel collected and championed works by his artist friends, which adorned the family’s home at 19 Rue Spontini and later at 37 Rue de l’Université [Fig 6-7].
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Immersed in this artistic and urbane milieu, Gimpel became a regular and insightful diary-keeper. His diaries from 1918 until the outbreak of World War II in 1939 chronicle the art market of the time and bring the reader into a vibrant world of artists, dealers and collectors. ‘René Gimpel possessed… the awareness of being an observer... Here, the diary of René Gimpel encapsulates a world that is disappearing. At the same time, noting the effects of modernity — industry to the invention of new terms such as “photogenic” — delighted the progress-loving diarist.’ (Clément Dirié, ‘Préface. Du côté de Gimpel, passeur considérable’, Journal d’un collectionneur. Marchand tableaux, Paris: Hermann, 2023, p. XI & XIII)
Beyond the glimpses into the dynamic artistic landscape of the time, Gimpel’s writings are a window into the day-to-day life of a successful art dealer during the interwar years and the mounting tensions leading up to World War II.
‘Friday 1st September 1939. – It’s war. ... First image of war: Boulevard Montparnasse at a quarter to seven in the morning, a young girl, pretty and blond, her hair blowing in the wind, riding a bicycle in long trousers and wearing a Red Cross badge on her arm…’
As war approached, Gimpel was able to send some artworks from his personal collection and businesses away from Paris for safekeeping, with some stored in London and New York; yet other works were at a later date deposited with the Crédit Commercial de France in Nice.
Facing persecution, Gimpel fled Paris on a bicycle in June 1940, and together with his family, took refuge in the zone libre (unoccupied zone) in southern France. Following the first anti-Jewish statute of the Vichy regime in October 1940, the Gimpels were forced to vacate their home on Rue de l’Université and hastily rented an apartment at 6, Place du Palais Bourbon, which was requisitioned by the Nazis in 1941. The following year, René Gimpel’s belongings in Paris — amounting to 200 crates — were seized by the Nazis as ‘ownerless assets’.
During the war, René Gimpel and his three sons, Charles, Peter and Jean joined the French Resistance. Gimpel was later arrested first by the Vichy regime, then by the Nazis. He was interned in the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, where he died of slave labour-related exhaustion on 3 January 1945.
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[28 June 1926] ‘At Claude Monet’s. - I have bought two canvases from him for 200,000 francs. They are among Monet’s masterpieces. They are not actually a pair, but both depict women in boats. What a book could be written on the subject of fine Sundays in nineteenth-century French painting! The impressionists are particularly great there, reaching the summit of their art when they paint our French Sundays, so typical of our people. There is candor in them and gaiety, color, a gracious ease, tenderness and silences and clear intelligent faces’
ARTISTIC ENGAGEMENT
Gimpel was an active member of the Parisian cultural intelligentsia in the early 20th century. His circle included Marcel Proust, whom he met in 1907, and other notable writers as well as artist contemporaries such as Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Marie Cassatt, Jean-Louis Forain, Chaïm Soutine and Abraham Mintchine. The artist Marie Laurencin was a close friend and painted several members of the Gimpel family [Fig. 5]. Gimpel collected and championed works by his artist friends, which adorned the family’s home at 19 Rue Spontini and later at 37 Rue de l’Université [Fig 6-7].
Immersed in this artistic and urbane milieu, Gimpel became a regular and insightful diary-keeper. His diaries from 1918 until the outbreak of World War II in 1939 chronicle the art market of the time and bring the reader into a vibrant world of artists, dealers and collectors. ‘René Gimpel possessed… the awareness of being an observer... Here, the diary of René Gimpel encapsulates a world that is disappearing. At the same time, noting the effects of modernity — industry to the invention of new terms such as “photogenic” — delighted the progress-loving diarist.’ (Clément Dirié, ‘Préface. Du côté de Gimpel, passeur considérable’, Journal d’un collectionneur. Marchand tableaux, Paris: Hermann, 2023, p. XI & XIII)
Beyond the glimpses into the dynamic artistic landscape of the time, Gimpel’s writings are a window into the day-to-day life of a successful art dealer during the interwar years and the mounting tensions leading up to World War II.
‘Friday 1st September 1939. – It’s war. ... First image of war: Boulevard Montparnasse at a quarter to seven in the morning, a young girl, pretty and blond, her hair blowing in the wind, riding a bicycle in long trousers and wearing a Red Cross badge on her arm…’
As war approached, Gimpel was able to send some artworks from his personal collection and businesses away from Paris for safekeeping, with some stored in London and New York; yet other works were at a later date deposited with the Crédit Commercial de France in Nice.
Facing persecution, Gimpel fled Paris on a bicycle in June 1940, and together with his family, took refuge in the zone libre (unoccupied zone) in southern France. Following the first anti-Jewish statute of the Vichy regime in October 1940, the Gimpels were forced to vacate their home on Rue de l’Université and hastily rented an apartment at 6, Place du Palais Bourbon, which was requisitioned by the Nazis in 1941. The following year, René Gimpel’s belongings in Paris — amounting to 200 crates — were seized by the Nazis as ‘ownerless assets’.
During the war, René Gimpel and his three sons, Charles, Peter and Jean joined the French Resistance. Gimpel was later arrested first by the Vichy regime, then by the Nazis. He was interned in the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, where he died of slave labour-related exhaustion on 3 January 1945.
'September 19 [1922] / The Pellerin Cézannes. In his villa at Neuilly he must have at least a hundred of them. It is hard to look at a hundred Cézannes; it’s a hundred clashings of cymbals in your head: my head rang for hours. You feel the effort, the toil and travail in his painting, and yet it appears more and more complete.’
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In 1946, two of Gimpel’s sons, Charles and Peter, co-founded an art gallery in London. The inventory included the small number of artworks that René Gimpel had managed to send out of France before the outbreak of the war. They named the gallery Gimpel & Fils in memory of their late father. Gimpel’s youngest son Jean became a renowned historian and medievalist.
In 1963, the diaries of René Gimpel from 1918 to 1939, edited by Jean, were published in France under the title Journal d’un collectionneur. Marchand de tableaux [Fig. 8]. This book now represents an important source on the art world and the European and American taste of the era.
'September 12 [1930] / I buy a Soutine from Zborowsky for 32,000 francs. It’s the portrait of a poetess, a Polish woman. It is marvelous, a masterpiece'
The front cover of the first edition of Gimpel’s diaries in French (1963) and in English (1966) featured a portrait by Chaïm Soutine, a favourite artist of Gimpel’s, who had collected his works [Fig. 9]. This portrait had been, in fact, looted by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg from Gimpel’s vault at the Crédit Commercial de France in Nice in April 1944 and transferred to the Jeu de Paume in Paris. In late August 1944, it would be recovered from the last ERR train to leave Paris bound for Germany, which was - on the basis of intelligence shared by Rose Valland - stopped by the French Resistance at Aulnay-sous-Bois railway station in the outskirts of Paris. Returned to the Gimpel family after the war, the Soutine featured in the inaugural exhibition at Gimpel & Fils in London in November 1946 [Fig. 10].
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In recent years, Gimpel’s family, led by his grandchildren Claire Touchard Gimpel and René Gimpel, has sought to both consolidate his legacy and fight through the French courts for the restitution of artworks taken as a result of his persecution by the Nazis. In 2020, three paintings by André Derain, Paysage à Cassis [Fig. 11], Le Moulin [Fig. 12] and Paysage à Cassis [Fig. 13] were returned by the French government (from the Musée Cantini in Marseille and the Modern Art Museum in Troyes), after the court of appeal overturned previous findings during a seven-year case. All three of the restituted Derain paintings are visible on a damaged pre-war photograph of the the Gimpel family home in Paris [Fig 14].
The latest French edition of Gimpel’s diaries came out in 2023 [Fig. 15] with a new English edition in preparation.
In commemoration of René, the Gimpel family built a digital database of the art dealer’s professional and personal archives, with over 10,000 documents now available online: RG Archives — Gimpel Fils.
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