Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. Dealer and publisher

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler is one of the greatest art dealers of the twentieth century. His name has remained bound to the history of Cubism. Kahnweiler was the movement’s first promoter, having presented Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger in his Parisian gallery in 1908. He was also its prime witness, first historian and first editor. Hard-hit by the upheavals of history, which in 1940 stripped this pacifist German of his collection, this Jew of all his possessions, Kahnweiler would remain faithful his entire life to the intellectual and moral ethics that gave his relations with his artists – of more of a friendly than a commercial nature – a particular hue. A man of duty and conviction, he was the protector and collector of all of the artists he worked with in his three galleries, successively opened; the first bearing his own name, then the Galerie Simon and Galeríe Louise Leiris. Refusing to unify his line of work, yet hostile to abstraction, he considered painting as an intelligible writing of the world, animated by poetic feeling. Indifferent to the fashions and dogmas of his time, he held Picasso, ‘the shock of his life’, above all else.