Daniel Kahnweiler

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1956
Born	(1884-06-25)25 June 1884 Mannheim, Baden, Germany
Died	11 January 1979(1979-01-11) (aged 94) Paris, France
Occupation	Art dealer, historian

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (25 June 1884 – 11 January 1979) was a German-born art historian, art collector, and one of the most notable French art dealers of the 20th century. He became prominent as an art gallery owner in Paris beginning in 1907 and was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubist movement in art.

Kahnweiler's family moved from Rockenhausen, a small village in the Palatinate, to Mannheim, Baden, where Kahnweiler was born in 1884. His upbringing and education at a German Gymnasium prepared him well for his life as an art connoisseur and pragmatic businessman. Early employment in the family business of in Germany and Paris gave way to an interest in art collecting while Kahnweiler was still in his twenties. He opened his first small art gallery (4 by 4 meters) in Paris in 1907 at 28 rue Vignon. There was a family precedent for such an enterprise, since his uncle, who ran a famous stock brokerage house in London, was a major art collector of traditional English art works and furniture.

Kahnweiler is considered to have been one of the greatest supporters of the Cubist art movement through his activities as an art dealer and spokesman for artists. He was among the first people to recognize the importance and beauty of Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon and immediately wanted to buy it along with all of Picasso's works. Picasso wrote of Kahnweiler, "What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn't had a business sense?" Kahnweiler's appreciation of Picasso's talents was especially gratifying to the artist, since he was largely unknown and destitute at the time when many of his most famous works were created.

In his gallery, Kahnweiler supported many of the great artists of his time who found themselves without adequate recognition and little or no interest among collectors. Initial purchases included works by Kees van Dongen, André Derain, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Maurice de Vlaminck and several other artists of the same generation. To use his own word, Kahnweiler wanted to "defend" great artists, but only those who had no dealers and whose talents he was convinced of. Rather than exhibiting appealing works by established artists from the past and present, Kahnweiler championed burgeoning artists who had come from all over the globe to live and work in Montparnasse and Montmartre at the time. Thus Paul Cézanne, although a great artist, was considered too old to be represented, and his work was already represented by the dealer Ambroise Vollard in any case.