Adolphe Basler

Adolphe Basler was a Paris-based critic and art dealer who discovered and promoted the work of emerging artists in the vibrant and cosmopolitan artistic scene of Montparnasse in the 1910s and 1920s.

Basler spent his early years in Poland, but by 1894 began traveling and living abroad, first in Switzerland, where he studied chemistry, and afterward in England. Eventually he moved to France in 1898, encouraged by an officer and friend affiliated with the Polish socialist group Naprzód in Kraków. In 1899 Basler relocated to Paris, where he met the poet, art critic, and journalist Mécislas Goldberg,who encouraged him to study art and introduced him to avant-garde cultural circles. He began writing about Polish artists for French periodicals like La Revue Blanche, La Plume, and Montjoie!, and German publications like Der Cicerone. He also worked as a correspondent for a number of Polish journals, such as Glas Wolny, Krytyka, and Lvovian Sztuka, where he informed Polish audiences about cultural happenings in the French capital. Basler quickly integrated into the artistic milieu of early twentieth-century Paris, befriending the still fledgling art critic Guillaume Apollinaire. He frequented the famous cafés of Montparnasse and met the Catalan sculptor Manolo, who brought him to artists’ studios. Through these visits, Basler rapidly established a social network.

In the 1910s Basler became a marchand en chambre (a dealer with no gallery space whose transactions remained private and therefore unregulated by the French government). He developed an interest in the artists of the School of Paris, in particular Moïse Kisling, a Polish Jewish artist who he represented through an exclusive contract in the years before World War I. He also handled the work of the Czech painter and sculptor Otakar Kubín. Basler bought their works for very modest sums and, as their reputations grew, sold them at a profit. He also owned a significant group of works on paper by Picasso that he acquired in 1914 from the artist’s first retrospective at Heinrich Thannhauser’s Moderne Galerie in Munich. Before the outbreak of World War I, Basler brought nine of these drawings to New York, exhibiting them at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery. He put them up as collateral for a loan from Stieglitz, who kept the drawings after Basler defaulted; Stieglitz later gifted seven of these works, including Still Life with Bottle and a Pot of Hyacinths (1909) and Seated Man Reading a Newspaper (1912), to The Met. Back in Paris in the 1920s, as his politics veered toward the right, Basler developed a strong predilection for the classical French tradition and became critical of what he viewed as the overly subjective painting of the School of Paris.

From 1929 Basler directed the Galerie de Sèvres, the exhibition space of the publishing house G. Crès & Cie, whose artistic director was the critic and collector George Besson. For Crès, Basler edited several monographs on artists that Galerie de Sèvres represented such as André Derain, Amedeo Modigliani, Maurice Utrillo, and Suzanne Valadon, whose work was also exhibited at the Galerie de Sèvres. After suffering losses in the 1929 recession, he returned to operating as a marchand en chambre in the 1930s. Basler’s activities following this period are not known.