Etienne Bignou

Etienne Bignou was a French art dealer and gallerist who operated two eponymous galleries in Paris and New York until the 1940s. His work in the transatlantic art market contributed to the popularization of modern French painting among American and British collectors.

A precocious student, Bignou was educated partly in London, where, after his studies concluded, he remained active as an apprentice fur trader, developing both his business acumen and his command of English. Bignou returned to Paris in 1909 to assist his stepfather, Theodore Bonjean, at the Galerie Bonjean (10 rue Laffitte), which dealt initially in modern French art before shifting in the early 1910s to early modern Italian and Flemish painting. When Bonjean died in 1913, Bignou inherited the business and his stock of nineteenth-century paintings by artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Honoré Daumier. He returned the Galerie Bonjean’s focus to modern French painting and, in 1919, relocated to 8 rue la Boétie, a street populated by a number of ambitious dealers of contemporary painting, such as Galerie Barbazanges, Georges Bernheim, and Paul Rosenberg. In the early 1920s, Bignou represented Jean Lurçat and Raoul Dufy on the primary market.

After the First World War, Bignou renamed the business Galerie Bignou and drew upon his experience in Britain to establish close working relationships with gallerists Ernest Albert Lefèvre in London and A. J. “McNeill” Reid in Glasgow. Traveling frequently, though based in Paris, Bignou proved himself invaluable to the two gallerists, for whom he scouted and acquired contemporary paintings in Paris. He also organized solo and group exhibitions for Lefèvre and Reid, such as a 1923 presentation at Lefèvre’s gallery featuring paintings by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, among others. With these activities Bignou promoted modern French painting across the English Channel through the work of figures such as Eugène Boudin, Daumier, Henri Matisse, Odilon Redon, Henri Rousseau, Georges Seurat, and Maurice Utrillo. Significant sales mediated by Bignou during his affiliation with Lefèvre and Reid include Edouard Manet’s Peonies (1864–65; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), sold to Mrs. R. A. Workman around 1923, and Pablo Picasso’s Woman in White (1923; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), sold to Lillie P. Bliss in 1927.

Bignou’s activities with Lefèvre and Reid culminated on April 26, 1926, when the two galleries combined to form Alex Reid & Lefèvre, Ltd. in London, with Bignou as one of four founding directors. During the firm’s first year and beyond, he contributed to its ambitious exhibition program, organizing shows of work by painters such as Amedeo Modigliani (1929), Picasso (1931), Georges Braque (1934), and Salvador Dalí (1936). He also began traveling to New York City during this period, facilitating the sale of French art on the American market as Reid and Lefèvre’s proxy through the gallery Knoedler New York, an arrangement wherein Bignou received twenty-five percent of profits.

In 1929 Bignou joined Josse Bernheim and Gaston Bernheim de Villers of the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune to purchase controlling shares of the Galeries Georges Petit, a gallery focusing on modern French art then located at 8 rue de Sèze. Other shareholders included the American collector Chester Dale, to whom Bignou (operating on behalf of Reid & Lefèvre and Knoedler) sold Vincent van Gogh’s The Olive Orchard (1899; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC). To direct Galeries Georges Petit, Bignou tapped the experienced French-Brazilian gallerist Georges Frédéric Keller. Through him, Bignou became acquainted with Albert C. Barnes, another major American collector who would become a key client, purchasing numerous paintings from Bignou by Cézanne, Matisse, and Renoir.

The Great Depression forced Galeries Georges Petit’s shareholders to liquidate the business in 1932. Keller then joined Galerie Bignou but quickly left Paris to direct a branch of the gallery in New York City. Opened on March 4, 1935, on the eighteenth floor of the recently completed Rolls Royce Building at 32 East 57th Street, Bignou Gallery New York continued to focus on modern French painting, hosting a wide range of exhibitions, including solo shows of Picasso (1939, 1941), Dalí (1945, 1947) and Matisse (1948).

At the start of the Second World War, Bignou became associated with a controversy concerning his connection with Martin Fabiani, a French dealer later linked to the Nazi spoliation of artworks in France during the war. Two weeks before the German occupation of Paris in 1940, Fabiani organized for hundreds of works of art from the collection of recently deceased dealer Ambroise Vollard to be transported by ship to Bignou’s New York gallery. Included were paintings and drawings by many prominent Parisian artists, such as Cézanne, Degas, Manet, and Picasso. The works were first taken to Lisbon before embarking for the United States. The British Admiralty, wrongly suspecting Vollard’s works were being taken to a neutral territory for sale to profit an enemy state, escorted the ship to Bermuda, where the works were confiscated. They were later brought to Canada for safekeeping until the war’s end, when British courts ordered them restituted to Fabiani and Vollard’s sisters.

Beyond his involvement in the contemporary art market, Bignou was also an avid collector of manuscripts, famously owning the first handwritten draft of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s 1932 Journey to the End of the Night. Bignou’s New York gallery closed a year before his death in 1949, with the Paris location following suit in 1953. Portions of Bignou’s Paris stock went to his eldest son, Michel, who ran Galerie Michel Bignou, founded in 1942 at 1 rue d’Argenson. Some of his New York stock moved to Carstairs Gallery in the same city, where Keller went on to serve as director until 1963.