César Mange de Hauke

César Mange de Hauke was a French art dealer, art historian, and authority on the work of Georges Seurat. During the 1920s de Hauke was instrumental in shifting the focus of the international Jacques Seligmann & Cie art dealership toward the sale of contemporary art, particularly School of Paris works, and in doing so, transforming the tastes of the company’s American clients.

With the wealth acquired from his position as director of construction on the Panama Canal, Francis Mange and his wife, Marie Hauke, sent their son César to St. Ronan’s School in Kent from 1911 to 1913 to learn English. During his time in England, de Hauke developed an interest in art and frequented the drawings department of the British Museum whenever he had the opportunity to visit London. Following his return to Paris in 1913, de Hauke became close friends with the fashion designer Paul Poiret and began socializing with the artistic community that visited Poiret’s atelier, the Maison Martine (1903–23), which included playwright Jean Cocteau and artists Raoul Dufy and Marie Laurencin. He went on to study art history in Paris and London.

De Hauke moved to New York in 1925 and through René Seligmann quickly found a job as a sales representative at Jacques Seligmann & Cie, where he worked from 1926 to 1931. Germain Seligmann, the company’s president, was immediately impressed by de Hauke’s knowledge of modern French art and hired him to head de Hauke & Co., a subsidiary of Jacques Seligmann & Cie that focused exclusively on the sale of modern French works to the American market. Though not much of a collector himself, de Hauke relied on his contacts in Paris and London to gather stock for resale. From Paris galleries Bernheim-Jeune, Paul Brame (of Brame & Lorenceau), and Roger G. Gompel, he acquired Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings for Jacques Seligmann & Cie, including Edgar Degas’s At the Milliner (1882; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). From dealer Etienne Bignou, he purchased such School of Paris works as Amedeo Modigliani’s Reclining Nude (1919; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). His stock of Fauvist and Cubist works generally came from the Galerie Pierre or dealer Roland Balay. De Hauke also bought works from sources in London, including the Leicester Galleries and Reid & Lefèvre. In turn, de Hauke & Co. sold works of art to private American clients, including Lillie P. Bliss, Frank Crowninshield, Chester Dale, and Duncan Phillips, and worked closely with New York gallerists and art dealers like M. Knoedler & Co., Pierre Matisse, and Curt Valentin to place others. Germain Seligmann made gallery space available to de Hauke & Co. at 3 East 51st Street, where he organized exhibitions featuring Pierre Bonnard and Odilon Redon (1928) and Modigliani (1929).

The success of de Hauke & Co. convinced the Seligmann family that the sale of modern art was a profitable venture and the subsidiary company was absorbed within Jacques Seligmann & Cie in 1930. Modern Paintings, Inc. became the modern department of the dealership shortly thereafter, with de Hauke as its director. In 1931 his working relations with Seligmann strained, de Hauke resigned and returned to Paris to work primarily in art publishing. The two continued to work together for a number of years, however: de Hauke was instrumental in securing loans for exhibitions at the Seligmann Company, including Picasso: Blue and Rose Periods, 1901–1906 (1936); Twenty Years in the Evolution of Picasso, 1903–1923 (1937); and Juan Gris, 1887–1927 (1938). De Hauke also relied on his connection with Poiret to help acquire Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) from Doucet’s widow in 1937 to sell to Jacques Seligmann & Cie.

In the 1940s de Hauke began working with Brame on a series of publications entitled Les artistes et leurs oeuvres: études et documents (Artists and Their Work: Studies and Documents); together, they produced three volumes on Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Georges Seurat, respectively. De Hauke also went on to rewrite the catalogue raisonné of Seurat’s work, which remains the authoritative text on the artist’s oeuvre today.

De Hauke was active in Paris during the Nazi occupation of France, although the exact nature of his activities during this period remain unclear. In his last will and testament, de Hauke left a small collection of nineteenth-century graphic art to the British Museum, which included a study for Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grande Jatte of 1884.