Elisabeth (born Conrad, called Elly) and Gustav Kahnweiler

The younger brother of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the pioneering dealer of Cubism, Gustav Kahnweiler was himself an art dealer who became director of the Galerie Flechtheim in Frankfurt in 1922. He also amassed, together with his wife, Elly, a modest collection focused on Cubist paintings, sculptures, and works on paper. After moving to England in the 1930s to escape Nazi persecution, Gustav and Elly loaned and gifted works from their collection to the Tate, helping to cement the visibility of Cubism in a country where it had been historically underrepresented.

Born in Stuttgart to a wealthy family, Gustav served as a junior officer in a cavalry regiment in the First World War. He later followed his brother into the art business, receiving a lump sum from his family to establish himself in the trade sometime between 1918 and 1920. Research shows that Gustav may have used some of this money as part of the Kahnweiler Syndicate, a group of collectors who purchased stock from Daniel-Henry’s gallery, which had been requisitioned by the French state at the beginning of the First World War and liquidated in a series of auctions between June 1921 and May 1923; their efforts to buy back Daniel-Henry’s inventory helped him to rebuild his business in the interwar period under the name Galerie Simon. In 1920 Gustav also used his funds to invest in the Düsseldorf-based gallery of Alfred Flechtheim, a friend and business associate of his older brother; he officially became a junior partner the following year. Between 1921 and 1922 Flechtheim expanded his gallery to two new locations, in Berlin and Frankfurt; Gustav took over the Düsseldorf branch, located at Königsallee 34, for much of 1922 and was made director of the Frankfurt branch, located at Schillerstrasse 15 and soon renamed Galerie Flechtheim und Kahnweiler, by the end of the year. There, following Flechtheim’s commercial strategy, he focused on the promotion and sale of French Cubist painting—especially by artists associated with Galerie Simon—to German collectors. While the gallery also represented a number of less established German artists and, from 1925, Paul Klee, German art sales made up a comparatively small part of its business.

Gustav and Elly began building their personal collection in the early 1920s. Little is known, however, about how it was formed due to the destruction of archives pertaining to the couple’s life and work. Since many of their artworks were acquired by Gustav through his brother’s connections, scholars have assumed that Gustav was largely responsible for shaping the collection. Their loans and eventual gift of the collection to the Tate, however, were made jointly. The particular lack of information about Elly’s life and role in forming the collection may also reflect the structural inequalities she faced as a woman and a wife.

In the first of two distinct phases of collecting activity, Gustav acquired contemporary works by artists connected to Galerie Simon, including Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Henri Laurens, André Masson, and Maurice de Vlaminck, some of whom were also personal friends. His earliest recorded acquisitions, in 1921, were also among the most significant: the large canvas Overlooking the Bay (1921; Tate) and the collage Bottle of Rum and Newspaper (1913–14; Tate), both by Gris. He also purchased Marie Laurencin’s The Fan (ca. 1919; Tate) for Elly as a wedding present, likely acquiring it from Flechtheim, who jointly represented the artist with the dealer Paul Rosenberg. The vast majority of works purchased over the following decade were produced in the 1920s, with Bottle of Rum and Newspaper the only Cubist work in the collection predating the First World War. Others represented in the collection were by relatively minor artists championed by Daniel-Henry for carrying a Cubist visual language forward into the 1920s and 1930s, including André Beaudin, Eugène de Kermadec, Daniel Henry’s brother-in-law Elie Lascaux, and Suzanne Roger.

This phase of collecting, Gustav’s directorship of the gallery in Frankfurt, and the life Gustav and Elly had built in Germany came to an abrupt halt after the Nazis seized power in 1933. Gustav and Elly, who were both Jewish, fled Germany for Paris in March 1933, with Flechtheim closing his galleries and following them by November. Flechtheim carried swiftly on to London, while Gustav and Elly journeyed across the Channel and settled in Cambridge in the winter of 1935–36. Flechtheim introduced Gustav to Freddie Mayor of London’s Mayor Gallery, an associate of Daniel-Henry’s, who borrowed and exhibited items from Gustav and Elly’s collection, sold works on their behalf, and jointly purchased a number of works in the years following the Second World War. Gustav, however, effectively retired upon moving to Britain, living with Elly off family funds held in Switzerland as well as profits from his occasional deals and, later, his brother’s exclusive contract with Picasso.

In 1940, as a result of their German nationality, Gustav and Elly were placed in internment camps on the Isle of Man, and Gustav enlisted in the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps, serving until 1942. The couple became naturalized British citizens in 1947. They then embarked on a second phase of collecting, adding numerous works to their holdings that seemed to reflect their personal tastes, rather than Daniel-Henry’s. These notably included the monumental bronze sculpture Draped Reclining Woman (1957–58; Tate) by Henry Moore as well as a number of works by Renato Guttuso, both of whom became friends. Gustav and Elly also expanded their existing holdings of work by artists linked to Daniel-Henry, including the major purchase of Picasso’s painting The Studio (1955; Tate).

From the early 1950s, Gustav and Elly loaned an ever-increasing number of works to the Tate for the first half of each year while they traveled in Europe. By 1974 the bequest of their entire collection to the Tate had been formalized. At the time of Elly’s death, in 1991, the collection numbered over 150 objects, of which 95 were sold, as per Gustav’s instructions, to fund the purchase of a major painting: Braque’s The Billiard Table (1945). This work, and the objects from the collection kept by the Tate, now form the cornerstone of the museum’s Cubist collection. Cubism drew a mixed reception in Britain for much of the twentieth century and had a slight presence in the nation’s public collections as a result. The Kahnweilers’ gift represented a significant shift in this state of affairs, as well as a tribute to the country that, as Gustav and Elly put it, had granted them “asylum” after they fled Germany.