Rolf de Maré

Rolf de Maré was a passionate supporter of modern dance, a patron of the arts, and a discerning collector of avant-garde paintings who purchased Cubist works as early as 1914.

Born to a wealthy Swedish family, de Maré began collecting in the early 1910s after being introduced to the French art scene by his lover and compatriot, Nils Dardel, a Swedish painter who had moved to Paris in 1910 to study at Henri Matisse’s Academié, a private art school. Close to painters such as Georges Braque and Fernand Léger but also to dealers Alfred Flechtheim and Wilhelm Udhe, Dardel worked as an advisor for de Maré, helping him to build a major art collection focused on Cubism. Thanks to Dardel’s negotiations with Flechtheim, de Maré was the first private collector to own Pablo Picasso’s At the Lapin Agile (1905; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which he kept from 1914 to 1952. If Dardel was the main negotiator for purchases with dealers and artists, de Maré himself attended Kahnweiler sequestration sales in 1922 where he bought several Picassos, including The Glass (1911–12; Art Institute of Chicago).

In 1920 de Maré founded the Ballets Suédois in Paris, which he would operate with the help of his partner, the choreographer Jean Börlin, until 1925. Similar to Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, the company worked with avant-garde artists and composers, blurring the boundaries between dance and the visual arts. De Maré saw the ballet as an extension of his art collection that came to life on the stage, and he entrusted the costumes and sets to artists Dardel, Giorgio de Chirico, Francis Picabia, and especially Léger, who worked on several productions including Skating Rink in 1922 and The Creation of the World in 1923. From 1931 to 1952, de Maré managed Les Archives Internationales de la Danse in Paris, the first archive devoted to dance, part of which, including six thousand books and documents on Western dance, was given to the French government (preserved today in the library of the Paris Opera). In 1951 de Maré brought the collection of costumes, sets, and dance-related artifacts from the Ballets Suédois to Stockholm to form the Dansmuseet in the Royal Swedish Opera, which opened in 1953.

After his death in 1964, a large part of de Maré’s art collection, including Cubist works such as Picasso’s bronze Head of Fernande (1909), Braque’s Still Life with Fruit Bowl (1908), and Léger’s Staircase (1914), was bequeathed to the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.