Frank R. Perls

The existence of the Perls galleries spanned almost a century through various iterations in Berlin, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. Their owners—Hugo, Käte, and sons Frank and Klaus—played a major role in the dissemination of European modernism and helped shape countless collections. Their own pioneering holdings, started when names like Pablo Picasso barely rang a bell, remain legendary to this day.

Frank’s parents owned a famed collection of modern art in Berlin before World War I and successively managed two galleries: Kunsthandlung Hugo Perls in Berlin, active from 1923 to 1931, and after the couple’s divorce in 1931, Galerie Käte Perls in Paris, active from 1932 to 1940 (13 rue de l’Abbaye in Saint-Germain-des-Prés). Franz Richard (known as Frank, nicknamed Dada) studied in Munich, Berlin, and Frankfurt and then apprenticed in his mother’s gallery. Frank would later recall meeting Picasso and Dora Maar in 1936 at the Café de Flore, while his mother was preparing an exhibition titled “Picasso 1900 à 1910” that took place in the summer of 1937. That same year, Käte and Frank witnessed the production of Guernica and she acquired the study Weeping Woman with Handkerchief (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Frank visited Picasso numerous times throughout his life.

As the Great Depression led to a decline in the Parisian art market throughout the 1930s, Käte and her sons Frank and Klaus considered their options. In 1935 Klaus went to New York, and when Frank joined him two years later they opened the Perls Galleries at 32 East 58 Street. The plural “Perls Galleries” encompassed both the Paris and New York operations, and the letterhead listed Käte Perls, Franz R. Perls, and Klaus G. Perls. Between 1937 and 1939 Käte organized exhibitions in Paris, including “For the Young Collector,” “Modern Primitives of Paris,” and “Picasso before 1910,” then sent them to New York.

Two years after opening the New York gallery, the brothers parted ways: Klaus and his new wife Dolly partnered to continue operating the New York gallery (which remained active until 1997), while Frank opened his own space at 8634 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. In 1939 Frank exhibited the Belgian painter Frans Masereel; in 1940 Maurice de Vlaminck and Maurice Utrillo; and in 1941 Raoul Dufy, Picasso, Georges Rouault, and Utrillo, as well as the American painter Paul Lewis Clemens. That same year he held an exhibition of paintings, watercolors, and photographic compositions by Man Ray, and in 1942 an exhibition of portraits, before closing the gallery and enlisting in the U.S. Army. From 1942 to 1945, Frank served as Master Sergeant in the U.S. Military Intelligence, putting his language skills to good use, then as Commanding Officer in the Arts and Monuments Section of the Allied Military Government in Germany. Among other achievements, together with officer Martin Dannenberg, Perls retrieved the original document of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws. He was awarded a Bronze Star for meritorious conduct in September 1944 and received an honorable discharge in September 1945.

After the war, Frank worked for Associated American Artists in New York and Los Angeles. He then reopened his eponymous gallery in Beverly Hills in 1950 at 350 North Camden Drive, which relocated in 1965 to 9777 Wilshire Boulevard. His gallery was the first in California to exhibit Alberto Giacometti and Henri Matisse. He also showed Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee, Joan Miro, Henry Moore, and Picasso, in addition to the California artists Sam Amato, William Brice, Rico Lebrun, James McGarrell, Channing Peake, James Strombotne, and Howard Warsaw. Frank organized two landmark exhibitions at the University of California Los Angeles Art Galleries: “‘Bonne fête’ Monsieur Picasso, from Southern California Collectors” in 1961 and “Henri Matisse: Retrospective” in 1966. Two years later, Frank set auction records when he bought Juan Gris’s Still Life with a Poem (1915) for $120,000 and Rouault’s The Chinese Man (1937) for $92,000 at Parke Bernet (both Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena, Ca.).