Henri-Pierre Roché

French writer, journalist, advisor, dealer, and collector Henri-Pierre Roché was a central figure within international modernist circles in Paris and New York during the first half of the twentieth century. That Pablo Picasso described Roché as a “translator” underscores the scope of his activities as an intermediary operating between continents, connecting artists, dealers, and collectors, and facilitating the circulation of modernist artworks across Europe and the United States.

Raised and educated in Paris, Roché trained briefly as a painter at the Academie Julien. Though a prolific writer who had published seven books by the age of twenty-six, he is best known for his two later autobiographical novels, Jules and Jim (1953) and Two English Girls (1956), which were adapted to the cinema by auteur François Truffaut. In addition to contributing to international literary magazines including The Dial, Roché regularly completed French translations of English and German texts; in 1911, he translated Gertrude Stein’s word portraits of Picasso and Jean Cocteau. He also produced several projects for the theatre and ballet, collaborating with such figures as Serge Diaghilev, director of the Ballets Russes, and composer Erik Satie.

Roché’s abiding personal relationships with artists had a formative impact upon his development as a writer and collector. As a devoted diarist, he meticulously chronicled his encounters and exchanges within the literary and visual avant-garde in Paris in the decades before the First World War. In this capacity, Roché witnessed important developments in the history of Cubism. He frequented the studios of Georges Braque (who was also his boxing partner), André Derain, and Picasso, participated in the conversations at dinner parties hosted by Guillaume Apollinaire at the poet’s apartment on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and regularly visited Gertrude and Leo Stein’s apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. In addition, he was instrumental as an early advocate and collector of Marie Laurencin, whom he first met in 1906. During this period, he advised collector and couturier Jacques Doucet and introduced him to Derain in 1916.

Because his personal and professional relationships were nearly indistinguishable, it is difficult to separate Roché’s strictly commercial activities from what one might call a personal vocation as a collector. By 1915–16, his personal collection included works by Picasso, Braque, Laurencin, and Marcel Duchamp, including Duchamp’s Two Nudes (1910; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). In the fall of 1916, Roché secured a position as an attaché to the French wartime diplomatic mission in New York, where he lived until the end of the First World War. There he began a lifelong friendship with Duchamp. He socialized with figures associated with Alfred Steiglitz’s 291 gallery and New York Dada, including Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Marius de Zayas. In 1917, he co-edited the magazine The Blind Man with Duchamp and artist Beatrice Wood. He was introduced by Duchamp to collector Katherine Dreier, whom he intermittently advised, and had a short-lived affair with Louise Arensberg. He also served as an advisor to the prominent New York collector John Quinn, facilitating acquisitions for the attorney until the latter’s death in 1924. As Quinn’s European agent, Roché secured Cubist works directly from Picasso in 1922, including Three Women at the Spring (1921; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Mother and Child by the Sea (1921; Art Institute of Chicago) and Small Giants (location unknown). Roché also served as an intermediary for the sculptor Constantin Brancusi; between 1932 and 1936, Roché facilitated the sale of three sculptures to the Yeshwant Rao Holkar, Maharaja of Indore.

Following his return to Paris in 1919, Roché became a primary agent within the growing network of artists, dealers, and critics who shaped the burgeoning market for modern art into the 1920s. He attended the second Kahnweiler sequestration sale, where he acquired Picasso’s Bust of a Man (1908; The Metropolitan Museum of Art), reselling it to Pierre Loeb in 1925. With the dispersal of Quinn’s collection in two sales, held in Paris at the Hôtel Drouot in October 1926, and in New York at the American Art Association in February 1927, Roché acquired and resold at least two works that had belonged to his former employer: a Picasso gouache titled Head of a Man (Portrait with Crossed Arms) (1909; Hermitage, St. Petersburg) and Duchamp’s Apropos of Little Sister (1911; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.) Roché and Duchamp also purchased several works by Francis Picabia from Quinn’s collection, which they sold in an auction held at the Hôtel Drouot in March 1926.

In the last years of his life, Roché wrote several reflections regarding the development and progressive dispersal of his collection over time. Despite how rapidly his collection circulated, he identified a selection of works that remained in his possession in an article entitled, “Farewell, Brave Little Collection!” These included Brancusi’s Torso of a Young Man (1917; Cleveland Museum of Art) and Braque’s Homage to J.S. Bach (1911–12; The Museum of Modern Art, New York), purchased from dealer Paul Rosenberg in 1930. In an unfinished manuscript, “The Two Braques,” he described the affective power possessed by two Cubist works in his collection: Braque’s Table with Pipe (1913; private collection) and Homage to J.S. Bach remained in his collection for more than thirty years.