Germain Seligmann (or Seligman)

Germain Seligmann was an art dealer and collector who was president of the Jacques Seligmann & Cie art and antiquities dealership from 1924 until his death in 1978. He was instrumental in shifting the company’s focus toward the exhibition and sale of European modernism during the interwar and immediate postwar periods, specifically examples of Cubist and School of Paris works.

Seligmann apprenticed in Paris at 23 Place Vendome, then at 57 rue Saint Dominique (Hôtel de Sagan)—the Paris headquarters of his father’s art gallery, Jacques Seligmann & Cie. At an early age, Seligmann became interested in the family business, often accompanying his father on business trips and visiting the company’s New York gallery (founded in 1904 at 7 West 36th Street). In 1910 father and son traveled to St. Petersburg to acquire the Byzantine Swenigorodskoi enamels. Seligmann studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre and joined the French army at the outbreak of World War I, serving first in the infantry, and then as a translator to George C. Marshall of the First Division of the American Expeditionary Forces. Following the war, Germain became a partner at Jacques Seligmann & Cie, changing the company’s name to Jacques Seligmann & Fils. (The company name reverted to Jacques Seligmann & Cie in 1925.) Seligmann was appointed president of the New York branch in 1920, and became head of the entire company in January 1924 following his father’s death in October. From the mid-1920s onward, he was stationed in the New York office (relocated to 705 Fifth Avenue) and worked to shift the company’s specialty away from the antiquities market and toward the sale of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. Seligmann’s commitment to modern art was inspired by collector and couturier Jacques Doucet’s decision to sell his collection of Old Master art in 1912 in favor of contemporary art. Faced with resistance to the shift from other members of the family, in 1926 Seligmann hired César Mange de Hauke, a company sales representative, to head the de Hauke & Co., Inc., a subsidiary dealing exclusively in modern art, to which Seligmann gave financial backing and gallery space at 3 East 51st Street.

Seligmann shrewdly worked out an arrangement so that de Hauke could purchase modern works from Paris and London to be sold privately through de Hauke & Co., and also buy Old Master works and decorative arts for Jacques Seligmann & Cie. Together, Seligmann and de Hauke began exhibiting works in their New York gallery space and selling works by Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and Vincent van Gogh. The success of de Hauke & Co. convinced the Seligmann family of the growing significance of modern art. Seligmann liquidated de Hauke & Co. in 1930 and founded Modern Paintings, Inc. in its place, as the modern art department in the New York office. In 1937, with the political situation in Europe growing more contentious, the gallery moved its headquarters from Paris to New York. After successfully acquiring Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; The Museum of Modern Art, New York) and six other works by the artist from Jacques Doucet’s widow in 1937, Jacques Seligmann & Cie organized a series of exhibitions specifically spotlighting Cubist works lent by private clients at the Seligmann Gallery. Over the next decade, Seligmann focused the company’s interests on presenting French modernism.

In the late 1930s and 1940s, Germain began assembling his own collection of art. His collection reflected his wide art-historical interests with examples of medieval art, Neo-Classicism, nineteenth-century works on paper by Odilon Redon and Georges Seurat, Cubism, and several works by Roger de la Fresnaye. He also purchased works from Jacques Seligmann & Cie, such as Seurat’s Eiffel Tower (1889; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco); he acquired other works, including those by Georges Braque and de la Fresnaye, from private clients.

Seligmann’s gallery and collection in Paris were seized by the Vichy government in 1940 and the works mostly sold through private auction. Following World War II, Seligmann turned the company’s focus away from modern art and toward the acquisition of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century French art. The art dealer also began writing art history and criticism, an activity he had previously considered only a hobby. Curt Valentin published Seligmann’s The Drawings of Georges Seurat in 1946. Seligmann also wrote a history of the family business, entitled Merchants of Art: Eighty Years of Professional Collecting (1961) and completed the first monograph and catalogue raisonné dedicated to de la Fresnaye (1969).

Following Seligmann’s death in 1978, the company closed its doors. A year later, his private collection was sold in collaboration with E.V. Thaw & Co. and Robert M. Light.