Justin K. Thannhauser

Justin K. Thannhauser was one of the most important dealers of modern European art and was responsible for making Munich a center for Cubist and Expressionist art in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Thannhauser began his career by assisting his father, Heinrich Thannhauser, in the management of his Moderne Galerie in Munich (1909–28). Heinrich specialized in Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Expressionism, and Justin continued this commitment to adventurous art by exhibiting Cubist, Futurist, and other abstract works at his family’s gallery. The younger Thannhauser, then 21 years old, organized a major retrospective of Pablo Picasso’s work in 1913, which encompassed the entirety of the artist’s development from the so-called Blue Period of 1901 up to his most recent Cubist paintings of 1912, comprising seventy-six paintings and thirty-eight works on paper. The 1913 exhibition launched Thannhauser’s lifelong commitment to Picasso’s work; he would devote exhibitions to the Spanish painter again in 1922 and 1932. Thannhauser’s passion for the Cubist movement is also demonstrated by his purchase of two works now in the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection: Georges Braque’s Bottle, Glasses and Newspapers (1913), and Juan Gris’s Head of a Woman (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) (1912).

In the early 1910s, Thannhauser studied art history and philosophy as a student of Henri Bergson and Heinrich Wölfflin, among others. This intellectual tradition influenced Thannhauser’s writing, particularly his introduction to the catalogue of Picasso’s 1913 retrospective and the ambitious program of lectures that he organized at the Moderne Galerie. In these years, Thannhauser established close ties to Picasso’s Parisian dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and the dealer and collector Wilhelm Uhde. These partnerships contributed to Picasso’s growing reputation in Germany, which soon outpaced France in the market for Cubism.

After being wounded in battle during World War I, Thannhauser returned to Munich in 1916. In response to the difficult conditions faced by Germany in the postwar years, in 1919 Thannhauser moved to Lucerne, Switzerland with his family and established a branch of the gallery there (1919–37), later managed by his cousin Siegfried Rosengart. In the 1920s, Thannhauser took over the directorship of the Munich gallery from his father and steadily expanded the business with another Moderne Galerie location in Berlin (1927–37). In these years, he staged ambitious exhibitions of artists including Otto Dix, Paul Gauguin, George Grosz, Vassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Picasso, and Maurice de Vlaminck.

It was this commitment to aesthetically (and often politically) radical art as well as rampant antisemitism that forced Thannhauser’s exile from Germany during the Nazi regime. In 1937, Thannhauser moved his family and collection to Paris, where he opened another gallery. The Nazi occupation of France forced Thannhauser to escape once again, and he was able to immigrate to New York City in 1940. During the occupation, however, Nazis looted the Thannhauser family’s Parisian home, destroyed much of the gallery’s archives, and stole works of art that they had been forced to leave behind. Although Thannhauser did not reopen his gallery in New York, he began work in America as an art dealer from his home in Manhattan. While building a large client base of American collectors, Thannhauser also steadily built his own private collection. In 1963, he announced that he would donate seventy-five works to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In discussions with the Museum’s then-director, Thomas M. Messer, Thannhauser stipulated that his collection be on permanent display in a dedicated Thannhauser wing. With this donation, Thannhauser provided the Guggenheim with a historical reach that stretched from nineteenth-century Impressionists and post-Impressionists such as Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Gauguin, Edouard Manet, and Vincent van Gogh to twentieth-century works by Braque, Paul Klee, and Picasso. Thannhauser explained his decision to donate his collection to the Guggenheim as a means to preserve his family’s legacy after their exile from Germany due to the spread of Fascism: “My family, after five hundred years of living in Germany, is now extinguished. That is why I am doing what I am with my collection.”