Adolph Vogelweith (or Georges Adolphe)

Adolphe Vogelweith was a Paris-based painter, active during the 1910s and 1920s, who amassed a collection of works by his contemporaries, including those associated with radical new trends in painting and sculpture.

Little is known about Vogelweith’s path to becoming a painter. Born in the Alsace region of north-eastern France, he had a residence in Paris by 1908. He lived in the artistically vibrant neighborhood of Montmartre at 11 Boulevard de Clichy, where Pablo Picasso lived and worked between 1909 and 1913. Vogelweith started to exhibit at the Salon des Indépendents and Salon d’Automne in 1913, and continued to do so, with some gaps, until 1930. Hiss submissions mainly comprised landscapes and still lives executed in a post-impressionist style. As reported by the regional newspaper Le Télégramme de Voges on December 21, 1919, one of his paintings, Défilé au village (Parade in a Village), exhibited at that year’s Salon d’Automne, was acquired by the French state. He served as a jury member for the painting section of the Salon d’Automne in 1922.

In addition to pursuing his own career as a painter, Vogelweith acquired works by other artists. Annotated copies of sale catalogues suggest that he was a buyer at art auctions staged at the Hôtel Drouot in the aftermath of World War I. At the outset of the war, the French government confiscated the property of German nationals, including Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Richard Goetz, and Wilhelm Uhde. An annotated catalogue for the first sale of Kahnweiler’s property, on June 13–14, 1921, lists the name “Vogelweit” in connection to lots 77, 94, and 102: respectively, Pablo Picasso, The Scallop Shell: “Notre Avenir est dans l’Air” (1912; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection); Kees van Dongen, Nu couché (Reclining Nude; location unknown); and Maurice de Vlaminck, Nature morte a la clarinette (Still Life with Clarinet, ca. 1914–15; Sotheby’s, New York, November 13, 1996, lot 270). An annotated auction catalogue for Goetz’s sale on February 23–24, 1922, lists “Vogelweitz” in connection with lot 10, André Derain’s still life painting of 1910 (probably Vase de fleurs [Vase with Flowers, 1910]; see Kellermann 1992, vol. 1, no. 281).

In November 1922, Kahnweiler’s Galerie Simon organized a loan exhibition, Les Inconnus (The Unknown). In addition to Kahnweiler, the lenders were artists, art critics, and writers whom Kahnweiler described in a letter to Derain, dated October 17, 1922, as their mutual friends: Adolphe Basler, Jacques Dufresne, Fernand Léger, André Lohté, André Malraux, Louis Marcoussis, André Masson, Picasso, Maurice Raynal, Vlaminck, and Vogelweith.

Vogelweith had just turned sixty when he died in July 1932. Five months later, the Hôtel Drouot hosted the posthumous sale of his estate, which included several examples of African and Oceanic art, studio props and furnishings, and most notably a large inventory of works on paper and paintings by Vogelweith’s artistic predecessors and contemporaries. Among the former were works by Edgar Degas, Paul Signac, and Camille Pissarro (includingJardin à Eragny [Garden at Eragny, before 1893; Christie’s Paris, December 3, 2013, lot 24]. Most of the works in the sale, however, were by members of Paris’s international avant-garde circles, some of whom exhibited at the same salons as Vogelweith and, like him, resided in Montmartre. The extensive roster included Othon Coubine, Marc Chagall, Derain, van Dongen, Othon Freisz, Alice (Alicja) Halicka, Max Jacob, Moïse Kisling, Marie Laurencin, Lhoté, Henri Le Fauconnier, Jacques Lipchitz, Marcoussis, Jean Metzinger, Aristide Maillol, Amadeo Modigliani, Picasso, Georges Rouault, Chaïm Soutine, Maurice Utrillo, Suzanne Valdon, Vlaminck, and others.

In 1934, the Salon d’Automne featured seven of Vogelweith’s paintings, some lent by society members, in a special section honoring the recently deceased members of the society.