The Dealer Who Made Impressionism an International Sensation

Three women greet viewers to “Cassirer: Breakthrough of Impressionism” at Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie: Edgar Degas’s Miss La La (1879), Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Lise with a Parasol (1867), and Max Slevogt’s 1901 portrait of Cassirer’s own daughter, Suzanne Aimée Cassirer. Two French, one German, all three paintings are connected to Paul Cassirer, the Berlin dealer who is credited with bringing Impressionism to Germany, including many works now in the Nationalgalerie collections; and with supporting German artists who furthered the developments of the avant-garde.

Too often, we try to separate the art market from the museum, as if esteemed collections of now-canonical art could be held apart from the money with which they were bought and the circumstances in which they were sold. This exhibition and the accompanying catalog openly trace the mechanisms by which art crossed borders and exchanged hands. Impressionism ushered in a turn from art academies and state collections as arbiters of taste toward collectors and critics operating in a private market, making dealers essential to the eventual success of the movement. Lesser known than his French colleague and counterpart Paul Durand Ruel, Cassirer was the primary dealer of French Impressionism in Germany around the turn of the 20th century (Durand Ruel himself said Cassirer was exclusively responsible for bringing the group’s paintings across the Rhine).

In the 19th century, French art predominated: This was both the advantage and the eventual controversy of Cassirer’s gallery. The dealer funneled foreign paintings to both private collectors and Berlin public collections at a time when the state was working to promote a German national style. Cassirer initially founded the Kunstsalon with his cousin Bruno in 1898, but the two soon split and Cassirer took over operations in 1901. Based in the fashionable Tiergarten district, Cassirer’s gallery had a sumptuous interior designed by the Art Nouveau architect Henry van de Velde. There, he displayed paintings in what were considered relatively spare, single row arrangements at a time when all-over salon-style hangs were in vogue.

In addition to Degas and Renoir, Cassirer exhibited Monet, Manet, Cézanne, and van Gogh, as well as non-French artists including Edvard Munch. He did so for the love of art but also for profit: As a contemporary caricature of the gallerist quipped—“from Monet and Manet to money.” Cassirer was trained in art history and exhibited early Monet works, like the 1866 Jar of Peaches on view at the Alte Nationalgalerie, a painting that balances the restraint and containment of a glass jar of fruit with an expressively marbled tabletop. Shown at the same exhibition as the more radical Impression, Sunrise (1872), the inclusion of early still lives allowed Cassirer to construct a lineage for the movement that his patrons could follow. Manet’s great scandal, the 1863 Dejeuner sur l’herbe, was also shown at the Kunstsalon, though it did not find a buyer.

One of Cassirer’s strategies was to repeatedly exhibit unsold works as a way of acclimating the public to new styles, a strategy that resulted in what was then the largest ever exhibition of van Gogh in 1914, with 151 works. There are only 2 van Gogh works on view in the current exhibition at the Nationalgalerie, emphasizing a divide between what Cassirer showed and what the state wanted to collect. Van Gogh’s Boulevard de Clichy (1887), exhibited in 1905 and 1908 at Cassirer’s gallery, resonates with German Impressionist Curt Hermann’s Snow-Covered Roofs (1908/09), hung nearby. Both urban scenes are flecked with vivid color, an argument for the influence of French on German art.

Mounting French influence was a problem for a cadre of German artists working to defend a conservative nationalist vision. In 1911, the landscape painter Carl Vinnen authored a “Protest by German Artists” against the influx of French work and gathered 140 signatures, to which Cassirer responded as part of a “Reply to a Protest by German Artists” organized by artists more sympathetic to internationalism, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Already three years prior, the head of the Nationalgalerie, Hugo von Tschudi, had been ousted for his acquisition of French art via Cassirer as Kaiser Wilhelm II held an increasingly tight grasp on the national collections and preferred to promote German nationalism: This attempt to constrain museums to patriotic ends finds an uncomfortable echo in the US today, where museum exhibitions are increasingly under pressure from state priorities.

Cassirer’s story ended tragically, by suicide amid divorce proceedings. But his legacy for German art remains vividly present, not only in the works on view but in demonstrating the merit of greater transparency in the formation of museum collections and the motivations, spoken and unspoken, that shape them.