Paul Rosenberg

Paul Rosenberg (29 December 1881 – 29 June 1959) was a French art dealer. He represented Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse. Both Paul and his brother Léonce Rosenberg were among the world's major dealers of modern art.

Career The younger son of Jewish antiques dealer Alexandre Rosenberg, Paul and his elder brother Léonce joined their father's business. Alexandre had emigrated from Bratislava to Paris and established an antiques gallery in 1878, beginning to collect Monet, Cézanne, Manet and Renoir, and by 1898 had become a noted dealer of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. “This partnership would end abruptly in 1932, when Rosenberg found out about his wife’s affair with Wildenstein”

Paul's stock included pieces by all of the classical and contemporary French and major European artists, and latterly American artists, including: Marsden Hartley; Max Weber; Abraham Rattner; Karl Knaths; Harvey Weiss; Oronzio Maldarelli; Nicolas de Staël; Graham Sutherland; Kenneth Armitage; and Giacomo Manzù. The result was that from 1920, Paul Rosenberg's company was widely acknowledged to be the most active and influential gallery in the world. Every summer the Rosenberg family and the Picasso family would depart for the South of France, holidaying there with friends including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Somerset Maugham, Stravinsky, Ravel and Matisse.

By 1935 along his brother-in-law Jacques Helft, a noted antiques dealer, he opened a branch in Bond Street, London, to enable them to engage with more Americans.

In July 1940, Nazi Alfred Rosenberg (no relation) established the Parisian base of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR),

New York: 1940–1959 Rosenberg, his wife, his daughter Micheline and her husband Joseph Robert Schwartz,

From this base post-war, Rosenberg managed to reclaim and re-purchase a number of pieces from his pre-war collection, but these represented less than half of the works he had lost. These included Nude Reclining by the Sea (1868) by Gustave Courbet, which was taken on 5 September 1941 by the ERR in a raid on Rosenberg's bank vault in Bordeaux together with another 162 of his paintings. The Courbet was cataloged at the Jeu de Paume in December 1941. It was later recovered from Göring's personal collection and repatriated to Rosenberg in New York. Rosenberg sold it in April 1953 to the New York collector Louis E. Stern, who donated it in 1964 to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

He also purchased the Three Musicians (MoMA version) from Pablo Picasso in fall of 1921 and gave it to the MoMA in 1949. Pablo Picasso, 1921, Three Musicians, oil on canvas, 200.7 × 222.9 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired by Paul Rosenberg

Alexandre P. Rosenberg joined his father in New York in 1946 and became a partner in 1952. After the death of his father in 1959 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Alexandre became the company's principal. In 1962 Alexandre was a co-founder and first President of the Art Dealers Association of America, remaining one of the association's permanent board members throughout his life. He also served as an advisor to both the American Government and the Internal Revenue Service on matters pertaining to art works. After Alexandre's premature death in 1987 in London from an aneurysm, while attending the reunion of the US Army Second Armored Division,

Art collection recovery

Because the Nazis banned so-called "degenerate art" from entering Germany, art so designated in France was looted and held in what became known as the "Martyr's Room" at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. Much of Rosenberg's professional and personal collection was branded as "degenerate art" and thereby fell under the mandate of the Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art. Following Joseph Goebbels personal directive to sell these degenerate works for foreign currency to fund the building of the Führermuseum and the wider war effort, Hermann Göring appointed a series of ERR-approved dealers to liquidate these assets. Göring instructed them to give him the proceeds, with which he intended to grow his personal art collection.

In the mid-1950s, Rosenberg lost a French lawsuit that he started to recover a Matisse in the south of France, after the judge decreed the masterpiece belonged to the defendant, Rosenberg's own family kin. In October 1997, Rosenberg's heirs filed suit in United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, Seattle, to recover the painting Odalisque (1927 or 1928) by Matisse from the Seattle Art Museum, the first lawsuit against an American museum concerning ownership of art looted by Nazis during World War II. Then museum director Mimi Gardner Gates brokered an 11th hour settlement that returned the artwork, after which the museum sued the gallery which had sold it the painting in the 1950s. As the sole heir to her parents' estate, after the death of her mother Micheline in 2007, Sinclair sold the painting at auction, raising in excess of $33m. In the same year she also donated the 1918 Picasso painting of her grandmother and mother to the Musée Picasso in Paris. Gurlitt's collection was sent to a secure warehouse in Garching. Authorities are presently cataloging the works, researching their pre-war owners, and any surviving relatives.

In 2012, the Rosenberg family identified Profil bleu devant la cheminée (Woman in Blue in Front of Fireplace; 1937), a Matisse painting that was confiscated by the Nazis in 1941, in an exhibition catalogue and demanded that the Henie-Onstad Art Centre (HOK) near Oslo, Norway, return it. Rosenberg had bought the painting directly from Matisse in 1937 and had it stored at the time of the Nazi invasion in a bank vault in Libourne, a commune in the Gironde in Aquitaine, southwestern France. The ERR entered the vault in March 1941, and, after cataloging at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in September 1941, it was earmarked for Göring's private collection. Then in the hands of various dealers during the Nazi period, post-war in the late 1940s it was bought by Norwegian shipping magnate Niels Onstad from the Paris-based dealer Henri Bénézit. It has since appeared in numerous publications and toured the world on several occasions. Although under Norwegian law, due to the period of ownership, the painting now belongs to HOK, Norway was one of 44 signatories to the 1998 Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art. Protracted mediation, overseen by Christopher A. Marinello of the Art Recovery Group, saw the painting returned to the heirs of Paul Rosenberg in March 2014.

In May 2015, Marinello also recovered, for the Rosenberg heirs, Portrait of a Seated Woman by Henri Matisse, which had been found in the Munich home of Cornelius Gurlitt.

In popular culture Rosenberg is played by Will Keen in the 2018 television series Genius, which focuses on the life and art of Pablo Picasso.