Sam Salz

Sam Salz (1894-1981) was an art dealer, art collector, and patron of the arts. He was born March 12, 1894, in Radomyśl Wielki, (then in Galicia, Austria-Hungary; since 1921 in Poland). He died on March 21, 1981, in New York City.

Professional life

In the 1920s he opened a gallery in Cologne, where Salz sold works by Marc Chagall, Hans Arp, Georges Braque, and James Ensor. From 1926 to 1930 he worked in Brussels and then worked in Paris and London by the end of the 1930s. He purchased works of art directly from artists such as André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck, Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, and Chaïm Soutine. He got to know Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse personally. This period also saw several portraits of Salz, including a watercolor by James Ensor, a pastel by Édouard Vuillard, and a photographic portrait by the German photographer August Sander.

Salz visited the United States for the first time in 1936. He settled in New York City in 1938. After the Second World War, he was involved in the repatriation of stolen art works. In New York, he began to specialize in the art of Impressionism. From his New York base, he sold artworks by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Alfred Sisley, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. At first he used an outside gallery, but eventually he created a private gallery in his home on East 76 Street, to which he asked potential buyers to come in order to show them his private art collection.

His clients have included renowned museums and collectors like Albert C. Barnes, Paul Mellon, Robert Lehman, Henry Ford II, David Rockefeller, and William S. Paley. Salz also sold artwork to personalities from the film world such as Greta Garbo, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Kirk Douglas, and Edward G. Robinson. Among Salz's friends were writer Erich Maria Remarque, pianist Vladimir Horowitz, and painter Diego Rivera. In 1959, he donated Édouard Manet's Asparagus to the Louvre (placed in the Musée d'Orsay in 1986). To the Art Institute of Chicago, he gave works including, in 1963, Virgin and Child with Saint Elizabeth and John the Baptist as a Child by Jacques Blanchard. He presented Claude Monet's The Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau Forest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He donated the sculpture The Serf by Henri Matisse to the Museum of Modern Art. In recognition of his philanthropy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art named Salz as Fellow in Perpetuity of the Museum.

During the Kennedy administration, he donated to the White House the painting The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, July 4, 1776 by Charles Édouard Armand-Dumaresq.