Даниель-Генри Канвайлер: Сурет өнерінің тарихындағы тұлға

German born art collector and art dealer

Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (25 June 1884 – 11 January 1979) was a German born art collector, and one of the most notable French art dealers of the 20th century. He became prominent as an art gallery owner in Paris beginning in 1907 and was among the first champions of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubist movement in art.

Kahnweiler was born in 1884 in Mannheim, Baden to a prosperous Jewish family. His family had previously moved from Rockenhausen, a small village in the Palatinate. Kahnweiler grew up in Stuttgart and was trained to study finance and philosophy. and by so doing, actually removed them from public view. From the viewpoint of the general public, Cubism came to be more associated with the 'Salon Cubists', such as Jean Metzinger,

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 not only ruptured the Cubist experiments in art, but also forced Kahnweiler to live in exile in Switzerland; due to his German citizenship, he was considered an alien under French law. Many German nationals living in France had their possessions sequestered by the French state, and as a result, Kahnweiler's collection was confiscated in 1914 and sold by the government in a series of auctions at the Hôtel Drouot between 1921 and 1923. During the years of exile (until 1920), Kahnweiler studied and wrote works such as the Der Weg zum Kubismus and Confessions esthétiques. Writing becoming a passion he continued over his lifetime, and he authored hundreds of books and major articles. The second period of enforced writing came during a period of internal exile caused by the events of World War II. As a Jew, the Nazis forced him to flee Paris. He remained in France, in hiding. "Under the clouds from the gas chambers," as he put it in his seminal work on Juan Gris.

Kahnweiler was very prolific as an author, but never produced a full autobiography. There was, however, a series of interviews first aired on French television, then published and translated as a book under the title Mes galleries et mes peintres ("My galleries and my painters"). For his 80th birthday, a Festschrift was published with contributions by the world's leading philosophers, art historians, and artists, all of whom emphasized the vital importance of his unique contribution to art history – an importance still not yet fully appreciated, probably due to the fact that he has been viewed mostly as an art dealer and not as an art historian. This situation has been aggravated because some of his major works on aesthetics were either never translated into English or badly translated. The omission of key elements of a proper understanding of Cubism and focus on small and sensational elements of his complex relationship with Picasso has led to a flawed understanding of the ideas he put forward in these writings. Although revered by artists for his business and aesthetic sense and respected by art dealers and art historians, the true impact of his life and work has yet to be recognized, despite a 1988 biography by Pierre Assouline. He died in 1979 in Paris, aged 94.