Rene Gimpel (1881–1945)

René Albert Gimpel was born in Paris, France to an Alsatian Jewish family. He was the only child of Clarisse Adelaïde (Adèle) Vuitton and Ernest Nathan Gimpel, an art dealer. When his father died suddenly in 1907, René had to step into his shoes at E. Gimpel & Wildenstein in New York and at the Paris house of Wildenstein. At age 25, René Gimpel was already working in the transatlantic art trade and fluent in English. He was socially and commercially well connected: his mother was a niece of Louis Vuitton. His father was the business partner and second cousin of Nathan Wildenstein. René's wife Florence was the sister of the influential British art dealer Sir Joseph Duveen. Gimpel had an instinctive sympathy for the modern artists among whom he moved, including Georges Braque, Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, and his intimate friend Marie Laurencin. In 1929, he discovered and started to support Abraham Mintchine, whom he recognized as an artistic genius. Gimpel was also a friend of Marcel Proust, whom he met at Cabourg in 1907. René Gimpel's repeated trips to the USA resulted in significant sales to wealthy North American collectors and museums. In 1940, after Nazi Germany's invasion of France in World War II, Gimpel fled Paris with his family for the southern "unoccupied" zone, leaving behind his home in rue Spontini and his gallery. Having joined the Resistance in Marseille, he was arrested in 1944 by the Vichy authorities. He was deported to the concentration camp at Neuengamme, near Hamburg, Germany, where he died in 1945. His witty and acerbic personal journal, which he kept for 21 years, had been safely hidden in Paris by Madame Odile Poirier, a trusted family retainer, and was recovered after the war. It was published posthumously as Journal d'un collectionneur: marchand de tableaux in 1963. Three years later, it was translated into English and published in the USA as Diary of an Art Dealer. The diary is a valuable primary source for the history of modern art and of collecting between the two World Wars. In 1946, René's two eldest sons, Charles and Peter, opened the Gimpel Fils gallery in London in honor of their late father. The inaugural exhibition, entitled "Five Centuries of French Painting," consisted of the recovered works their father had sent to London for safekeeping.