Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

Pablo Picasso, autumn 1910

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About This Work

The official Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois record identifies Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler as a Pablo Picasso oil on canvas, dated autumn 1910, in Oil on canvas. The subject of this portrait is Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979), a German-born art dealer, writer, and publisher. Kahnweiler opened an art gallery in Paris in 1907 and in 1908 began representing Pablo Picasso, whom he introduced to Georges Braque. Kahnweiler was a great champion of the artists’ revolutionary experiment with Cubism and purchased the majority of their paintings between 1908 and 1915. He also wrote an important book, The Rise of Cubism , in 1920, which offered a theoretical framework for the movement. Kahnweiler sat as many as thirty times for this portrait. No longer seeking to create the illusion of true appearances, Picasso broke down and recombined the forms he saw. He described Kahnweiler with a network of shimmering, semitransparent surfaces that merge with the atmosphere around him. Forms are fractured into various planes and faceted shapes and presented from several points of view. Despite the portrait’s highly abstract character, however, Picasso added attributes to direct the eye and focus the mind: a wave of hair, the knot of a tie, a watch chain. Out of the flickering passages of brown, gray, black, and white emerges a rather traditional portrait pose of a seated man, his hands clasped in his lap.

Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler is grouped under Analytic Cubism for gallery navigation using the date published by Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. This period label provides high-level art-historical orientation and does not supersede the primary collection record. The institutional credit line is: Gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman in memory of Charles B. Goodspeed.

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