Even before his acquisitions for La Peau de l’Ours, André Level bought works for himself, which he continued to do during and after his activities as a manager of the association. He first kept the works refused by the Committee, for instance: “I kept for myself, without insisting, a small head of a young man by Picasso, which one of my colleagues from the Committee, to whom I presented it, found a little harsh”[i]. This oil canvas Head of a Boy, from the autumn of 1906 (fig .18) corresponds to nº111 of the sale of his personal collection in 1927, “then bought for 50 golden-francs, it later reached 14000 paper francs in my sale”. After 1914, he continued to buy young painters by keeping as a conducting line the interest for innovative art. Yet he could never abandon Picasso's work and gathered a set of drawings and gouaches. While he mainly owned works from his first Blue and Rose periods, he followed the evolution of the master with a great interest and ended up with a passion for Cubism. In his Souvenirs, he deplored his frilosity: “It is not that, in the visits I made from time to time to Picasso, rue de Ravignan, and then boulevard de Clichy, and finally on the other side of the river, boulevard Raspail and rue Schoelcher, I did not observe with a great interest the beginnings, and then the accentuation in his works of the Cubist technique he created following the development of his needs. But I saw this as investigations which were to take him further and I was still waiting, while if I had not tried so hard to understand, if I had given in, abandoned myself, I would have felt sooner the joys and safety that I only found later in the works of his greatest genius”[ii]. We can only find the trace of two drawings in a more or less Cubist style: a sweet-dish with pears, probably from the years 1908-1912 and a post-Cubist still life, a pastel of April 18, 1921 which was part of a sale of André Lefèvre’s collection as André Level’s former collection[iii].
Without a book of account, it is difficult to know which works were directly given by Picasso, which works were bought, from which dealer and at which period. However, by combining the information found in Level’s books, Picasso of 1928 and Souvenirs d’un collectionneur published in 1959, with the catalogue of the sale of his personal collection in 1927 and the sale catalogue of André Lefèvre's collection in 1964, a few works can be identified. Thirteen years to the day after the sale of La Peau de l’Ours, André Level who chose this date out of superstition, decided to offer his personal collection for sale at auction in Drouot. The ageing collector prefers “to detach himself from the material objects” to dedicate himself to his family. While this collection was smaller than the one previously constituted, it remained highly respectable: “A few new additions present chances which I found amusing to take and which make the difference between these two collections, by making mine younger and which marks an orientation towards the left, if I dare say so, as it comprises a large old work by Léger, one by Gris, two by Chirico, several works by Modigliani, a Soutine, several works by Charchoune, one by Beaudin, some lesser works by Picasso, but nearly in the same quantity, drawings with or without watercolour, with colour pencsils, pastel, from the Blue period or the beginning of Cubism: The Poor, The Meal, Woman Ironing, etc… »[iv].
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Summary