Once the association was created, André Level took his role to heart, multiplying the contacts, visiting the artist's studios and continuing to tour art fairs and galleries. As he tells in his Souvenirs d’un collectionneur, published in 1959, (Fig.2) he had the habit, once or twice a week, to tour Montmartre: Berthe Weill’s small gallery which aimed above all to defend “The young painters”[i] whom the collector had been seeing since his installation rue Victor Massé and the shop of the père Soulier, a famous mattress maker in Montmartre who exhibited young needy artists on the sidewalk in front of his boutique.
Level knew that he could find there cheap, young and promising young artists, unlike in the galleries of the rue Lafitte. The first acquisitions were works by Henri Matisse whom he met through his friend René Piot, then by Odilon Redon, Van Dongen, Albert Marquet or the Nabis, Maurice Denis, Emile Bernard and Edouard Vuillard. In 1914, the collection was eclectic but gathered the tastes of all the members of the association and acted as a panorama of the young painting of the beginning of the century. The sale catalogue of La Peau de l’Ours, with 145 paintings, allow us to see the scope of the collection, with about sixty artists, from the Neo-impressionists to the Fauves. Among the names which are more prestigious today appear: Van Gogh, Gauguin, ten paintings by Matisse and twelve works by Picasso: canvases, pastels, gouaches and watercolours[ii].
Picasso was present in the collection from the first year. It seems that Level bought at that time the pastel Intimacy (Fig.3) from Berthe Weill’s gallery. The work was part of the collective exhibition presented at the end of 1904[iii]. We can also think that the 1904 watercolour, Contemplation (Fig.4), which represents Picasso seated at a table looking at a sleeping woman corresponds to the “portrait of Picasso by himself, a quite hard sketch” [iv], bought for fifteen francs from the père Soulier in 1904. In parallel to these acquisitions for the association, Level regularly bought things for his personnal collection there.
It took two more years for the businessman to pay full attention to the Spanish artist. In 1906, Level bought six works by Picasso from Berthe Weill and the père Soulier, whose reasonable prices did not hurt the budget of the association. The art historians Pierre Daix and Michael C. Fitzgerald have tried to reconstitute the acquisitions of the works by Picasso[v]. We can thus say with certainty that among the six works was House in Barcelona (Fig.5), also known as Blue House [Daix VII, 1] which was part of the “Exhibition of Mr. Girieud, Launay, Picasso and Pichot” at the gallery Berthe Weill in 1902[vi] and which had probably remained in the corresponding stock. We can also deduce, based on Level’s accounts, that Woman and Children, 1901 (Fig.6), and Man with a Cape, 1900 (Fig.7) were among these works.
[i] See « Les Premiers Marchands de Picasso : Berthe Weill », Archives Journal nº4, November 2008
[ii] For a complete list of the artists, see the catalogue of the sale « La Peau de l’Ours », Hôtel Drouot, salles 7 et 8, 2 march 1914.
[iii] Nº37. 24 october – 20 november 1904, Galerie Berthe Weill, Exposition de MM Charbonnier, Clary-Baroux, Dufy, Girieud, Picabia, Picasso, Thiesson.
[iv] André Level, Souvenirs d’un collectionneur, Mazo, Paris, 1959, p. 18.
[v] Michael C. Fitzgerald, Making Modernism, Picasso and the creation of the market for the twentieth century art, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, p. 274, note 32.
[vi] N.17. 15 november-15 décember 1902, Galerie Berthe Weill, Peintures, pastels et dessins de MM. Girieud, Launay, Picasso et Pichot.
3 / 13
Summary