“Picasso is the greatest Modern, we know that, but when did his superiority start? A friend of mine pretends that, when people will discuss our art like that of the Egyptians, by embracing several dynasties, they will say Giotto and Picasso, without putting anything else between them”[i].
These few lines from André Level to Guillaume Apollinaire show, a few months after the sale of the collection of La Peau de l’Ours, the collector’s admiration for Picasso which went well beyond a simple financial operation. André Level (1863-1946), was a collector, businessman and financier, but above all an enlightened amateur. He did not imagine, when he founded with a few friends the Association La Peau de l’Ours in 1904, that he would, ten years later, be at the origin of an unprecedented speculative operation which was to place modern art at the forefront of the artistic scene and to offer Picasso his first great public success.
Born in a family of great industrialists, André Level was a refined and cultivated man who took an interest in bibliophily and art from a very young age. He embraced a passion for modern art as early as 1895 when he met the brothers Gaston et Josse Bernheim-Jeune during a stay in Royan, at the Bains de Mer. He then started to visit regularly their gallery rue Laffitte, as well as the neighbouring galleries of Lucien Moline, Ambroise Vollard or Siegfried Bing and started at the time a small collection of modern art, buying works for a few dozen francs; a watercolour by Constantin Guy and a small drawing by Georges Seurat. Under the advice of his friend Alexandre Natanson, founder of La Revue Blanche, he then turned to the Nabis and bought a small oil on cardboard from Edouard Vuillard. The young collector was a true amateur who nonetheless remained focused on the “business which gave him a living”[ii].
The true artistic shock happened in 1903 when Level visited the first Salon d’Automne. He told in his Souvenirs: “The youth and temerity there contrasted strongly with the monotony and lack of unforeseen in the great yearly salons. [...] The good artists - some were really young- were not drowned in a general mediocrity. This was a success which I felt very vividly”, he then added “I had seen there canvases which appeared to me, without the slightest doubt, as the authentic art of our time and its nearest future. I believed in this, I had faith”[iii]. He then had the idea to gather a few close relations and to join their means to create a joint collection which each member could enjoy in turn. Although the minutes of a general assembly in August 1906 and a family note of June 1920 tell us that André Level was an administrator of the Société Française de Transports et Entrepôts Frigorifiques and of the Compagnie des Docks et Entrepôts de Marseille, it seemed that in 1903 he did not have the necessary financial means or already had too many expenses to fully satisfy his desires.
He then managed to convince his brothers Emile, a business banker, Jacques, director of the Société Électrométallurgique Française and Maurice, a lawyer, as well as his cousin the playwright Georges Ancey, Baron de Cunieu and a few industrialist friends, among whom the brothers Ellissen et Raynal and he registered the statutes of the association La Peau de l’Ours on February 24, 1904[iv]. A total of thirteen members and eleven annual shares worth 250 francs evenly distributed among each member except for Maurice and Emile Level and Jacques and Jean Raynal who each bought a joint share.
[i] « Lettre d’André Level à Apollinaire, Paris, 24 décembre 1914 » in Correspondance Guillaume Apollinaire, André Level, letters presented edited and with notes by Brigitte Level, Aux lettres modernes, Paris, 1976, p. 7.
[ii] André Level, Souvenirs d’un collectionneur, Mazo, Paris, 1959, p. 16.
[iii] Level, Souvenirs, p. 17.
[iv] For a complete list of the members see Guy Habasque, « Quand on vendait la Peau de l’Ours », L’Œil, march 1956.
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Summary