L’inconnu qui faisait confiance aux artistes d’ici
The Nazis stole his family’s paintings. Now, twenty years after his death, he is changing the rules of restitution
The Walrus
In April 7, dignitaries and TV crews made their way down cobblestoned streets to the Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf, a small gallery on the edge of the Rhine River, Germany, to witness the return of a painting the Nazis had compelled a Jewish art dealer named Max Stern to sell in 1937.
(…) but he was certain he could be successful as a dealer in Montreal, because he had spotted a void he knew how to fill. Most of the city’s galleries were pushing stuffy nineteenth-century European genre and landscape paintings. No one was promoting or selling homegrown works because, as he later explained, “Canada didn’t have any confidence in its own artists.”
(…)
Stern pitched his vision to Rose Millman, who had just opened a space on rue Sainte-Catherine called the Dominion Gallery of Fine Art. Impressed by his assurance and expertise, she offered him a job for $12.50 a week. Stern said he wanted $17.50 and her promise to make him a full-fledged partner once he built up her business by conquering Canada, as he put it, “by selling Canadian artists.”
Within months, he was mounting exhibitions by contemporary Canadian painters. Over the years, they would include John Lyman, Goodridge Roberts, E. J. Hughes, Stanley Cosgrove, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and others whose names he would play a pivotal role in establishing. Stern secured their loyalty and best work by offering them monthly retainers for an agreed-upon number of works, already an established practice in France, England, and the United States, but not yet in Canada.
His first major coup came in 1944, when he visited Emily Carr, then seventy-two, at her home in Victoria. She showed him a room packed with 300 paintings. Struck speechless by her talent, he asked if he could mount an exhibition. Laughing, she replied, “You will not sell a single painting.” The recipient of critical praise, Carr had yet to enjoy commercial success. “If you let me choose the paintings,” Stern replied, “I think I can make it a perfect success.”
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In the ’50s, Stern took the gallery in a new direction. Predicting that television, movies, and posters would make audiences yearn for the tactile, he made what would become a highly lucrative investment in the works of then little-known British sculptor Henry Moore; and he secured Canadian rights to sell the creations of famed nineteenth-century French master Auguste Rodin, whose popularity had waned in postwar Europe. By the ’70s, the twenty pieces he had bought from Moore for $15,000 had skyrocketed in value, and French dealers visited regularly because he had the largest collection of Rodin’s works outside the Paris museum that bore the sculptor’s name.