Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie Honors Paul Cassirer, the Dealer Who Sold Impressionism to Germany

Three women open "Cassirer: Breakthrough of Impressionism" at Berlin's Alte Nationalgalerie: Edgar Degas's Miss La La (1879), Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Lise with a Parasol (1867), and Max Slevogt's 1901 portrait of Suzanne Aimée Cassirer, the dealer's own daughter. Two French, one German — all three paintings connect to Paul Cassirer, the Berlin dealer credited with bringing Impressionism to Germany and with supporting German artists who pushed the avant-garde forward.

The exhibition and its accompanying catalog refuse a separation the museum world often maintains: between esteemed collections of canonical art and the money that bought them. Impressionism marked a turn away from academies and state collections as arbiters of taste toward collectors and critics in a private market — and dealers became essential to the movement's success. Paul Durand-Ruel, Cassirer's French counterpart, said Cassirer was exclusively responsible for bringing the group's paintings across the Rhine.

Cassirer founded the Kunstsalon with his cousin Bruno in 1898; the two split, and Cassirer took sole control in 1901. The Tiergarten-based gallery had a sumptuous Art Nouveau interior designed by architect Henry van de Velde. There, Cassirer hung paintings in relatively spare, single-row arrangements while salon-style, all-over hangs remained the norm.

Beyond Degas and Renoir, he showed Monet, Manet, Cézanne, van Gogh and Edvard Munch — for love of art, but also for profit. A contemporary caricature of the gallerist quipped: "from Monet and Manet to money." Trained in art history, Cassirer exhibited early Monet works like the 1866 Jar of Peaches, now on view at the Alte Nationalgalerie, a still life that balances the restraint of a glass jar of fruit against an expressively marbled tabletop. Shown originally at the same 1872 exhibition as the more radical Impression, Sunrise, such early still lifes let Cassirer build a lineage his patrons could follow. Manet's great scandal, the 1863 Déjeuner sur l'herbe, also appeared at the Kunstsalon — though it found no buyer.

One strategy stands out: Cassirer repeatedly re-exhibited unsold works to acclimate the public to new styles. The approach culminated in what was then the largest van Gogh exhibition ever mounted — 151 works in 1914. The current show includes only two van Goghs, a gap that underscores the divide between what Cassirer showed and what the state wanted to collect. Van Gogh's Boulevard de Clichy (1887), exhibited at the gallery in 1905 and 1908, hangs near German Impressionist Curt Herrmann's Snow-Covered Roofs (1908/09); both urban scenes are flecked with vivid color, an argument for French influence on German art.

That influence provoked a fight. In 1911, landscape painter Carl Vinnen authored a "Protest by German Artists" against the influx of French work and gathered 140 signatures. Cassirer responded through a "Reply to a Protest by German Artists" organized by internationalist sympathizers Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Three years earlier, Nationalgalerie director Hugo von Tschudi had been ousted for acquiring French art via Cassirer, as Kaiser Wilhelm II tightened his grip on the national collections in favor of German nationalism — a constraint of museums to patriotic ends the exhibition's presentation notes finds an uncomfortable echo in pressures on US museums today.

Cassirer's own story ended tragically, by suicide amid divorce proceedings. His legacy for German art remains vividly present in the works on view — and in the case the show makes for greater transparency about how museum collections form, and about the motivations, spoken and unspoken, that shape them.