Sam Salz

Sam Salz was an art dealer, art collector, and patron of the arts.[1] He was born March 12, 1894 in Radomyśl Wielki, then in Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Poland);[2] he died on March 21, 1981, in New York City.[3]

Sam Salz
Born(1894-03-12)March 12, 1894
Radomyśl Wielki, Galicia, Austria-Hungary
Died(1981-03-21)March 21, 1981
New York City
NationalityU.S.
OccupationArt dealer

Personal life and start as an art dealer

The son of a Torah sofer, Salz was born in 1894 in the Galicia province of Austria-Hungary. At age 17, he traveled to Vienna to study painting and art history at the Academy of Fine Arts. During World War I he served in the Austrian army. After the war, Salz traveled to Paris to resume his study of art. After a short time working as an artist, he gave up his artistic plans and began to work in the art market. He became friends with one art dealer, Gaston Bernheim-Jeune, and worked for another, Ambroise Vollard, beginning around 1920.

Salz's marriage to the dancer Marina Franca ended in divorce. Marina and Sam had two sons, Marc and Andre. In 1970, Salz married Janet Reisner Traeger. He died in 1981 at the age of 87 in New York City.[3]

Professional life

In the 1920s he opened a gallery in Cologne, where Salz sold works by Marc Chagall,[4] Hans Arp, Georges Braque, and James Ensor. From 1926 to 1930 he worked in Brussels and then worked in Paris and London by the end of the 1930s. He purchased works of art directly from artists such as André Derain,[5] Maurice de Vlaminck, Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, and Chaim Soutine.[6] He got to know Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse personally.[7] This period also saw several portraits of Sam Salz, including a watercolor by James Ensor,[8] a pastel by Édouard Vuillard,[9] and a photograph of August Sander.[10]

Salz visited the United States for the first time in 1936. He settled in New York City in 1938. After the Second World War, he was involved in the repatriation of stolen art works. In New York, he began to specialize in the art of Impressionism. From his New York base, he sold artworks by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro,[11] Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Alfred Sisley, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.[12][13] Although he used an outside gallery, he created a private gallery in his home on East 76 Street, to which he asked potential buyers to come in order to show them his private art collection.[13][14]

His clients have included renowned museums and collectors like Albert C. Barnes,[15] Paul Mellon, Henry Ford II, David Rockefeller, and William S. Paley.[3] There were personalities from the film such as Greta Garbo, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Kirk Douglas, and Edward G. Robinson.[16] Among Salz's friends were writer Erich Maria Remarque,[17] pianist Vladimir Horowitz,[18] and painter Diego Rivera.[16][3]

Charitable donations
The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, July 4, 1776, circa 1873 by Charles Édouard Armand-Dumaresq on display in the White House Cabinet Room.

He donated art to several institutions. He gave sketches by Paul Gauguin to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.[19] He donated to the Louvre Édouard Manet's Asparagus (it is housed in the Musée d'Orsay).[20] To the Art Institute of Chicago, he gave the paintings Virgin and Child with Saint Elizabeth and John the Baptist as a child by Jacques Blanchard. He gave Claude Monet's The Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau Forest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.[21] He donated the sculpture The Serf by Henri Matisse[13] and paintings and drawings by Édouard Vuillard[22] to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In recognition of his gifts to the museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art named Salz a Fellow in Perpetuity of the Museum.[3] In Jerusalem, Salz underwrote the construction of a small park (גן משה זלץ) that was named for his father, who was murdered by the Germans during the Holocaust.[23]

During the Kennedy administration, he donated to the White House in Washington, D.C., the painting The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, July 4, 1776 by Charles Édouard Armand-Dumaresq.[24]

References
  1. "Sam Salz".
  2. "Radomysl Wielki, Poland [Part I]".
  3. Saxon, Wolfgang. (March 22, 1981). Sam Salz, Art Dealer and Collector of Impressionist Works, Dies At 87. The New York Times.
  4. "Sam Salz: Sam Salz and Marc Chagall".
  5. Gelman, Jacques, Rewald, Sabine, & Lieberman, William S. (1988). Twentieth Century Modern Masters: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  6. "Sam Salz: Soutine's suit and other stories".
  7. "Sam Salz: Henri Matisse and my parents, Sam and Marina Salz".
  8. "Blogger".
  9. "Sam Salz - Edouard Vuillard - The Athenaeum".
  10. "'Art Dealer [Sam Salz]', August Sander - Tate". Tate.
  11. Tinterow, Gary. (1994). Origins of Impressionism. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  12. Nannette V. Maciejunes. Collecting Modern Art in the 1960s and 1970s. In Monet to Matisse: The triumph of impressionism and the avant garde : the Howard D. and Babette L. Sirak collection at the Columbus Museum of Art. 2004. Esterow, Milton. (Feb. 15, 1964). An East Side Mansion Is Scene of Some of the Biggest Art Sales in the Country.
  13. "An East Side Mansion Is Scene of Some of the Biggest Art Sales in the Country". The New York Times. 15 February 1964.
  14. The Clarence Whitman Mansion
  15. "Sam Salz: Sam Salz and Dr. Albert Barnes".
  16. "Sam Salz: Diego Rivera, Edward G. Robinson and Sam Salz".
  17. "Sam Salz: Sam Salz and Erich Maria Remarque".
  18. "Sam Salz: When paintings are worth the price of music: Sam Salz and Vladimir Horowitz".
  19. "Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South".
  20. "Musée d'Orsay: non_traduit". 16 February 2009.
  21. "The Bodmer Oak, Fontainebleau Forest". The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.
  22. "Édouard Vuillard. Dinnertime. c. 1889 - MoMA". The Museum of Modern Art.
  23. Marc Salz. "the salzmines".
  24. "Sam Salz: A painting donation to the White House".
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