Bernheim-Jeune

Bernheim-Jeune. French family of art dealers and publishers. Alexandre Bernheim-Jeune (1839–1915), the son of an artists' supplier, opened a gallery in Paris in 1865 and was succeeded by his sons Joseph (known as Josse) (1870–1941) and Gaston (1870–1953), who was himself an artist, painting under the name Gaston de Villers. (Although they have the same year of birth, the brothers were not twins; Joseph was born in January, and Gaston in December.) By the 1890s the gallery was dealing in the work of leading Impressionists, including Monet, Pissarro, and especially Renoir, who painted five portraits of the family (the other artists who painted the family included Bonnard and Vuillard; there are examples by all three artists in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris). From about the turn of the century the gallery began showing an interest in more avant-garde work, and in 1901 it held a major retrospective exhibition of van Gogh's work (see EXPRESSIONISM). Its links with a younger generation of artists were reinforced when Félix Vallotton married Alexandre's daughter in 1899 and when Félix Fénéon became a director in 1906. He remained with the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune until 1925, in charge of its modern section; in this role he dealt particularly in the work of Neo-Impressionists such as Henri-Edmond Cross and the Fauves (including Matisse), but he also, for example, arranged the first group exhibition of the Futurists in France (1912) and showed the work of the Synchromists in 1913. The firm published monographs on several of the artists in which it dealt and also issued a periodical, Bulletin de la vie artistique.