Uhde, Wilhelm

Uhde, Wilhelm (1874–1947). German collector, dealer, entrepreneur, and writer on art, active mainly in France. He was born in Friedeberg in der Neumark and studied in Munich and Florence, abandoning law for the history of art (a decision that caused his prosperous but puritanical family to disown him). In 1904 he settled in Paris and the following year he was buying pictures by Braque and Picasso at a time when these artists were practically unknown. John Richardson writes that ‘He liked to see himself as a missionary preaching the gospel of modern German literature and modern French painting, despite the stigma of having to earn his living as a marchand amateur (a private dealer) … Picasso took a strong liking to this free spirit, who had such a sharp clear eye and a sharp clear mind. Uhde responded with total devotion’ (A Life of Picasso, vol. 1, 1991). Later, however, their friendship ended, as Picasso objected to Uhde's turgid book, Picasso et la tradition française (1928), ‘which puts forward a view of the artist as the embodiment of the German and Gothic soul. This was too big a price to pay for Uhde's adulation. Picasso stopped seeing him’ (Richardson). Uhde knew many other distinguished avant-garde figures and was a link between French and German artists; when Klee visited Paris in 1912, Uhde introduced him to leading Cubist painters, including Delaunay, whose work made a great impact on Klee. (Uhde was homosexual, but in 1908 he had made a brief, unconsummated marriage of convenience to Sonia Delaunay-Terk, so she could escape from her Russian family.)

After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Uhde's collection was seized (and later sold) by the French as he was considered an enemy alien, and he was forced to leave France. (Ironically, he was later considered an enemy by his own country; in 1938 he published a book entitled Von Bismarck bis Picasso and the following year Hitler—incensed at the linking of these names—stripped him of his German nationality.) After the war Uhde returned to Paris and took up dealing again, becoming well known for discovering and encouraging naive artists (earlier he had been one of the first to appreciate Henri Rousseau, publishing the first monograph on him in 1911 and organizing the first retrospective of his work in 1912). In 1947 he published his best-known book, Fünf primitive Meister, dealing with Bauchant, Bombois, Rousseau, Séraphine, and Vivin (French and English editions appeared in 1949). After his death he was honoured by the French when a room at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris was devoted to works of the ‘20th-century primitives’ and named after him.