For MoMA, an art dealer’s trove

Archives of the Parisian art dealer who represented Picasso, Matisse and other early French modernists will be donated to the Museum of Modern Art for scholarly research, the museum announced.

The Paul Rosenberg Archives encompass “a unique assemblage of materials” for the study of early 20th century French art and for “documenting the provenance of hundreds of paintings and sculptures,” MoMA said in a statement about the Rosenberg family bequest.

Rosenberg operated his family’s Paris gallery from 1906 until the outbreak of World War II in 1939. In 1940, he and his family reached New York, where he opened a gallery on East 79th Street. After Rosenberg died, in 1959, his son Alexandre operated the gallery until his death in 1987. Alexandre Rosenberg’s wife, Elaine, made the bequest to MoMA.

The original Rosenberg gallery in Paris sold 19th century works by Eugene Delacroix, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Paul Cezanne and, after 1906, added paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Leger and Henri Matisse.

The family archives comprise numerous sale records, photographs of every work in the gallery’s inventory, correspondence, exhibition files and photographs of installations staged in Paris.

Paul Rosenberg had a close relationship with Picasso. The artist acted as witness for the birth of Alexandre Rosenberg.