Publisher's Synopsis
As the last embers of Impressionism flickered out amid the early stirrings of the modernist avant garde, the collector couple Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser were on hand to speed French paintings transition into the twentieth century. Between 1905 and 1936, the Hahnlosers assembled a small but breathtaking collection of works by the leaders of the Nabi and Fauve movements, and their precursors Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne and Auguste Renoir. Buying directly at modest pre-war rates from artists that were still making their names, such as Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, Odilon Redon, Georges Rouault, Aristide Maillol, Félix Vallotton and Edouard Vuillard, the Hahnlosers nursed French painting of the nineteenth century into the twentieth century. During the FirstWorldWar, their house, the Villa Flora inWintherthur, Switzerland, provided refuge for many of these artists, and Bonnard and Vallotton in particular developed close friendships with the couple. (Félix Vallottons critical judgment informed their acquisition of works by Van Gogh and Cézanne, and after the artists death Hedy Hahnloser wrote Vallottons biography.) Now, in this volume authored by the art historian Margrit Hahnloser-Ingold, also the couples grand-daughter, the story of this legendary collection is told for the first time. Alongside 250 colour plates, The Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser Collection offers a chronology detailing the couples purchases, their travels and their relationships with artists, in an unprecedented insider peek into the world of the Nabis, the Fauves and turn-of-the-century French painting.
