Alix de Rothschild, the altruistic patron
About the exhibition "Collectionneuses Rothschild, mécènes et donatrices d'exception" at La Boverie in Liège (Belgium) until 26 February.
If all wealthy people were as sincere and generous patrons of the arts as Alix de Rothschild (1911-1982) was, who followed only her instincts and sensibilities, artists would have less to worry about when it came to making a living from their works of art for sale. Here, there is no speculation or clever strategies for pulling the strings of the art market. No sacrifice to the altar of fashion. Only taste, affection, trust, honesty... and a real desire to support emerging talent. This woman, who claimed not to be an art collector, finally bought throughout her life nearly two thousand works of art, be they paintings, sculptures, popular objects or African art. Unfortunately, all of this was too widely dispersed after her death to be able to fill an art gallery that would be accessible to everyone today. A pity. Because that was really her thing. Creating a bridge between the artist and the public.
Her children often teased her about it: "Mum will leave the largest collection of unknown painters". And Alix de Rothschild humbly admitted: "I also know that I have works that are not always the best by great artists, because I knew them young, and I liked the beginnings in them. Isn't that a great sentence from a great patron? A real patron? The kind who has made it his mission to devote his considerable financial capacity to the development of art and those who make it throughout the world, without worrying about making a profit? The daughter of the Austro-Hungarian Baron Philipp Schey von Koromla and the Frankfurt Rothschilds' descendant Lili Jeanette von Goldsmith, who moreover had married her distant Parisian cousin and inevitably banker Guy de Rothschild, surely had as much money as she wanted anyway. So only her true artistic sensibility guided her art purchases, as she had bought herself a painting by Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) when she visited the painter's studio in Paris when she was still a teenager.
This wealthy woman, known for her interest in young contemporary artists, was bound to be offered many works of art for sale. Nevertheless, when we see reproduced in the January issue of Connaissances des arts the sublime monumental triptych by Jesekiel David Kirszenbaum (1900-1954), Moses, Jeremiah, Elijah, depicting the three prophets in the manner of Georges Rouault, painted in 1947 especially for Alix de Rothschild, we think she knew how to recognise a talented artist. Whatever her children say. The same goes for Avigdor Arikha (1929-2010), the Franco-Israeli painter and engraver whose exhibition she financed in 1972 without being mistaken. She was fascinated by the Second School of Paris. She was also very interested in the Slovenian painter Zoran Music (1909-2005) and the German painter Francis Bott (1904-1998), who was born like her in Frankfurt am Main. Whether they were from Central Europe, South America or Italy, all the artists who caught her eye at the time exhibited in Paris in the early 1950s. For example, she bought two paintings by the Mexican painter Francisco Toledo (1940-2019), as well as Pablo Picasso's The Washhouse.
"I am obviously happy to own works by Cézanne or Picasso," Baroness Alix de Rothschild confided to an art critic in 1970, "the lyricism of Vieira da Silva or Séraphine transports me, but I don't deserve any credit for it. My emotion is only of interest if it serves an artist by helping to widen the circle of his admirers or to make his work known to those who do not know him. It is difficult not to find this great lover of art, who devoted her life and energy, as well as her fortune, to this formidable altruistic commitment, endearing. "Always open to new expressions as well as ancestral identities, she was also passionate about Amerindian statuettes or African masks and collected objects of popular art, encouraged by Georges Henri Rivière," writes Valérie Bougault in Connaissance des arts.
It is therefore not surprising that Alix de Rotschild became one of the most important figures in the post-war cultural world. In 1961, she was the first woman to sit on the board of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, for which she notably contributed to the purchase of Figure debout by Fritz Wotruba (1907-1975), and to which she even donated her drawing Femme nue étendue by Gustav Klimt in 1965. A native of Normandy, she donated several works of art to the museums of Le Havre, Caen and Honfleur, as well as creating the Musée de la bourrellerie et outil in Pont l'Evêque. Divorced in 1956, she was also mayor of Reux for thirty years, a small commune in Calvados where she lived full-time in her castle.
There she gathered together as many of the works of art she had acquired as possible, which also adorned her mansion on Avenue Foch in Paris. She also decorated the grounds of the Château de Reux with numerous contemporary sculptures, such as those by Henri Laurens, Cardenas, Norbert Kricke and Slavos. She commissioned Francis Bott to create no less than eight abstract stained glass windows for the chapel on the estate, which made a decisive contribution to the reputation of this exile and friend of Max Ernst and Oskar Kokoschka. Far from the Parisian elite, this collector who thought she was not a collector finally accomplished an immense body of work quietly and in the shadows.
Knight of the Palmes Académiques, Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters and of Social Merit, the Jewish press in France and England did not seem to rediscover her until her death. World president of the Youth Aliyah, Alix de Rothschild nevertheless forged particularly close links with Israel, and founded the French Friends of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. After his death, an Alix de Rothschild Centre for Contemporary Crafts was established in that city. As Valérie Bougault wrote in Connaissance des arts, "wherever she is, art takes shape".