Wilhelm Uhde, the great talent spotter

It was 1908 when Le Douanier Rousseau said to Picasso that famous line, “we are the two greatest painters of our time, you in the Egyptian style and I in the modern one”. Some time had to pass before Rousseau's talent was recognised and before Picasso was hailed as a master. Yet one of the few who had already clearly spotted the genius of both was the German Wilhelm Uhde, whose instinct for understanding the new trends in painting made him one of the greatest talent spotters in the Paris of the avant-gardes.

Before moving to the French capital in 1904 and starting out as a collector, dealer and art critic, Wilhelm Uhde (Friedeberg in der Neumark, 1874 - Paris, 1947) studied Law. But, disenchanted with the legal profession, he decided to change the course of his life and devote himself to his real passion: art. Once in Paris, he struck up a relationship with the painters who gathered at the Café du Dôme, and also held meetings at his apartment on the Ile Saint-Louis, attended by artists such as Braque, Delaunay, Dufy and Picasso.

He also met with fellow collectors, such as the Stein siblings or his compatriot Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, whom he would introduce to Picasso. In fact, the two of them were among the first to appreciate his talent and to buy his artworks, becoming two of the leading promoters of Cubism. Uhde, for his part, began his collection of pieces by the Málaga-born painter in 1905, the year he bought La habitación azul (1901). He also got involved in championing the avant-gardes and did not hesitate to put on several exhibitions in his own gallery, on the rue Notre Dame des Champs in Montparnasse, including works by Braque, Derain, Herbin, Metzinger and Picasso himself.

Although his influence was surely greater on the careers of the naïve artists, in whom Uhde always took a special interest. In 1928 he organised the first show of amateur painters in Paris, with works by Henri Rousseau, Séraphine Louis, Camille Bombois, André Bauchant and Louis Vivin. Artists he presented as “Painters of the Sacred Heart”. Years earlier he had already put together a posthumous retrospective devoted to Rousseau. And, in 1945, an exhibition given over entirely to another of his great discoveries, Séraphine.

In 1908 he had entered into a marriage of convenience with the painter Sonia Terk to prevent her deportation. The union lasted only two years. Afterwards she married Robert Delaunay and Uhde would have a relationship with the painter Helmut Kolle. When the First World War broke out, he was forced to return to Germany and his art collection was seized and sold at public auction.

Uhde carried on working in the German market until he was able to return to France in 1924. But fate was not on his side and, with the arrival of the Nazis, he lost his gallery and his art pieces once again. This time he took refuge in the south of the country. When the war ended he wanted to go back to the French capital, where he died in 1947. A year later, as a tribute to his work, the Uhde room opened at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.