WHEN THE JOURNAL of René Gimpel was first published in Paris in 1963, Gaston-Louis Vuitton (1883–1970), Gimpel’s second cousin and the president of the famous Vuitton luggage enterprise, was initially in ‘a state of euphoria’. On closer reading, however, his reaction was less sympathetic: ‘you must have edited it, and you did well to do so. I would even say that you did not go far enough’, he wrote in a letter to the dead author’s youngest son, Jean Gimpel.1 Vuitton was correct on one point at least. René Gimpel’s journal, kept more or less continuously from 1918 until 1939, had been edited not only by its author during his lifetime, but by several subsequent editors. What was so damaging, and to whom, that the art dealer’s diary had been meddled with since he first put pen to paper? His journal is hardly the answer to Casanova’s – the avowed source of inspiration for Gimpel – nor does it bear comparison to the racy, unedited chronicles of his French contemporary the misanthropic literary critic Paul Léautaud (whom Gimpel described as ‘poisonous’). This article examines the genesis of the journal and its significance as an art-historical document.

René Albert Gimpel (1881–1945), born in Paris in the heady era of La Belle Epoque, was the only child of Clarisse Adelaïde (Adèle) Vuitton (1862–1915) and Ernest Nathan Gimpel, a Parisian art dealer born in Alsace who died in New York of diphtheria in 1907 aged forty-eight. At the time of his father’s death, René, aged twenty-five, was already a transatlantic dealer who could converse fluently in English (unusual for a Frenchman at the time), and he was obliged to step into his father’s shoes at E. Gimpel & Wildenstein in New York and at the Paris house of Wildenstein. Gimpel was socially and commercially well connected: his Paris-born mother, who had at one time worked for the fashion house of Worth, was a niece of Louis Vuitton (1821–1892) and a friend of Isabelle, the wife of René Viviani, prime minister of France in 1914–15. Gimpel’s father was a second cousin to Nathan Wildenstein (1851–1934) and his business partner; while René himself married the late Sir Joël Duveen’s youngest daughter, Florence (1886–1978), by that marriage becoming brother-in-law both to Joseph Duveen and Sir Arthur Abrahams and uncle to Armand Lowengard (1893– 1944), the scion of the Paris firm of antiquarians.

In his journal, Gimpel presents a first-hand account of Euro- American artistic taste and consumption in the early to midtwentieth century (Fig.25).2 He was active as a dealer, primarily in French eighteenth-century fine and decorative art, at the peak formative period of the modern art market: he bought in Europe and sold in North America. Most of that art – painstakingly shipped on the mighty transatlantic liners (in Gimpel’s case in custom-made Vuitton travelling crates) – was destined for private collections but is now in public museums in the United States, where it forms a significant part of the nation’s cultural heritage. One might suppose that a transatlantic art dealer, the agent of commerce and fortune, acted entirely in his own selfinterest, but the content of the journal reveals a different story. Broadly speaking, it is an amalgam of biographical mise-en-scène and historical documentation, with records of economic exchange, aesthetic analysis and socio-political comment, interlarded with gossip. A constant refrain is the passage of time, of time lost and regained via recollection. It captures such ephemera as the New Year’s Day advertising postcards mailed by Lalique, Vuitton and Cartier, and the paper strips that Parisians used to protect their window panes during bombardment in 1918 (Fig.26). Gimpel observed: ‘Spontaneously an art has sprung up, the art of paper strips. There could not possibly be another geometric design to invent: some are marvellous. Sometimes the humble shopkeeper shows more taste than the grand goldsmith’.3

Gimpel made his first attempt at keeping a journal in 1910: it lasted a fortnight. A second attempt in 1912 ran to only two pages. Of his third attempt he wrote, ‘I tried again during the first four or five days of the war and I stopped that also’.4 He was more successful with the fourth attempt and managed to make regular entries from 12th February 1918 until 21st September 1939, with occasional lapses. He wrote in a set of cahiers or carnets which are extant: twenty-two exercise-books that record his business exchanges and personal encounters during the interwar period. When Gimpel began writing he was in his mid-thirties, with a pregnant wife, two young children, and an established business partnership in Paris and New York. The Great War was nearly over and Franco-American relations were good. At the end of the twenty-second cahier, dated 21st September 1939, he was a lone trader on the eve of his fifty-eighth birthday and of another world war. Paris was blacked out. Walking his dog Faith one evening, he became caught up in the human exodus heading for the quai d’Orsay station, which then served as the terminus for south-western France, and observed: ‘Each of them is returning to his native village. All the villages of France which have settled in Paris go back with them’.5 Gimpel soon joined the exode, fleeing the city on an ancient bicycle for the unoccupied zone of southern France. His remaining valuable possessions in Paris were designated ‘abandoned’ and ‘ownerless’ and were confiscated from his last place of residence, 6 place du Palais Bourbon, among the estimated forty thousand homes in Paris that were sacked by the combined operation of Goering and the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR).6 The Gimpel carnets, however, were in safe-keeping elsewhere in the occupied city.

On 21st July 1960, René Gimpel’s son Jean signed a contract for the publication of the first French-language edition of the journal with Calmann-Lévy. Entitled Journal d’un collectionneur: marchand de tableaux, it was first published in France in 1963 with an introduction by Jean Guéhenno (1890–1978) of the Académie française. Guéhenno chose to salute Gimpel as a heroic patriot, not unsurprisingly given that he himself had written a wartime account, Journal des années noires: 1940–1944. La Jeune polonaise de Montparnasse by Chaim Soutine was illustrated on the cover of the Journal d’un collectionneur and later on the dust jacket of the Diary of an Art Dealer (Fig.27). The portrait had been confiscated by the ERR from Nice in May 1944, but was restituted in April 1946.7 It was exhibited in the inaugural exhibition of Gimpel Fils in November 1946.

As editing proceeded, pressure was brought to bear to omit certain passages for fear of legal reprisals, and at certain critical points this became a tussle between the publisher and members of the Gimpel family, particularly Jean (more than one publisher had withdrawn their interest owing to disputes over cuts to the publication); ultimately Calmann-Lévy sought legal opinion on how to proceed. The distinguished French lawyer Jacques Masse (1910–2002) advised that the majority of Gimpel’s art attributions concerning ‘fakes’ could be retained, cautioning that otherwise the book would be needlessly ‘emasculated’.8 Nevertheless Masse recommended that a number of passages be removed, in view of the art dealer’s predilection for character assassination while, for form’s sake, the German expert ‘who liked pretty legs too much’ could be designated by an initial.9

In the 1960s the Gimpel family had difficulty persuading publishers in the United Kingdom and the United States to produce an English-language version of Journal. In 1962 the London publishing firm of George Allen & Unwin was concerned that, although the Gimpel journal contained some interesting passages, the book would mean little to English readers. Victor Gollancz, the head of another London publishing house, saw it as a ‘Christmas book’ which they would not be able to produce in time. Eventually the maverick New York firm of Farrar, Straus & Giroux took up the option, and published the Diary of an Art Dealer in 1966, the same year that they published Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. It was eloquently but not flawlessly translated by a young American expatriate, John Rosenberg (1931–91), adapted not from the manuscript, but from the French edition, with the result that the text was even further removed from the author’s original intention (insofar as it can be established) and that many of the errors in the Journal were transferred to the Diary, and new errors were created: ‘Sur un banc: cinq soldats, sept jambes de bois’, for example, Gimpel’s quip on the human casualties of war, was mistranslated as: ‘On a bench: five soldiers with seven wooden legs’ (which would have meant that at least two of the soldiers had two wooden legs each; in fact, he is referring to the bench’s four legs and three soldiers with one wooden leg apiece). Nevertheless, the Diary was fortunate in having Rosenberg, a well-educated and talented script editor, as its translator, who successfully carried over Gimpel’s wit from French to English even if on occasion the text acquired more polish in the process.10

The Journal d’un collectionneur was a much abridged version of the original manuscript, and while it was reissued in a greatly expanded and revised edition in October 2011 – the first revision of the text since 1966 and the only edition with no illustrations save on the cover – it is still a condensed and edited version of the manuscript carnets. In the 2011 edition some of the shortfalls of the earlier edition were improved, some characters deemed of minor interest in 1963 have since made it into print, and more political commentary is included.

Of the five textual versions in two languages of Gimpel’s chronicles, including the manuscript journal which he himself edited (in some cases entire pages are crossed out), all are different, with intentional and unintentional deviations. Each is manifestly a document of its time, bearing the specific marks of its editor and/or transcriber.

Throughout the Journal’s pages we meet Gimpel through his encounters with others. He served as the interpreter for René Viviani, then president of the French ministerial council and head of the French war mission to America, and Reading Bertron, a prominent American financier and attorney, shortly before Bertron travelled to Petrograd in May 1917 as a delegate of the Elihu Root Commission. The meeting between Viviani and Bertron took place in New York on 11th May 1917 in Adelaide Frick’s ‘very small, but ravishing’ private boudoir, which featured François Boucher’s panels of the Arts and Sciences.11 A large part of Gimpel’s appeal as a chronicler was that he was cosmopolitan and streetwise. He was preoccupied with France’s position in the world, yet was happy to criticise and note its idiosyncrasies; for instance, on the arrival in Paris of Victor Emmanuel III, King of Italy, in 1918, he observed how curious it was that the French people, who adored dethroning kings, also loved to acclaim them.12 On the other side of the Atlantic, he became cynical of the yearning for progress in the United States: ‘America is in a sad way’ he wrote in 1938 to his close friend, the Paris artist Rose Adler. ‘For some years the country has pursued false thrills: that of Industry, and that of the cocktail’.13 With his innately European sensibility, he was especially alert to others’ foibles. One vignette concerns a father who is pompously showing off his knowledge in a Paris museum to his young son who is desperate to go to the lavatory. Gimpel perfectly captures the tension and pitch, as played out against the hushed, rarefied environment of the Musée de Cluny. He was particularly scornful of the Parisian Rothschilds, whom he clearly found intolerably eccentric, and he was remorselessly excoriating of Baron Maurice de Rothschild (1881–1957), who had the habit of conducting business with Gimpel from his bathtub. In contrast, Louis Guiraud, a fellow Parisian art dealer, had a great deal of taste according to Gimpel: this being the sort of observation which caused Gaston Vuitton to remark rather acidly that as the journal proceeded readers were given the impression that art dealers became aristocrats while the aristocracy became art dealers.14

Certainly in Gimpel’s manuscript there is a great deal of analysis of individual character and behaviour and comment on others’ social background and position. Upward and downward mobility, in the first half of the journal at least, was an endless source of fascination, and Gimpel took many opportunities to elevate some characters while debasing others. This may have had its roots in Parisian habits, but a unique contributing factor is that the art dealer was privy to a cultural milieu that allowed him regular exchanges with a range of influential, artistic or eccentric personalities (and sometimes all three). For example, Gimpel reveals that Marcel Proust used to refer to their place of assignation at Cabourg, on the coast, in an isolated corner of the Grand Hôtel’s great hall, as ‘le camp des réprouvés’ (the reprobates’ retreat).15 These social exchanges were usually accompanied by Gimpel’s acute rendering – or dismembering – of human character, such as the scholar and connoisseur Bernard Berenson:

With Berenson, the art critic [in Paris]. If small, lithe tigers could speak, they would have the voice and intelligence of this feline Pole. Behind that calculated sweetness a high old roaring goes on. He has velvet paws and killer talons of steel.16

This passage in Rosenberg’s translation has been described by the art critic Robert Hughes as ‘the best thumbnail sketch of Bernard Berenson yet written’.17

Thumbnail sketches were Gimpel’s forte. He used the metaphor of a predatory feline again to describe a rival Paris art dealer, Georges Petit (1856–1920); in Rosenberg’s translation, Petit has the face of ‘a rutting, obese, hydrocephalic tom’.18 Another cameo of Petit paints him crouching over his aperitif: ‘Like a cat before a mouse, I find Georges Petit, that enormous and hedonistic tomcat, sitting in front of his little glass of chartreuse’. 19 At various points in the journal Gimpel prompts Petit to recall some of his experiences as a dealer, and we learn that he gathers his material – in the manner of another Paris ‘institution’, the art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1867–1939) – by getting people to ‘talk’.

Financially damaged by the collapse of Wall Street in 1929, and following the death of his neighbour and long-time friend, the artist Jean-Louis Forain, René Gimpel stopped writing his journal on 18th November 1931, at a time when the delayed effects of the Crash were felt in all Western industrialised countries. As Malcolm Gee has noted, only the most important Parisian dealers were able to sit out the lean years after the Crash up to 1935–36, owing to the art market’s dependence on American buyers.20 Gimpel was in anguish: ‘I am sorely tempted, in the face of Forain’s death, to stop this journal. I have the impression that they are already all dead, those who have passed through here: Renoir, Monet, Marcel Proust, Caro-Delvaille, Nungesser, Mary Cassatt, and how many others? I should let this journal die, its oxygen is depleted’.21 But two years later he did resume it, on 16th October 1933, although there are significant gaps; he found it particularly difficult to write when in North America and could not work out whether the cause was fatigue or laziness.22

Over the course of writing the journal – he wrote everywhere: in the street or the metro – Gimpel was increasingly conscious of, even frustrated with, writing not so much a memoir but what he gradually recognised as a tentative history of art. By 1927 he was reviewing the journal for style and content but also for his own archives, in the realisation that dealers’ documents were a valuable aid to provenance. The data that René Gimpel provides in the cahiers concerning ownership and sales of artworks have proved priceless to researchers since selections from the notebooks were first published; public museums have used his attributions for establishing the provenance of works in their permanent collections. Many catalogues raisonnés, such as Pierre Rosenberg’s Chardin, have used Gimpel’s observations to inform their provenance research, and auction houses quote freely from the journal entries in their notes on provenance. Biographers and art market researchers have also used the journal. Malcolm Gee’s classic, Dealers, Critics, and Collectors of Modern Painting of 1981, cites Gimpel’s journal to provide a sense of the modern Paris art market, while Gerald Reitlinger drew on Gimpel’s journal entries to inform his three-volumed The Economics of Taste (according to one account, Diary of an Art Dealer caused Reitlinger to revise his analysis of record prices paid for works by Watteau).23 However, despite attention to the journal’s content, Gimpel himself has failed to attract the same interest as his contemporaries Berenson and Duveen.

The Diary was severely pruned for its Anglo-American readership. Gimpel’s observations on Prohibition, alcoholism and the lax morals of young American women in 1923 were mostly omitted from the English-language publication. What else was omitted or distorted, and does it matter? For instance, the penultimate passage in Diary which begins ‘the conflagration is not far from bursting upon us’ announces the outbreak of the Second World War.24 This bombshell is casually introduced against the backdrop of the superlative exhibition from Madrid’s Museo del Prado that Gimpel saw in the Musée d’art et d’histoire in Geneva, where Spain’s Republican government had committed the national treasures to the headquarters of the League of Nations until the end of the Spanish Civil War. The following and final entry, for 3rd September 1939, concludes: ‘Paris. We’re at war’: a dramatic end to Diary, and a piece of editorial licence; Gimpel’s final words in the journal described seeing his second son, Pierre, for the last time at Rambouillet, where the 4th Hussar regiment was stationed, before leaving for the front.

How was Gimpel’s journal received by critics at the time? Some cast it as a sybaritic stroll through the drawing rooms of the well-to-do on both sides of the Atlantic. However, Herbert Read, in his introduction to Diary of an Art Dealer, wrote that it would survive ‘as a record of the social life of its period no less precious in this respect than Proust’s novel’, and he hailed Gimpel as an expert ‘to whom we owe many important discoveries and identifications’ (Fig.28).25 On the other side of the Atlantic, Edouard Roditi, a poet, scholar and critic, compared the literary and historical qualities of the Gimpel journal with the duc de Saint-Simon’s memoirs of life at the court of Louis XIV.26 Roditi added that Maurice Sachs’s Tableau des moeurs de ce temps of the late 1930s continued where Gimpel’s observations left off, and that taking the Goncourt brothers, Sachs, Proust and Gimpel together, a hundred years of the history of a stratum of Paris society was covered. Roditi staunchly defended the journal’s merits even while admitting that when it was first published in Paris in 1963 it ‘failed to impress influential French critics of literature or of the arts’ and instead seemed to appeal to a few historians and gossip-columnists.27 He wagered, however, that the Gimpel journal would be read when the journals of André Gide and Albert Camus had been forgotten ‘by all but a few scholars condemned to read them as source-material for doctoral dissertations’.28 Dennis Farr, writing in The Burlington Magazine, concentrated on the art dealer as patron, arbiter of taste and contributor to the art-historical record. Farr perceptively noted that Gimpel’s ‘more caustic comments’ and ‘parochial gossip’ were no doubt suppressed, but on the whole he enjoyed the ‘extraordinary anecdotes’ about American tycoon collectors (one such account concerns the upper-crust guests at The Breakers at Newport being more enthralled with Alice Vanderbilt’s mechanical toy of a black man smoking than with the Vanderbilts’ fine collection of art), while at the same time Farr confessed to being ‘infuriated’ that paintings referred to in the text were not listed in the index, which is still the case.29

The most interesting review, to this writer’s mind, is that by Harold Rosenberg (1906–78) in The New Yorker in 1967. Rosenberg (no relation to John Rosenberg) pinpointed the figure of the dealer as the third member of an unholy trinity which he labelled the ‘art comedy’– the other two members being the artist as ‘culture hero’, and the collector as possessor and status-seeker. The shortcomings of the Diary, Rosenberg concluded, stemmed in the main not from the limitations of the author’s personality but from ‘the nature of his vocation’. Rosenberg closed the review with a rousing tattoo on art reduced to commodity: ‘The clatter of the cash register resounds throughout The Diary as the monotonous undertone of its anecdotes and reflections’, he wrote dismissively. Rosenberg also deplored Gimpel’s technique as an art critic: ‘He appraised paintings by the emotion aroused in him by their subjects, by the appeal of the model or the beauty of the scene. The Last Judgment was to him “an explosion of flesh”, while Botticelli’s Spring embodied “the spell the Renaissance has cast on the world, to be served for all eternity with bended knee and hands clasped on high”. His verdicts on twentieth-century art were even worse’.30 It may be that Rosenberg – a committed Marxist during the interwar years – expected a socio-political tract, which would go some way towards explaining why he considered the Diary was neither a record of its time nor even of the life of its author:

. . . he lacked historical perspective and had no grasp of politics or awareness of the crackup of Europe in process between the two wars. It is only in the entry before the last (which, on September 3, 1939, states simply, ‘We’re at war’) that, in mentioning an exhibition that included Goya, Velázquez, and El Greco, he was moved to speak of ‘the conflagration [that] is not far from bursting upon us’. All the more admirable that this genial, non-political man should, after the fall of Paris, have become active in the Resistance, and all the more pathetic that his life should have ended in a Nazi concentration camp.31

Rosenberg was writing twenty-eight years after the last entry in the Diary, which was inserted by editors to effect a closure which was not present in the manuscript. He may not have realised that much of the political content in the journal had been suppressed as ‘tedious’, not to mention observations which René Gimpel saw fit to delete himself. That aside, Rosenberg did not deem Gimpel’s Jewishness, nor his periodic comments on anti-Semitism, a consideration worth mentioning.

René Albert Gimpel died on the morning of 3rd January 1945, aged sixty-three, in Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, where he had been working in a sawmill. His journal, which had been safely hidden in Paris by Mme Odile Poirier, a trusted family retainer, was recovered after the War. On 20th November 1946, his two eldest sons, Charles (Ernest) and Peter (Pierre) Gimpel, opened Gimpel Fils gallery, named in homage to their late father, at 84 Duke Street, off Grosvenor Square, London (where the decorators Ethel Bethell and Alice Dryden, as Elden, had operated in the 1920s). The inaugural exhibition, entitled Five Centuries of French Painting, was composed of the recovered works that their father had consigned to London for safe-keeping. This cache allowed the nascent gallery to survive the difficult early years of post-War trading. In September 1948 the gallery moved its premises to 50 South Molton Street, Mayfair. It was here, in November 1966, coinciding with the twentieth anniversary of the Gimpel Fils gallery, which by then specialised in modern British art and emerging artists, that René Gimpel’s Diary of an Art Dealer was launched.

I am most grateful to the Gimpel family in London and Paris for access to their archives.

1 Letter from G.-L. Vuitton to J. Gimpel, 9th September 1963: ‘Je pense que vous avez émondé et en cela, vous avez bien fait. Je dirai même que vous n’avez pas encore assez coupé’; Gimpel Family Archives (hereafter cited as GFA).

2 Lucien Coutaud described the interior of Gimpel’s house in rue Spontini, Paris, as resembling the Louvre. In the photograph Greuze’s portrait of La Marquise Madeleine Barberie de Courteilles (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Brunswick, permanent loan from the Fritz Behrens Foundation) is framed by an eighteenth-century Coromandel folding screen, looted from Paris by the ERR and restituted on 11th May 1948 (Jeu de Paume records: http://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume/), while landscapes by André Derain from the D.-H. Kahnweiler collection form a backdrop.

3 R. Gimpel: MS, premier carnet, 10th May 1918, p.72.

4 Ibid., septième carnet, 8th October 1920, p.22: ‘J’ai encore essayé durant les quatre ou cinq premiers jours de la guerre et je me suis aussi arrêté’.

5 Ibid., vingt-deuxième carnet, 1st September 1939, p.57: ‘Chacun va dans son petit village. Tous les villages de France qui sont à Paris rentrent chez eux’.

6 Many other works of art were confiscated by the Nazis in Nice, where the Gimpels, among others, had stored them for safe-keeping in the strongroom of the Crédit Commercial de France (see Fig.27 and note 7). Not all have been recovered.

7 Jeu de Paume records: http://www.errproject.org/jeudepaume/.

8 Letter from J. Masse, Paris, to R. Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 28th March 1962; GFA.

9 R. Gimpel: Journal, dix-huitième carnet, 13th December 1929, p.589.

10 Rosenberg was born in New York City in 1931, and was educated at Columbia University. He made London his home in early 1953 and worked with Romulus films, bringing Frederick Forsyth’s novels The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File to the screen; he was also a television producer for Tales of the Unexpected and the novels of P.D. James.

11 R. Gimpel: MS, deuxième carnet, 19th June 1918, p.30 (and Journal, p.61). In this retrospective entry Gimpel noted that both he and Nathan Wildenstein were convinced that the panels, formerly in the private collection of Maurice-Edouard Kann (1839–1906) in Paris, were not by Boucher but merely the work of a skilful eighteenth-century decorator. This entry was severely pruned for publication in 1963 and 1966, but even in 2011, when most of the passage was reinstated, Gimpel’s comment on the panels was mistranscribed, suggesting they were the work of Boucher.

12 R. Gimpel: Journal, quatrième carnet, 19th December 1918, p.118.

13 Letter from R. Gimpel at The Madison Hotel, New York, to R. Adler, Paris, 1938: ‘L’Amérique est dans un triste état. Le pays a emmaganisé [sic, emmagasiné] pendant des années les faux frissons, celui de l’Industrie et celui du cocktail’; GFA.

14 Letter from G.-L. Vuitton to J. Gimpel, 9th September 1963; GFA.

15 R. Gimpel: MS, douzième carnet, 13th September 1924 (Journal, p.403, misdated). Both men stayed at the hotel for the month of August in 1907 and 1908, and formed an intimate acquaintance. Gimpel explained in a lecture in New York in 1927 that the camp des réprouvés was simply two armchairs, occupied by himself and Proust in the evenings, set apart from everyone else. See ‘“Marcel Proust”, Conférence faite à New York (Institut français) le 4 janvier 1927, Cahier René Gimpel’, introduction, commentaire et notes par Cynthia J. Gamble, OEuvres et Critiques 20/2 (1995), p.153. I am grateful to Cynthia Gamble for making this paper available.

16 R. Gimpel: Diary of an Art Dealer, transl. J. Rosenberg, New York 1966, p.4.

17 R. Hughes: Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists, London 1990, p.352. Hughes did not point out that Berenson was actually Lithuanian.

18 R. Gimpel: Journal, premier carnet, 8th May 1918, p.42. ‘Georges Petit, qui a une figure de matou musqué, obèse et hydrocéphale’.

19 Ibid., troisième carnet, 31st July 1918, p.79. ‘Comme un chat devant une souris, je trouve Georges Petit, ce matou gigantesque et jouisseur, assis devant son petit verre de chartreuse’.

20 M. Gee: Dealers, Critics, and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market between 1910 and 1930, New York 1981, p.284.

21 R. Gimpel: Journal, vingtième carnet, 15th July 1931, pp.645–46.

22 Ibid., dix-neuvième carnet, 22nd January 1930, p.600.

23 Gee, op cit. (note 20). For Reitlinger, see the letter from S. Whittingham, Turner House, London, to J. Gimpel, 29th September 1987; GFA.

24 Gimpel, op. cit. (note 16), p.446.

25 H. Read: ‘Introduction’, in ibid., pp.xi–xii.

26 E. Roditi: ‘Swann’s Way’, New York Times (27th November 1966); BR4.

27 Ibid., BR4.

28 Ibid., BR4.

29 D. Farr: Review of Diary of an Art Dealer, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 110 (1968), p.472.

30 H. Rosenberg: ‘The Art Game’, review of Diary of an Art Dealer, The New Yorker (21st February 1967), revised galley proof, Harold Rosenberg Papers 1923–84, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, Special Collections (980048), Series IIA: 32/2, n.p.

31 Ibid., n.p.