David David-Weill

Individual
1871-1952
French

Place of birth: San Francisco, California, United States

Place of activity: Paris, France;

Place of death: Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

Born in San Francisco, California, to French parents, David Weill--as he was then known--relocated with his parents to Paris, France, shortly after his bar mitzvah. In Paris, he attended secondary school at the prestigious Lyce Condorcet. While in school, David Weill began collecting eighteenthcentury French art, first purchasing a painting by the neoclassical painter MarieGabrielle Capet. Upon graduating, he completed his required service in the French military and then entered the family banking business of Lazard Frres, which was headquartered in Paris with offices in New York and London. In 1897, David Weill married Flora Raphel and built an elaborate mansion in the bucolic town of Neuilly, France. The couple welcomed seven children over the course of their fiftyfiveyear marriage. In keeping with the aristocratic fashions of the 1920s, David Weill legally changed his family's surname in 1929 to DavidWeill.

DavidWeill and his wife supported numerous philanthropic causes, including the construction of affordable housing, sanatoriums, and free medical clinics in Paris and beyond. He supported extensively l'Universit de Paris, funding scholarships, campus construction projects, and opportunities for students to study abroad. His philanthropy extended to several museums and libraries, including the Bibliothque National de France, where he paid for the institution to duplicate the card catalogue from the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, thereby providing French researchers with knowledge of the Washington repository. DavidWeill amassed an enormous personal art collection that eventually contained works of eighteenth and nineteenthcentury European painting and decorative arts; Chinese bronzes, jades, and cloisonn; Islamic ceramics; and even preColumbian objects. The Acadmie desBeauxArts recognized DavidWell as an astute collector, admitting him as a member in 1934. DavidWeill made anonymous gifts of art to French museums and generous financial contributions, including personally supplementing the small salaries of some Louvre curators. In 1920, he joined the Consul of National Museums and served as president of the organization from 1931 to 1940. He participated in the Socit des Amis du Louvre, becoming the organization's vice president in 1926. Also in 1926, he announced a promised gift of one thousand objects to the National Museums of France; by the time of his death in 1952, this gift included more than twothousand works of art. Throughout his life, he routinely financed large purchases on the request of museum curators, gifted objects he purchased independently, and loaned objects from his collection to exhibitions. In the early 1930s, DavidWeill hired Marcelle Minet (b. 1900) as the curator of his personal collection.

Asian art figured prominently in the DavidWeill collection, including objects with Japanese, Chinese, and Iranian origins. He owned several rare nineteenthcentury Japanese prints, which are known to have survived World War II; their present location, however, is unknown. DavidWeill seems to have held bronze objects in high regard, as he amassed an enormous group of smallscale Iranian and Eurasian bronzes (ultimately auctioned at Htel Drouot in 1972) and ancient Chinese bronzes, many of which are housed at the Muse Guimet, Paris. Ahead of his time, DavidWeill was among the first wave of European collectors of Chinese art, and his collection was wideranging, including objects from the Neolithic to early dynastic periods. Throughout his home in Neuilly, he displayed Song ceramics, Buddhist sculptures, classical painting, and ornate cloisonn alongside European works of art. He frequently purchased Chinese antiquities from the famed dealer C.T. Loo and, in 1934, participated in the Karlbeck Syndicate, an international consortium of museums and private collectors who purchased objects that Orvar Karlbeck, a wellknown Swedish connoisseur of Chinese art, acquired while traveling in China.

DavidWeill's ancient Chinese jades and bronzes, however, were the most celebrated in his collection of Asian objects, attracting the attention of scholars and museums. He promoted the field of Chinese art history by lending objects to major exhibitions and allowing scholars to publish on his collection. Pieces from his collection appear in several early publications on Chinese art history, including Osvald Sirn's A History of Early Chinese Art (1929). DavidWeill lent highlights of his jade and bronze collection to the Muse de l'Orangerie for special Chinese art exhibitions, including Bronzes chinois des dynasties Tcheou, Ts'in, et Han (1934) and Arts de la Chine Ancienne (1937). He also lent twelve ancient Chinese bronzes to the International Exhibition of Chinese Art (1935--36) at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

He encouraged the National Museums of France to collect and exhibit Chinese art by making frequent gifts. In 1912, along with his mother, he made his first gift of Chinese art when he presented the Louvre with an antique Chinese bronze (in 1945, it was transferred to the Muse Guimet, Paris). In 1923, he gifted an impressive group of 150 Chinese cloisonn objects to the Muse des Arts Decoratifs, forming the foundation of their Chinese collection.

In the summer of 1939, with the French approaching war with Nazi Germany, both the National Museums of France and private collectors began to carefully crate and store their collections in pastoral regions across France. In August, Marcelle Minet began the lengthy process of packing the majority of DavidWeill's collection into 152 wooden crates, marked with the initials D. DW. She sent 130 crates to the Chateau du Sources in the South of France where DavidWeill's collection was stored alongside treasures from the Louvre. The other twentytwo boxes went to Chateau de MareilleGuyon.

The following summer of 1940, after the German invasion of France, David and Flora DavidWeill secured visas from the Vichy government to go to Portugal via Spain, planning to eventually flee to America. During their journey, Nazi soldiers arrived at their Neuilly home, looting whatever art objects remained onsite and seized the property, transforming it into the Nazi Headquarters outside of Paris. On September 8, David DavidWeill learned via radio broadcast that he had been stripped of his French citizenship. By February the following year, the Nazis seized his family's bank, Lazard Frres, and shuttered its properties. Fearing for their safety, the DavidWeills went into hiding at the Roquegauthier Castle in Cancon, France. By 1942, David and Flora DavidWeill relocated to Agen, where they hid in the home of a friend and assumed the surname Warnier.

On April 11, 1941, German officers of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) arrived at Chateau du Sources, seizing the DavidWeill collection. The ERR also discovered and seized DavidWeill objects stored in MareilleGuyon. All of DavidWeill's collection passed through the ERR's central collecting depot at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris for shipment to Germany. While other collections were entirely inventoried, DavidWeill's was not and several boxes remained unopened. The ERR sent DavidWeill's collection to Germany for distribution amongst German museums. However, by the conclusion of the war in 1945, when DavidWeill's collection resurfaced, it remained in its original, unopened crates. DavidWeill's collection arrived in fall 1945 at the Munich Central Collecting Point (MCCP), a depot organized by the American Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Program (MFAA), where MFAA officers sorted, inventoried, and returned Nazilooted art to the rightful owners. In December 1945, Marcelle Minet began working at the MCCP as a French liaison and immediately recognized the crates she had packed in the summer of 1939. She spent the following year coordinating the safe return of the DavidWeill collection to Neuilly. DavidWeill was reportedly so thrilled that she found his collection, he sent "fine French wine and champagne" to the MCCP. Allied forces recovered the majority of DavidWeill's collection and returned it to him by 1947. Objects that remained missing were included in the massive publication, produced between 1947 and 1949, Rpertoire des biens spolis en France durant la guerre, 1939--1945.

After the War, David and Flora DavidWeill returned to Neuilly, where they restored their home and continued their philanthropic efforts. DavidWeill enthusiastically returned to collecting and gifting works of art to French institutions. He died at home on July 7, 1952. In 1953, the National Museums of France honored DavidWeill's life and generosity with an exhibition hosted by the Muse de l'Orangerie, featuring highlights of his many gifts.

What objects he had not bequeathed to the French National Museums, DavidWeill willed to his family. In the 1970s, after Flora DavidWeill's death, there were a series of auctions that ultimately dispersed objects from DavidWeill's collection around the world. Today, works from his collection can be seen in a number of institutions including the French National Museums, the National Gallery of Art, the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the NelsonAtkins Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to name just a few.

LITERATURE
Henry Nocq. "Les Nouveaux Acadmiciens, M.M. D. Weill & M. Adolphe Max." Acadmie des beauxarts: Institut de France, no. 19 (January 1934), 75--82.

"Le style du Houai et ses affinits: notes propos de quelques objets de la collection DavidWeill." Revue des arts asiatiques, Annales du Muse Guimet VIII (1934), 159--76.

Georges Salles. Bronzes chinois des dynasties Tcheou, Ts'in, et Han: muse de l'Orangerie, maijuin 1934. Paris: Muses nationaux, 1934.

Georges Salles. Arts de la Chine ancienne. Paris: Muse de l'Orangerie, 1937.

Donations de D. DavidWeill aux muses franais, 6 Mai--7 Juin. Paris: ditions de Muses Nationaux, 1953.

Donation de D. DavidWeill au Muse du Louvre: miniatures et maux, Octobre 1956--Janvier 1957. Paris: ditions des Muses Nationaux, 1956.

"Les Antiquits Orientales de la Collection DavidWeill." Revue de Louvre 22 (1972), 425--24.

The D. DavidWeill Collection, Catalogue of Fine Early Chinese Bronzes, Jades, Sculpture, Ceramics and Silver. London: Sotheby's, February 29, 1972.

Collection D. DavidWeill, Bronzes antiques des steppes et de l'Iran: Ordos, Caucase, Asie Centrale, Louristan. Paris: Htel Drouot, June 28--29, 1972.

Pierre Amiet. Les Antiquits du Luristan: Collection DavidWeill. Paris: de Boccard, 1976.

Lynn H. Nicholas. The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. New York: Random House, 1994. 90--91, 93--94, 133--34, 164, 341.

Hector Feliciano and Alain Vernay. The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. 87--89.

Elizabeth Campbell Karlsgodt. Defending National Treasures: French Art and Heritage under Vichy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. 75, 203.

William D. Cohan. The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007.

Edgar Munhall. "The DavidWeill Family" (lecture). The Fick Collection symposium, "Money for the Most Exquisite Things: Bankers and Collecting from the Medici to the Rockefellers,"

March 2, 2013. https://www.frick.org/interact/miniseries/money/edgar_munhall_davidweill_family.

Iris Lauterbach. The Central Collecting Point in Munich: A New Beginning for the Restitution and Protection of Art. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2019. 117--18.

Muse des Arts Dcoratifs. "David DavidWeill (1871--1952), Collectionneur et Vice Prsident de l'UCAD." https://madparis.fr/francais/musees/museedesartsdecoratifs/dossiersthematiques/lemaddepuis1864/daviddavidweill18711952collectionneuretvicepresidentdelucad/.

Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art. "Marcelle Minet, (1900--?)." https://www.monumentsmenfoundation.org/minetcaptmarcelle

June 3, 2020