René Gimpel's 'Diary of an Art Dealer'

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 This article examines the genesis of the journal and its significance as an art-historical document.