Guy Wildenstein

NEW YORK—If you are looking for lineage among New York art dealers, you would be hard pressed to find anyone with better credentials than Guy Wildenstein. It was his great-grandfather, Nathan, who first set up business in Paris in the 1870s, and his family has continued as major dealers ever since.

Guy’s grandfather, Georges, expanded the company’s range from old masters to the Impressionists and Postimpressionists, and his father, Daniel, spent years on the production of the five-volume Monet catalogue raisonné. The Wildenstein interest in postwar and contemporary art was reflected in 1993 when they went into partnership with Arne Glimcher to form Pace Wildenstein, but from their townhouse on 64th Street, Wildenstein & Company still operates a business that feels like something from a bygone era.

On April 27 they opened a remarkable Monet retrospective—complete with a 350-page scholarly catalogue—as a tribute to Daniel Wildenstein and as a benefit for Evelyn Lauder’s Breast Cancer Research Foundation. While the show was being hung, Guy Wildenstein gave ArtInfo a private preview. Guy makes a compelling companion; he is not only extremely knowledgeable about this work, but passionate about it as well, and full of surprising and entertaining anecdotes.

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Guy, doesn’t it seem odd that in this day and age, a show like this—which you have called “the largest survey show of Monet’s oeuvre to be shown in New York in over 30 years”—should be staged by a private gallery rather than by a public museum?

I think it’s just that there are so many things happening in New York all the time, and it wasn’t on the front burner of any museum’s thinking. The fact that this great painter hasn’t been seen in a retrospective for so many years, and then it happens in our gallery, is a tremendous honor for us.

This show is also really important to me because I’ve organized it in memory of my father. All of his life my father worked on Monet and considered him the most important of the Impressionists.

It’s also a chance to give back to something that has given us so much. Where does an art dealer make his money? From these pictures and these collectors. Bringing these works out of private collections that we know (because most of these pictures came from us originally) and giving the public a chance to see them again for a month and a half is very exciting.

You’ve managed to secure some remarkable loans, haven’t you?

Unfortunately, because of our size—as you say, we’re not a museum—we don’t have the space to put up more pictures; and we would have loved to have had 20 more works. In the end we have 62 pictures, 21 of which come from public institutions, and 41 from private collections. Some have never been seen in public, and that’s really exciting: pictures that have never been seen before and that will probably not be seen again for a very long time.

One that has never been seen in public is this one—Adolphe Monet in the Garden of “Le Coteau” at Sainte-Adresse (1867)—which remained for many years in the collection of Monet’s brother. That’s the painter’s father in the garden. The companion piece hangs in the Hermitage. I tried the hardest possible to get that picture but the Hermitage wouldn’t budge. I even asked the owner of this picture, that if the Hermitage lent theirs, would he reciprocate by lending his picture to Russia so that they could show the two works together. He accepted, but the Hermitage weren’t having any of it. It’s a pity.

I’m intrigued to know how you managed to get pictures that had never been loaned before.

Our name was important. But there was also one moment that was very moving to me. There is a collector here in New York—he sits on the board of the Metropolitan Museum—and he never lends. Never. I went to see him and said, “I’m doing a Monet show and I have some extraordinary pictures.” He said, “You know, Guy, I never lend, and if I start everybody’s going to be on my back.” So I said, “That’s a pity because it’s going to be in memory of my father,” and he grabbed my arm and said, “Which ones do you want?”