Barbazanges Gallery

The Galerie Barbazanges was an art gallery in Paris that exhibited contemporary art between 1911 and 1928. The building was owned by the wealthy fashion designer, Paul Poiret, and the gallery was used for Poiret's "Salon d'Antin" exhibitions. The gallery showed the work of artists such as Picasso, Modigliani, Gauguin, Matisse, Chagall, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Boussingault, Moreau and Dufy, Utrillo, Goncharova, Modigliani, Chagall, Zadkine, Coubine, de La Fesnaye, etc.

In 1911 Henri Barbazanges rented part of the property at 109 Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré from his friend, the fashion designer Paul Poiret, and opened the Gallery Barbazanges with financial assistance from L. C. Hodebert. The gallery would exhibit contemporary art. The building was beside Poiret's eighteenth century mansion at 26 Avenue d'Antin. The Galerie Barbazanges leased the ground floor, with a total area of about 250 square metres (2,700 sq ft). Behind the front room there were a number of smaller rooms leading to a 70 square metres (750 sq ft) room without windows, but with a glass roof 5.5 metres (18 ft) high. This large back room may have been built by Barbazanges when he took control in 1911. A door was made between Poiret's mansion and one of the rooms of the gallery.

In February and March 1912, Robert Delaunay's first personal exhibition was held, during which 41 works, including four views of the Eiffel Tower, were exhibited. Marie Laurencin also exhibited some of her works.

Poiret reserved the right to hold two exhibitions each year. One of these was L'Art Moderne en France from 16–31 July 1916, organized by André Salmon. Salmon gave "26 Avenue d'Antin" as the address and called the exhibition the "Salon d'Antin". Artists included Pablo Picasso, who showed Les Demoiselles d'Avignon for the first time, Amedeo Modigliani, Moïse Kisling, Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, and Marie Vassilieff. Poiret also arranged concerts of new music at the gallery, often in combination with exhibitions of new art. The 1916 Salon d'Antin included readings of poetry by Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, and performances of work by Erik Satie, Darius Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky, and Georges Auric. Satie's Musique d'ameublement (furniture music) was performed in public for the first time at the gallery on 8 March 1920 during intermissions of a play by Max Jacob.

Henri Barbazanges worked mainly as an art dealer and supplied many European museums. In 1912, the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum bought Auguste Renoir's 1868 painting of The Sisley Couple.

In 1919, he bought from Gustave Courbet the painting The studio of the painter which he sold at the Louvre a year later and which is now in the Musée d'Orsay. In 1919, he bought The self-portrait of Paul Gauguin with halo and snake from François Norgelet. The painting was later acquired by Lord Ivor Charles Spencer Churchill. In 1924, he and his colleague Georges Bernheim acquired the entire studio collection of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who died in 1919. Many other paintings, such as the self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh from 1887 (oil on canvas, 47 cm x 35, 5 cm), passed in his hands.

In 1923 Pierre Matisse, son of Henri Matisse and Amélie Parayre, came to work at the gallery to gain experience in the art market before moving to New York in 1924. In March 1923 Raoul Dufy and Jean Émile Laboureur organized the first Exposition du Groupe des peintres-graveurs indépendents at the gallery. A second exhibition of this group was held in 1924. Another of Poiret's exhibitions, also organized by Salmon, was La Collection particulière de M. Paul Poiret, from 26 April to 12 May 1923.

Barbazanges retired in 1923, but Hodebert continued to run the gallery under the original name. Advertisements in 1926 also called it the Galerie Barbazanges-Hodebert. In the spring of 1928 the gallery moved to 174 Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré, where the Galerie Camille Hodebert had been open since 1922. In 1929 this gallery was called the Galerie L.C. Hodebert. In January 1929 Hodebart transferred the space of the former Galerie Barbazanges to Georges Bernheim. It housed the Galerie Heim from the 1950s, which specialized in old master paintings.