L’antiquaire Georges Joseph Demotte, le Louvre et les musées américains. S’approprier le discours sur le patrimoine médiéval de la France au sortir de la Première Guerre mondiale

Abstract

The activity of the antiquarian Georges-Joseph Demotte (1877–1923) during the periods before and after the First World War was one of the crucial moments in his career. In Paris, he decided to move to the luxurious district of the eighth arrondissement and began a new activity, art publishing. The first book he published was on the growth of the Musée du Louvre during the war. A few months before the end of the war, he opened a boutique specialising in medieval art in New York. The arrival of such objects, in the particular context of the immediate post-war period, considerably transformed the way in which they were regarded. Through his sales, Demotte would contribute to the enrichment of American collections such as those of Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924), George Grey Barnard (1863–1938), Raymond Pitcairn (1885–1966), William Randolph Hearst (1863–951) and John D. Rockefeller Junior (1874–1960). Each of these collectors, whose profiles and tastes were very different, referred in the way they chose to present their collections to France, its heritage and its museums, but less to the Louvre than to other institutions such as the Musée de Sculpture comparée and the Musée de Cluny.

Keywords

• medieval art
• publishing
• history of collections
• history of taste
• art market
• American museums