World War I and World War II
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 not only ruptured the Cubist experiments in art but resulted in Kahnweiler, of German origin, being considered by the French as an alien; and being forced to live in exile in Switzerland. Many German nationals living in France had their possessions sequestered by the French state, and as a result, Kahnweiler's collection was confiscated in 1914 and sold by the government in a series of auctions at the Hôtel Drouot between 1921 and 1923.
During the years of exile (until 1920) he studied and wrote on his experiences. He wrote works such as the Der Weg Zum Kubismus and Confessions esthétiques. Writing becoming a passion he continued over his lifetime, creating hundreds of books and major articles. The second period of enforced writing was the internal exile which occurred during World War II where as a Jew, the Nazis forced him to flee Paris. He remained in France in hiding; where as he put it under the clouds of the gas chambers he wrote the seminal work on Juan Gris.
Read more about this topic: Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler
Famous quotes containing the words world war, world and/or war:
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“O sovereign mistress of true melancholy,
The poisonous damp of night disponge upon me,
That life, a very rebel to my will,
May hang no longer on me. Throw my heart
Against the flint and hardness of my fault,
Which, being dried with grief, will break to powder
And finish all foul thoughts. O Antony,
Nobler than my revolt is infamous,
Forgive me in thine own particular,
But let the world rank me in register
A master-leaver and a fugitive.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Now, were I once at home, and in good satire,
I’d try conclusions with those Janizaries,
And show them what an intellectual war is.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)