Masterworks Research · October 2026

Art Market History | Collecting

Thirteen friends and relatives, a ten-year agreement and a Picasso nobody had room to hang: the Paris syndicate that tested modern art at auction, and what its result can and cannot tell an investor.

La Peau de l'Ours was a Paris collectors' syndicate founded on February 24, 1904 by the businessman André Level, in which thirteen relatives and friends paid 250 francs a share each year to buy work by young artists, Picasso and Matisse among them, and agreed from the start to sell everything at auction after ten years [4][5]. The sale at the Hôtel Drouot on March 2, 1914 returned more than four times what the members had put in [9], and Picasso's Family of Saltimbanques, bought from the artist in 1908 for 1,000 francs, brought 11,500 francs at the hammer [1][4][5]. The members also gave 20 percent of their profit to the artists, six years before French law created a resale right for artists [7][11]. Read as an investment, it combined pooled capital, a horizon fixed in advance and a bet on living artists, and it ran for one decade in one city.

What You Need to Know

  • Thirteen members held eleven shares of 250 francs a year. Level proposed each purchase, and a majority of a three-member committee approved it [4][5].
  • Over ten years the syndicate bought about 145 works by some 60 artists, twelve by Picasso and ten by Matisse [2][5].
  • By Christopher Green's count the sale brought 116,545 francs against 27,500 francs contributed, a gain of 75,845 francs after expenses [8].

1. Who founded La Peau de l'Ours, and how was it organized?

André Level was a company secretary at the Compagnie des Docks et Entrepôts de Marseille who had collected the Nabis since the 1890s [2][4]. After the first Salon d'Automne, in November 1903, convinced him its young painters were "the authentic art of our time," he asked people he knew to pool their money with his [4]. His brothers Émile, Jacques and Maurice, his cousin the playwright Georges Ancey, and industrialist friends including the Ellissen and Raynal brothers signed the statutes on February 24, 1904 [4][5].

Each share cost 250 francs a year for ten years. Level proposed purchases, and a committee of three (Level for life, plus two members elected for two-year terms) approved them by majority. Twice a year the members drew lots for the order in which they picked works to hang at home, and they could swap pictures by sending the manager a note [5]. The name came from La Fontaine's fable about selling a bear's skin before you have killed the bear [7][9].

A liquidation clause proposed by Robert Ellissen set the waterfall in 1904. If the sale brought less than the members had paid in, they split it pro rata. If it brought more, each member first took back his contributions plus compound interest of at most 3.5 percent, and of anything left, 20 percent went to Level as manager and 20 percent to the painters or their families [5].

2. What did La Peau de l'Ours buy, and from which dealers?

Level bought in the studios and from dealers; Christopher Green names Bernheim-Jeune, Ambroise Vollard and Berthe Weill [8]. In the first year Level bought a Picasso from a group show at Weill's gallery and the watercolor Contemplation from Père Soulier, a Montmartre mattress maker who showed young artists, and he went back to both in 1906 for six more Picassos [4]. Weill had opened in 1901 under the motto "Make way for the young," and a touring exhibition of her career closed at the Musée de l'Orangerie in January 2026 [13]. The one older work, a Van Gogh, came cheaply from Vollard, who let it go at Renoir's urging [10].

The members gave their reasoning in the 1914 sale catalogue. Fine works of the past were "already almost inaccessible," so they preferred the risks of new things to the risks of the fake, the doctored and the overpriced [5]. With 2,750 francs a year to spend [9], the group could not reach the blue chips of 1904, but it could buy the best examples by living artists. Its steady buying helped lift their prices, and by 1910 that budget bought very little of the work it had been collecting [9].

Picasso painted Family of Saltimbanques in 1905, a canvas of 212.8 by 229.6 centimeters [1]. Level saw it in 1908 and persuaded a committee whose vote was not unanimous at first. Picasso turned down the 1,000-franc offer, saying foreign buyers were interested, kept a 300-franc deposit while he thought it over, and came back fifteen days later for the other 700 [4]. No member's home had room for it, so the canvas that became the syndicate's most valuable asset spent more than five years rolled up in storage [4][5].

3. What happened at the Hôtel Drouot sale in March 1914?

Level ran the sale like a launch. He started the publicity months ahead, printed a catalogue with fine plates and booked the Drouot salesrooms normally reserved for sales expected to reach 100,000 gold francs [4]. On February 20, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso's dealer, wrote to the Russian collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov offering to bid for them without commission and naming Family of Saltimbanques as the centerpiece [4]. German dealers came in person, among them Heinrich Thannhauser of Munich and Alfred Flechtheim of Düsseldorf [5].

Every work sold [4]. A Cubist view by Jean Metzinger made 100 francs and a Raoul Dufy 160, while the Gauguin and the Van Gogh made 4,000 and 4,200 francs [5]. Family of Saltimbanques opened at 8,000 and went to Thannhauser for 11,500 francs, and one reporter wrote that he would gladly have paid twice that [5]. The 11,500 figure is the hammer price reported the next day, while FitzGerald, Green and Sotheby's give 12,650 francs [5][6][7][8][10]. Green and Gary Schwartz put the sale total at 116,545 francs, while Vérane Tasseau, citing Le Figaro, gives 106,250 [4][8][9]. On any count the syndicate roughly quadrupled its money [4][9].

4. How much did the artists receive, and what is the link to droit de suite?

The liquidation accounts show 12,641.49 francs paid to the artists, each in proportion to the profit on his own works [4][5]. Picasso received 3,978.85 francs with a letter from Level dated April 4, 1914 [4], which Schwartz puts at 17 percent of his earnings that year [9].

On May 20, 1920, France created the droit de suite, an inalienable right for artists to a share of the price when their works were resold at public sale, on a scale from 1 percent to 3 percent [11]. James Fenton, summarizing FitzGerald, writes that the syndicate's principle entered French law six years after the sale [6][7]. The syndicate shared profit, and only after members had their money back with interest, while the 1920 law took a percentage of the price, profit or loss [11]. The European Union harmonized a version of the right in 2001 [12].

5. How did the Paris press react to the sale?

Most papers covered the sale with goodwill or amusement, according to Guy Habasque's 1956 history [5]. André Warnod in Comoedia described dealers, painters and poets, Max Jacob in a red coat among them, people "not usually seen at the Hôtel Drouot" [5]. Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in the Mercure de France that the Fauves and Cubists had faced an auction for the first time, and that for the first time part of the proceeds had been set aside for the artists [10].

In Paris-Midi, Maurice Delcourt titled his piece "Before the Invasion." He called the work "grotesque and formless" art by "undesirable foreigners," said Germans had pushed the prices up, and predicted their money would prove "well invested" on the day they came to empty the Louvre [5]. War broke out five months later [3].

6. What happened to Family of Saltimbanques after 1914?

Thannhauser's gallery sold the painting by June 1915 to the Munich poet and patron Hertha Koenig. Rainer Maria Rilke lived beside "the great Picasso" in her apartment from June to October 1915 and dedicated the fifth of his Duino Elegies to her [1]. The Valentine Gallery in New York sold it on February 10, 1931 to Chester Dale, who described buying it from a bank in Switzerland, and it came to the National Gallery of Art with his bequest in 1963 [1]. Since then it has been out of the supply of Picassos any collector can buy.

7. What does La Peau de l'Ours teach an art investor?

Pooled capital buys what one buyer cannot

Eleven shares of 250 francs bought what no member could have bought alone, and paid for a manager with the time and the contacts to find the work. We think the committee and the calendar did as much for the result as the money did.

A horizon fixed in advance

The sale date was in the 1904 statutes [5], so nobody had to decide when to sell and nobody could sell early. A fixed date also carries timing risk, and this one was lucky. The sale closed five months before the war, and Kahnweiler's confiscated stock, about 3,000 items including 1,219 works by Braque, Gris, Léger and Picasso, was sold at Drouot from 1921 to 1923 [3]. Green writes that those sales depressed Cubist prices until the mid-1920s, while Tasseau finds that Picasso's own prices held up [4][8]. A horizon ending in 1922 could have produced a different result.

Living artists, bought before the institutions

The syndicate got the artist market right before it got the price right, and the artist market decided most of the outcome. Picasso and Matisse carried the sale, while Derain, Dufy, Vlaminck and Utrillo sold for a few hundred francs or less [5].

Governance among people who knew each other

The committee, the lottery and the swap-by-letter rule worked because the members were brothers, cousins and friends [5]. The same closeness let members support prices at the sale. Émile and Maurice Level paid 2,600 and 5,200 francs for two Picasso gouaches [4], and Schwartz notes that the consortium's own bidding helped drive prices up [9].

The dealer channel

Level bought where new painting first appeared, at small dealers and in the studios, and sold where prices were public, at Drouot [4][5]. For how those channels work now, see How the Art Market Works.

8. What does the result not prove?

The record covers one decade in one city, and it is famous because it worked. Any groups that bought the wrong painters left no catalogue for historians, so the surviving record leans toward success. Inside the collection the gains sat in two artists, and members paid some of the prices at the sale.

Gary Schwartz puts the syndicate's return at perhaps 25 percent a year, and finds that the works whose later history can be traced appreciated no faster than 7 or 8 percent a year after 1914 [9]. The founders took the steepest part of the curve. We read La Peau de l'Ours as evidence of what a well-run group can capture early in an artist market, and as weak evidence about a market that is already priced. Collecting in company did not end in 1914, and we explain why Masterworks is organized around a club in Why Masterworks Is Organized Around a Club.

Sources

  1. National Gallery of Art. "Family of Saltimbanques, 1905, Pablo Picasso." Collection record and provenance, accession 1963.10.190. https://www.nga.gov/artworks/46665-family-saltimbanques
  2. Jozefacka, Anna. "André Level." The Modern Art Index Project, Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 2015. https://www.metmuseum.org/research-centers/leonard-a-lauder-research-center/research-resources/modern-art-index-project/level
  3. Mahler, Luise. "Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler." The Modern Art Index Project, Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 2015. https://www.metmuseum.org/research-centers/leonard-a-lauder-research-center/research-resources/modern-art-index-project/kahnweiler-d
  4. Tasseau, Vérane. "Pablo Picasso, André Level, and Max Pellequer." In Pablo Picasso: The Business of Art and Friendship. Larkin Erdmann, Zurich, March 2025. https://www.larkinerdmann.com/media/pages/publications/pablo-picasso-the-business-of-art-and-friendship/047fb177c1-1756800164/18_picasso_cover_hires.pdf
  5. Habasque, Guy. "Quand on vendait la Peau de l'Ours." L'Œil, March 1956, quoting the association's statutes, the 1914 sale catalogue, and press reports by André Warnod (Comoedia), Seymour de Ricci (Gil Blas) and Maurice Delcourt (Paris-Midi). Archived reproduction: https://web.archive.org/web/2018/http://www.centaures.com/lapeaudelours.html
  6. FitzGerald, Michael C. Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. The standard study of the sale; its figures are cited here through Fenton, Green and Tasseau.
  7. Fenton, James. "Becoming Picasso." The New York Review of Books, February 6, 1997. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/02/06/becoming-picasso/
  8. Green, Christopher. Art in France, 1900-1940. Yale University Press Pelican History of Art, 2000.
  9. Schwartz, Gary. "The tale of the bear that turned into a bull." The Schwartzlist, October 17, 2024, first published in NRC Handelsblad, July 19, 1996. https://www.garyschwartzarthistorian.nl/2-the-tale-of-the-bear-that-turned-into-a-bull/
  10. Sotheby's. "Œuvres provenant de la collection André Level." Catalogue note, Impressionist and Modern Art, Paris, 2010, lot 1. https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2010/impressionist-and-modern-art-pf1014/lot.1.html
  11. "France: Loi frappant d'un droit, au profit des artistes, les ventes publiques d'objets d'art (du 20 mai 1920)." Le Droit d'Auteur, June 1920, World Intellectual Property Organization archive. https://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/fr/copyright/120/wipo_pub_120_1920_06.pdf
  12. European Parliament and Council. "Directive 2001/84/EC on the resale right for the benefit of the author of an original work of art." Official Journal of the European Communities, September 27, 2001. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2001/84/oj
  13. Musée de l'Orangerie. "Berthe Weill, galeriste d'avant-garde." Exhibition booklet, October 8, 2025 to January 26, 2026. https://www.musee-orangerie.fr/sites/default/files/exposition/booklet/2025-10/Petit%20journal%20Berthe%20Weill.pdf

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