Goldschmidt, Inc., Lucien

Biography

Lucien Goldschmidt was born in Brussels on 3 March 1912, educated at the Collège Royal Français in Berlin, worked for Pierre Berès, a rare-book dealer in Paris, and established a New York branch for Berès in 1937. In 1953, he opened his own gallery, at 1117 Madison Avenue, with his wife Marguerite Studer Goldschmidt. The Goldschmidts retired in 1987.

The gallery was the first in the United States to exhibit Matisse's portfolio, "Jazz," in 1949 (it sold for $375). Mr. Goldschmidt collaborated with Weston Naef on "The Truthful Lens," a 1980 reference text about books illustrated with original photographs, not reproductions. He helped put together the unpublished correspondence of Toulouse-Lautrec, which he edited with Herbert Schimmel in a volume published in 1969, and he helped organize exhibitions, his last a show on Redon and Bresdin at the Grolier Club in Manhattan. In an article in The New York Times, John Russell described Mr. Goldschmidt's gallery as "the kind of book-cum-picture shop that Daumier would have liked to draw and in which Baudelaire would have whiled away the hours."

Lucien Goldschmidt died in New York on 17 December 1992. (New York Times obituary, December 18, 1992)

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