Georges Joseph Demotte
Belgian, 1877 - 1923
Georges Joseph Demotte, a Belgian-born collector and dealer of Islamic and medieval art, had businesses in Paris (first at 27, rue de Berri, and later at 23, rue de Provence) and New York City (first at 25 East Seventy-Eighth Street and later at 8 East Fifty-Seventh Street). Demotte was killed in a hunting accident on the estate of the Parisian antiques dealer, Otto Wegener, on September 3, 1923. Questions have been raised as to whether his death was accidental. He was involved in a lawsuit with Joseph Duveen and a forgery scandal at the time of his death. After his death, his seventeen-year-old son, Lucien Demotte (1906–1934), took over the presidency of the Demotte businesses in Paris and New York.
"Demotte Killed in Gun Accident; International Art Dealer Shot Dead While on Hunting Expedition in France," New York Times, September 5, 1923.
Meryle Secrest, Duveen: A Life in Art (New York: Knopf, 2004), 207–23.
https://www.doaks.org/resources/bliss-tyler-correspondence/annotations/georges-demotte I.S. 12/3/2018
George Joseph Demotte, alternatively Georges-Joseph Demotte (1877-1923) was a Belgian-born art dealer, the owner of galleries in Paris (27 rue de Berri) and New York (8 East 57th Street) specializing in the sale of medieval French art.
He became "infamous" among historians of Islamic art for his treatment of the highly important Great Mongol Shahnameh or "Demotte Shahnameh". This came into Demotte's hands about 1910; "he bought it from Shemavan Malayan, brother-in-law of the well-known dealer Hagop Kevorkian, who had brought it from Tehran".[1]
Demotte failed to raise the price he wanted for the whole manuscript from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other potential buyers. He then separated the miniatures and sold them, after various physical interventions to increase the sale value, and without properly recording the original form of the book. Pages were pulled apart to give two sides with miniatures, and to disguise this and the resulting damage, calligraphers were hired to add new text, often from the wrong part of the work, as Demotte did not expect his new clientele of wealthy collectors to be able to read Persian.[2] This has left the subject of some miniatures still uncertain, as the surrounding text does not match them.[3] Scholars have been very critical of the "infamous" Demotte,[4] and it irked many that the manuscript he treated so brutally carried his name, so the new name of "Great Mongol Shahnameh" was promoted, and has generally won acceptance.
His portrait was painted by Henri Matisse in 1918.
In 1923 he sued his former New York agent, Jean Vigoroux, in the French courts for embezzlement,[5] while simultaneously suing Sir Joseph Duveen for slander in the American courts, for having declared a medieval statuette that Demotte had sold a fake.[6] Neither suit had been settled when Demotte died, accidentally shot by a friend and fellow art-dealer, Otto Wegener, while returning from a boar-hunting trip.[7] Wegener was cleared of homicide by the French courts, but ordered to pay compensation to Demotte's family.[8]
His galleries, estimated at the time of his death to be worth $2,000,000, passed to his seventeen-year-old son Lucien Demotte (died 1934).[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Joseph_Demotte I.S. 12/3/2018
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Last Updated8/7/24
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