Wilhelm Bode and the Art Market: Connoisseurship, Social Networking and the Control of the Marketplace

The professional career and success of Wilhelm Bode (1845-1929) relied on the business of connoisseurship. Like other contemporary art historians involved in the commerce of art, he was entangled in the reciprocal dynamics and interdependencies of the nascent discipline of art history, connoisseurship and the art trade. The volume introduces new material and a fresh perspective on Bode’s strategic participation in the Western art market, exposing the particular consequences of these entanglements on the birth of the art historical canon and showcasing his complex agency within the art marketplace of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.