E. L. T. Mesens: Art Collector and Dealer

Abstract

The Getty Research Institute preserves the extraordinary archive of the Belgian surrealist Édouard Léon Théodore Mesens (1903–71). Papers in the collection document the long career of Mesens not only as a painter and poet but also as a collector and art dealer who was continuously involved in the sales and purchasing of modern art. Mesens’s job as a dealer started in the 1920s in Belgium and continued into the 1930s and ‘40s in England. These business activities allowed Mesens to assemble hundreds of artworks in a remarkable collection that was totally dispersed after his death. It is likely for this reason that scholars have thus far neglected Mesens’s role as a collector and dealer, despite the fact that by the 1950s he owned approximately three hundred of artworks kept in England and an unspecified number in Brussels—an extremely high quantity that evidences the indissoluble union between private collecting and commercial stock that characterizes Mesens’s practice.