Kay Gimpel RIP

Kyt · Apr 20, 2009

Kay Gimpel: SOE liaison officer who became an art dealer | Times Online Obituary

Kay Gimpel was the last survivor in her generation of the Gimpel family of art dealers, with family and business connections going back to the

Wildensteins on the one hand and to Joseph Duveen on the other. But her life was rather more rich and varied, and properly distinguished in its own right, than one might ordinarily suppose that of an art dealer’s wife to be, however successful the business, or central its place in the art world. Indeed, it was not to be art at all, but rather the chances of war, that brought her and her husband together.

Kathleen Moore was born in 1914, the second child and only daughter of Harold Moore, an Irish journalist, and his wife, Katherine Chapman, who had met in Toronto and settled in Winnipeg. Her younger brother had died in childhood, and her mother also died early, leaving her to run her father’s household while still a schoolgirl.

Escape came with the University of Manitoba, where she read French, and her evident gift for the language then took her on to a scholarship to Paris and to the Sorbonne. Europe was to claim her for the rest of her life.

She stayed on in Paris through the later 1930s, working at the British Embassy until, with the fall of France in May 1940, she along with the rest of the staff were sent back to London.

There, with Mary Mundle, with whom she had lived in Paris, and Alison Grant, a Canadian friend who had also fetched up in Paris, she took a flat at 54a Walton Avenue in Knightsbridge. Known familiarly as the Canada House Annexe, this was soon to become a notable social hub for those on leave from Special Operations — for each of the three women had become involved one way or another with the clandestine world of Special Operations and Military Intelligence.

Kay had joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) immediately on her return, but in practice, with her fluent command of French, soon found herself directly and deeply involved with the work of the RF section of the Special Operations Executive, maintaining contact with the Resistance and the Free French, briefing agents before they were sent to France and debriefing them on their return — if they returned.

She rose eventually to become head of Air Liaison, the section of SOE that, working directly with the RAF and the US Air Force, was logistically responsible for sending men and material into occupied Europe.

Whether it was through the work itself, or through the social life that spun around it, it was during this time that she first met her future husband, the young Ernest Gimpel, who after the fall of France had joined the Resistance, had been arrested by the Germans but had managed to escape, and in 1942 had been spirited to England by submarine.

Code-named Charles Beauchamp, he was sent back to France in November 1943, but was again soon captured by the Gestapo, brutally interrogated and then sent successively to Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Flossenburg. His first thoughts on his liberation by the Allies in the last weeks of the war were for Kay, and finding her again.

As it happened she was already in continental Europe, working in a team repatriating PoWs. She and Charles (he retained the name thereafter, though reverting to the Gimpel surname) were not only soon reunited but, by the end of August, married and on honeymoon, staying with cousins in Ireland at the start of Charles’s long recuperation. The Gimpel family was of Franco-Jewish origin, settled in Alsace. Charles’s grandfather, Ernest, who was to marry Louis Vuitton’s niece, Adèle, had moved to Paris after the cession of Alsace at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and had there set up as an art dealer.

In this he had been helped by the Wildensteins, to whom he was related by marriage, and in 1905 he went into partnership with Nathan Wildenstein in New York.

On his death in 1909, his son René took over, separating from Wildenstein in 1923 and continuing with galleries in New York, Paris and London.

He was married to Florence, Joseph Duveen’s youngest sister, and while, in common with the rest of the art trade, all too wary of his noble brother-in-law, could not but recognise the practical advantages of so powerful a contact.

It had been a rich life so far, but business was to be harder after the crash of 1929, and with the war it all came to an end. René, and Charles and Jean, his eldest and youngest sons, were involved with the Resistance from the first, while his middle son, Peter, joined the British Army and saw active service with the Eighth Army in North Africa and Italy, notably at El Alamein and Monte Cassino.

With the end of the warit was back to business, and late in 1946, with stock retrieved miraculously unscathed from store in a London lock-up, Charles and Peter reopened the gallery in London, renamed Gimpel Fils, in memory of their father, who had died in 1945 in the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg.

Over the following decades and through successive moves, from Duke Street to South Molton Street and finally to Davies Street, it was to secure its position as a leading gallery at the heart of the London art world, specialising in modern and contemporary British and international art — where indeed it remains, now in a fourth generation, under the direction of Charles and Kay’s elder son, René.

With the brothers, Charles and Peter, seeing to the art and cultivating the artists — and they soon had a notable list that included Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Alan Davie and Ben Nicholson — it fell naturally to Kay, with her recent administrative experience, her obvious flair and a wealth of native common sense besides, to look after the business side of things, and for the next several decades she was to be a central driving force in the gallery’s success — though, at the start, her grand and rather imposing Vuitton and Duveen in-laws and relations could not quite understand why she wanted, let alone needed, to work at all.

She never forgot her Canadian roots, frequently returning to Canada, and maintaining her contacts there. Michael Ignatieff, sometime journalist for The Times and now leader of the Liberal Opposition in Canada, the eldest son of Alison Grant, her old friend from the Paris days, was her godson. And in persuading the Gimpel Gallery to show Inuit art as early as 1953, she was a true pioneer in recognising such indigenous art at its true cultural level and importance. She continued active in the gallery’s affairs well into her eighties.

Kay Gimpel’s was ever a lively, bustling, energetic presence, always interested at a personal level. As friendly as she was forthright, she would charm alike the surly critic, neurotic artist or reluctant client with an equal facility. Her voice never lost its touch of the transatlantic, moderated by a decided Irish lilt.

Kay Gimpel’s husband, Charles, died in 1973, and she is survived by their sons, René and Charles.

Kay Gimpel, art dealer, was born on January 2, 1914. She died on March 19, 2009, aged 95
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