The Saga of the Senns, Collectors from Le Havre

The father, Olivier, collected Impressionists. His son Edouard and granddaughter Hélène nurtured links with contemporary artists. Meanwhile, his daughter Alice acquired works by artists of the Great American West. Between them, they created one of the finest modern collections.

Twenty years ago, Hélène Senn-Foulds (b. 1934) donated 205 works to MuMA, mostly from the collection of her grandfather, Olivier Senn (1864-1959). At the time, this major donation made the Le Havre museum’s Impressionist collection one of the foremost in the region. Since then, it has extensively studied and documented this group, and for this anniversary has endeavored to reconstitute Olivier Senn’s original collection. Upon his death, the collection, comprising over 500 mostly Impressionist works, was divided equally between his two surviving children: Alice (1898-1988) and Édouard (1901-1992), Hélène’s father. The result of long and patient research, the exhibition presents the missing part of the collection, which passed into the hands of Alice and her descendants. In the catalog, it also traces the history of a family of dignitaries and art lovers who rose to prominence in Le Havre in the second half of the 19^th century. A major finance and trade center, the city was far from being a provincial sleeping beauty. Its commercial and transatlantic port and its stock exchange, comparable to those of New York or Frankfurt today, made it a business hub and an ideal environment for entrepreneurs. When the Olivier Senn, a Doctor of Law, married Hélène Siegfried, he became part of an economically and politically powerful family. He soon joined the cotton company founded by his father-in-law, and developed it successfully, building up a considerable fortune. As well as his involvement with business, in 1896, at 32, he became a member of the Société des Amis des Arts. His interest in art had already led him to buy several works, notably by Eugène Boudin. An active collector until the eve of the Second World War, Olivier Senn was mainly drawn to Impressionism, with a penchant for landscapes. Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas, Guillaumin and the like figured prominently in his collection, which featured some outstanding works. His love of Impressionism led him to mix with other art lovers of his time in Le Havre, including Georges Dusseuil, Charles-Auguste Marande, Pieter Van der Velde and Édouard Choupay. Highly keen to champion art, they founded the Cercle de l’Art Moderne in 1906. They all bought numerous works at Paris auctions of the older generation’s great Impressionist collections: the Tavernier sale on March 6, 1900; the Blot sale on May 9-10, 1900; the Weiller sale on December 2, 1901; the Alexandre Blanc sale in December 1906; and the Rouart sale on December 9 and 18, 1912. Olivier Senn also bought from galleries including Georges Petit, Bernheim Jeune and Eugène Druet, and called on brokers like Paul Durand-Ruel. He personally attended major auctions and studio content sales, and met the artists, from whom he bought directly, as with Giorgio De Chirico’s The Red Tower, now in the Peggy Guggenheim collection in Venice.

Some 80 Drawings by Edgar Degas

While a great admirer of Impressionism, collecting a sizable number of works, Olivier Senn also built up a personal collection, in which works he fell in love with had a prominent place. His pronounced taste for drawing resulted in a group of almost 80 works by Edgar Degas and as many watercolors by Edmond Cross. Senn made confident choices, regardless of market considerations: for instance, he bought six paintings by Paul Sérusier in 1916 and 1917, despite the artist’s low price index. He took an unfailing interest in Félix Vallotton, acquiring at least eight paintings from different periods, and supported artists like Charles Lacoste and Charles Cottet. His loyalty to Albert Marquet (whom he followed throughout his career) was reflected in a group of 17 paintings and over 100 drawings. A true art lover, Olivier Senn lived surrounded by his collection, which hung in his apartment in Avenue d’Iéna in Paris. Several photographs of it have survived. He was regularly approached for exhibitions and made generous loans. He was also a major donor to the Musée du Havre and the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris.

Artists of the Great American West

After his death, Olivier Senn’s collection was preserved essentially intact by his two heirs. Édouard Senn, a cotton merchant like his father, had five children including Hélène Senn-Foulds, who donated her grandfather’s share of the collection to the Musée du Havre in 2004, and then her father’s share in 2009. Hélène began collecting around the same time that her father stopped. For his part, he set out to collect works by artists who were his contemporaries, maintaining direct links with some of them, like Endre Rozsda and Étienne Hajdu. The major pieces he acquired included The Beggar (1904), a watercolor from Pablo Picasso’s blue period, and Landscape, Antibes (1955), a painting by Nicolas de Staël. Hélène Senn-Foulds, in turn, was keen to collect living artists such as Zoran Music, Geneviève Asse and Philippe Cognée. Hélène’s adopted son Christophe Karvelis-Senn (b. 1962), married to a Mexican wife, Teresa, is also a collector, who focuses on the South American scene and artists like Gabriel Orozco, Pia Camil, Juan Soriano, Enrique Ramirez, Artur Lescher and Oscar Muñoz. As regards the family branch embodied by Alice Senn, the story continued on the other side of the Atlantic. As the Second World War approached, Alice and her husband Rodolphe Rufenacht decided to emigrate to the United States, and moved to New York in 1940, where they raised their five children. When Rodolphe died in 1949, Alice moved to Tucson, Arizona, where the climate was more beneficial for her health. Drawn to the arid landscape and the beauty of wide-open spaces, she began collecting works by artists of the American West. They included John Edward Borein, Edith Hamlin and Ross Stefan, all represented at the Tucson Museum of Art, to which Alice often made loans. She also bought several pieces by California-based ceramicists Otto and Gertrud Natzler. And it was in her Tucson home that she installed the collection inherited from her father in 1959. Prior to reconstructing Olivier Senn’s collection, the Musée du Havre focused its research on the section that had crossed the Atlantic. Thanks to the generosity of Alice’s descendants, the project has been successfully completed, and the story of a major family of collectors brought to light, to the joy of art lovers.

Worth Seeing
“Les Senn, collectionneurs et mécènes”
(“The Senn Family: Collectors and Patrons”)
Musée d’Art Moderne André-Malraux (MuMA)
Until February 23, 2025
muma-lehavre.fr