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Of his art dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Pablo Picasso once wondered, ‘What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn’t had a business sense?’ The dealer, who did so much with his Paris gallery between 1907 and 1914 to usher Cubism into the world, felt similarly indebted: ‘it is great artists’, he said, ‘who make great dealers’ Then as now, one without the other is unimaginable   Kahnweiler is one among several historic dealers in modern and contemporary art who might serve as role models to the gallerists who are today responsible for bringing ground-breaking artists to a wider public He was, by some accounts, a meagre businessman, but he had the temper for Cubism when few others did He knew not only how to spot artists (he showed all the principal Cubists: Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger) but also how to put them into conversation When his artists were unsure, he suggested titles for their work; he wrote about their paintings to provide audiences with context; he recognised the force of their style ‘I did not have the slightest doubt,’ he said, ‘as to either the aesthetic value of these pictures or their importance in the history of painting’   By the time he opened his gallery at 28, rue Vignon, the Salon de Paris had long been on the wane and public tastes were shifting The most affluent members of the bourgeoisie had the money for art, but only a nascent sensibility for abstraction They needed a gallery like his to put the art into context Kahnweiler’s Cubist programme – like Alfred Steiglitz’s photography programme at his 291 gallery in New York, or Charles Egan’s Abstract Expressionist emphasis at his eponymous New York gallery in the 1940s – lent focus to a new chapter in the history of modernism   The most important dealers have always made that their task That’s what the American art dealer Leo Castelli did with his gallery, which he opened in New York in 1957 In January 1958, he hosted Jasper Johns’ first solo show The exhibition, which included Johns’ paintings of American flags, rang the closing bell for