My Grandfather's Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War

by Sinclair, Anne

  The Germans didn’t forget Paul Rosenberg. In fact, they blacklisted him.

  He had thwarted them to some extent, sending a number of works to safety in London and New York and lending others to American museums, notably to the Museum of Modern Art for the first big Picasso retrospective, which my grandfather himself had put together during several months in New York with his friend Alfred Barr in 1939. Not surprisingly, in August of that year, my grandfather wrote to Picasso from Évian speaking of “dark events” as an inevitability.

  * * *

  On September 3, 1939, the day war is declared, my grandfather is with his family in the Touraine, near the Loire River, at Cinq-Mars-la-Pile. He closes his gallery and, for fear of bombing raids, takes some of his paintings to Tours. There he stores them under the name of his chauffeur, Louis Le Gall. These would be the first paintings recovered after the war because neither the Nazis nor the French authorities were aware of their existence.

  Then the whole family leaves for Bordeaux, where, on February 7, 1940, they rent a house, Le Castel, at 12 Route de la Tresne, in Floirac La Souys, three miles east of Bordeaux. Le Castel belongs to a couple named Ledoux, who continue living on the first floor despite the presence of the Rosenbergs. They take over the whole house again after the war and sell the property to the town council during the 1960s.

  * * *

  I’d never been to Floirac before and wanted to visit the house that I’d seen only in photographs. It was, after all, where my family spent the beginning of the war.

  The Garonne River is gray and overcast that morning in September 2010. After arriving at Bordeaux Mérignac Airport, I cross the river toward Floirac and begin to search for the route de la Tresne, as it is spelled on the family’s ration cards. I imagine that the street has been renamed several times by now and soon discover that ever since the socialist council was elected, it’s been called avenue du Président François-Mitterrand. Of course …

  Eventually I find Le Castel, which, according to postwar trial records, was looted during the months following the armistice, under the indulgent eyes of the Ledoux family.

  In the middle of a freshly mown lawn stands a cedar, plainly several hundred years old. At the foot of that tree, in May 1940, Henri Matisse and my grandfather engaged in spirited conversations about nature and its representation in painting. Massive, harmonious, reassuring, the tree was perhaps more damaged by the hurricane of 1999 than by the German invasion. The grounds are well tended, while the house itself looks rather weary. It’s a curious building, at once charming and distasteful. Designed in the nineteenth century and modeled on a fortress, it combines all the attributes—a keep, stone walls, carved rose windows in the façade—needed to turn it into a sort of Wuthering Heights.

  I push open the heavy glass-and-wrought-iron door. The hall looks a bit dingy and clearly hasn’t undergone any refurbishment in many years. The big mirror hanging on the wall lends it a certain elegance though the worm-eaten staircase is crumbling into dust.

  I climb the shaky stairs and ring the second-floor bell. The door is opened by a startled elderly gentleman, a clerk from the town hall, lodged there by the council. He ushers me into a three- or four-room flat that may have been the bedrooms, and perhaps the dining room, of Le Castel. There’s still a dumbwaiter set into one of the walls.

  The gentleman listens, slightly baffled, to my babbling (“my family lived here, left in June 1940; I’d like to see the downstairs”) and calls the town hall. Two deputies kindly join us and open up the property.

  Part of the house hasn’t been touched since those days; the other was clearly added on by the Ledoux family over the course of the subsequent decades. Might this work have been paid for, gossips suggested after the war, by the booty hidden inside the house?

  Despite its fancy name, the house isn’t very big, although the grounds are imposing. I inspect the whole building room by room, saving the drawing room for last. The kitchens are on the ground floor, as they are in all the houses in Haut-Floirac, which were the properties of the affluent Bordeaux bourgeoisie since the end of the nineteenth century. “It dates from the nineteen-thirties or forties,” I am told. “The pipes are rusty, the wiring was installed by the occupying Germans,” and the office is used as a storeroom for the drinks and mineral water that would be served at private or municipal events.

  The Rosenbergs stayed at Le Castel until June 1940, when they decided to flee France. With a clear-eyed view of the deteriorating situation, but perhaps placing too much confidence in the Maginot Line of fortifications against Germany, Paul brought dozens of his paintings to Le Castel so as not to be separated from them, and especially to keep them safe, far from Paris. He rented a vault for them in the town of Libourne, at the Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie (BNCI), which later became the Banque Nationale de Paris, when it was nationalized after the war.

  There 162 paintings were stored; they included a van Gogh self-portrait and paintings by Cézanne, Delacroix, Léger, Matisse, Sisley, Picasso, Vuillard, Utrillo, Corot, Monet, and Braque. On September 5, 1941, when the Nazis opened vault number 7, every piece was taken away to the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume. All Göring had to do was seize them.

  * * *

  So the Rosenbergs spent the winter of 1940 in Floirac. It was as if time itself had been suspended.

  During this period Braque came to visit. Troubled and dispirited about the outbreak of hostilities, he found it difficult to stand before his easel. In October 1939 he wrote to Paul: “I’d started a few canvases, but the turbulence that arose put a stop to all that. I haven’t gone back to painting, and for about a month now I’ve been making sculptures, which I am greatly enjoying. It’s athletic work because I’ve got to bring stones up from the beach that sometimes weigh more than 20 kilos.”1 Clearly, this work was as therapeutic as the defeat was traumatic: 120,000 dead, 200,000 wounded in a few weeks, a people humiliated. “Hitler did in seven weeks what the Germans had dreamed of doing for seventy years.”2

  When the Reich troops arrived in Dieppe, six miles from his property at Varengeville, Braque took his finest paintings and sought temporary refuge with the Rosenbergs in Floriac. He and his wife, Marcelle, also brought with them the little gold in their possession. On Paul’s advice, Braque put everything in the vault next to Paul’s in the same bank in Libourne. Of course, the vault was later forced open, its contents, along with Paul’s paintings, plundered by the Germans.

  In 1942 Braque received an almost comical letter from the BNCI about the lock that had been broken by the Nazis and had to be replaced at the bank’s expense: “We would be obliged if you would repay the expenses thus accrued—namely, 1,000 francs for expert advice and 200 francs for our trouble.”3

  * * *

  As for Matisse, he moved to Nice.

  On July 16, 1939, Matisse and Paul renewed the contract that had bound them together since 1936, adding a clause to the effect that it would become invalid in the event of war. On October 10 Matisse proposed a third contract, a “war contract” to be signed on the thirtieth of the month. “Given the uncertainty of the market, a one-year contract strikes me as reasonable … I foresaw a return of the golden age of the arts, a time when artists wouldn’t have to put their joys and torments on display … delivering their works not as soon as they hatched, but after living with them long enough to see them mature … Impossible in the present state of our civilization, and we must resign ourselves to parting company from our children before we’ve seen them grow,” Matisse says, referring to his paintings. “And your indomitable work arrives to rouse me from this state, which is so conducive to meditation even though it is imposed by circumstances. I succumb to temptation; the golden calm remains!”4

  On both sides, the renewal of this exclusive contract revealed a certain optimism despite everything in the years to come. Paul then announced to Matisse that he wanted to move from Tours to Bordeaux so that his son, Alexandre, “wouldn’t yield to idleness” and
could continue his studies (Tours was not a university town at the time) and begin his military training.

  According to Paul’s correspondence, it seems that in Floirac during those first months of 1940, before the catastrophe took place, the passion for art took precedence over commentary on events whose outcome remained uncertain. Many people were apparently unaware of how serious things were. In April 1940 the Art Institute of Chicago had planned a tour for Paul in America, so that he could come, along with his paintings, and deliver lectures on French painting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  That same year, during the so-called Phoney War,* Paul traveled all the way to Nice to see Matisse in his studio and came back by train with canvases under his arm. Clearly enchanted by his visit, he wrote to the painter as soon as he got home. Apparently, hanging his friend’s canvases to their greatest advantage was a more pressing matter than seeing his family after his absence: “I found you in a most excellent state … I’ve seen your new works which, the more I think about it, are the very best quality and the very best of Matisse … The ones I have brought here were hung on the walls of the living room in Le Castel at 2:30. After contemplating them again, I went to say hello to my family. I was very tired after an 18-hour journey, the sight of your canvases revived me … I’m very flattered and honored to have your esteem and trust … I’m going to Paris next week, and I will reopen the gallery with five new paintings by Matisse, five by Braque, five by Picasso: what a fine reopening that will be!”5 But he didn’t go back to Paris. The letter is dated April 4, 1940. The German assault on the Ardennes was about to begin.

  * * *

  In an article published in Sydney in 1941, the great art critic André Breton was asked to talk about the writers who remained in France during the war, and the magazine, Art in Australia, commissioned Paul to try to imagine the lives of his favorite artists under the occupation. Paul described one of his meetings with Matisse, who had, in his turn, come to Floirac just before the German attack.

  Their conversation, just a few weeks before the rout, seemed surreal. As usual, they talked about art and painting and contemplated the budding trees and the first flowers to bloom in that spring of 1940. Matisse marveled, Paul relates, at the white and yellow daisies that made the lawn a carpet lovelier than a fourteenth-century tapestry. “That is what we should create,” the great colorist told him. “There is the expression of freshness and color that I seek in my canvases. These are the harmonies that nature suggests to us but does not oblige us to reproduce objectively.”6 This was in May 1940.

  * * *

  Picasso was in Royan, not far from Floirac.

  He and my grandfather went on writing, phoning, seeing each other. Meanwhile, the rest of the family arrived from Paris and crammed themselves into the house. Paul told the Matisses that he would put them up, but there wasn’t so much as a free sofa. On June 11, 12, and 13, there were heated family discussions taking place in the ground-floor living room. The Germans had entered Paris on June 10, and the question the family struggled with was whether or not to flee.

  Seventy years later, this September afternoon in 2010, here I am back in the same room, with the same fireplace, the same cupboards, and the same chandelier. It’s strange watching a scene played out by ghosts. I imagine the evening: chairs crammed together, the children on the parquet floor, the half-packed suitcases in a corner. The room is alive. I hear the sighs, the murmurs, the anxieties, the certainties, the fears of all the people who are there camping out at Le Castel in those days in June 1940.

  * * *

  For most French families, there was no question of leaving France, but for some, especially the Jewish ones who knew that they were targets of the Germans and that they were close to the border, the debate was: exile or maintain the status quo.

  “Fearful of Vichy, or concerned that they would quickly become pariahs, some French citizens, and also some expatriates living in France, opted to flee,” writes Emmanuelle Loyer in Paris à New York. “Even the most unwilling began to imagine the possibility of going elsewhere as the noose began to tighten. While the first anti-Jewish statute dates from October 1940, the machinery of exclusion had been set in motion as early as July of that year. Time was short. As David Rousset would later say with gallows humor, France and the rest of Europe would soon offer only two exit routes: Marseille and Auschwitz.”7 Bordeaux might be added to the list.

  Jacques Helft, Paul’s brother-in-law, was adamant that the family leave France for Portugal, via Spain. As for my grandmother, she was unsure. Paul himself was of two minds. Everyone seemed to be guided by his own temperament when it came to the question of exile. Loyer sums up the dilemma of families by noting the “ultrasensitive balance between the agony of departure and the potentially dramatic implications of the stubborn will to stay.” She quotes a letter from Marc Bloch* written in May 1941, stressing the heartache of the historian crushed between “bureaucratic obstructions of the U.S. State Department, family matters and perhaps the growing convictions of the author of L’Étrange défaite that by remaining in his country one could better serve it.”8 Bloch was shot by the Germans in 1944 near Lyon, where he was in the Resistance.

  The problem of passports was the first one that needed to be solved. Seventeen were needed for the Rosenberg family and their dependents, if parents, grandparents, children, brothers, sisters, and nephews were going to get out of France. Marianne, my grandmother Margot’s youngest sister, had a childhood friend whose husband, having retreated to Bordeaux with the French government, happened to be secretary to the country’s president, Albert Lebrun. Although the republic was stripped of its powers and its territory, it retained the capacity to stamp and validate passports. And this was accomplished. As for the Portuguese consul, he bravely delivered visas, against the will of Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

  The second challenge was the crossing of Spain. Franco granted the refugees amassing at the border the right to pass through his country, but not to stop in Spanish territory. Paul and his brothers-in-law ultimately negotiated permission to cross Spain in three days and three nights.

  On June 16 they were ready to leave and crammed into the family cars for the trip of approximately 125 miles. Two miles before the border at Hendaye, the controls were strict, and the queue was interminable. They ate butter biscuits, opened sardine tins, and slept in their cars.

  Irún, Burgos, Salamanca: as predicted, it took them three days and nights to cross Spain. At the French border, there was a poignant separation from my mother’s brother, Alexandre, and his cousins François and Jean, who had decided to stay and fight for their country. They boarded the last Polish ship to leave Bordeaux, the Batory—named for a sixteenth-century Polish king—and left Libourne on June 17, 1940. Alexandre was nineteen and had been brought up in the comfort of an affluent family. Why would a young man just past adolescence embark on such an odyssey? The love of his country, a taste for adventure, the need to stand on his own two feet? Exactly what drove my own father to reject a comfortable life in America to go fight in the Middle East?

  So Alexandre and his cousins set off even before General de Gaulle issued his landmark appeal for support of the Resistance. As soon as they arrived in Great Britain, they joined what in 1943 would become the Second Armored Division, the Division Blindée of the future hero of the Free French forces, Marshal Philippe Leclerc. On August 24, 1944, my uncle and cousins were among the troops who liberated Paris.

  Meanwhile, the rest of the family had reached Portugal and temporarily settled in Sintra, fifteen miles from Lisbon. On a daily basis, the adults laid siege to the consulates and embassies to obtain—the number of refugees in the family had grown by now—twenty-one visas for anywhere: Paraguay, Argentina, Chile. But those visas were extremely precious.9* Paul later told an American newspaper that having arrived in Portugal as a refugee, he went to the British Relief Fund, which gave him a boiled egg and a piece of bread: “Imagine a man who has everyt
hing in life … and who, a week later, has lost his business, his fortune, his friends. I was sitting on a stone wall with a boiled egg and a crust of bread and I couldn’t help laughing.”10

  To be able to board a ship, you needed, as Emmanuelle Loyer writes, to have enough to pay for “a crossing, have a certain reputation, enterprising American friends, or colleagues, a lot of energy and a bit of luck.”11 Not to mention the fact that the Americans’ asking refugees to bring some kind of written guarantee that they would be able to earn a living in the United States made it impossible for many to leave.

  In August the situation was eased thanks to Paul’s old friend Alfred Barr. The distinguished director of the Museum of Modern Art had to fight to explain to the American authorities, who had never or barely heard of Paul Rosenberg, the potential artistic advantage that the United States might gain by welcoming him onto its soil. Barr was a persuasive man, and the Rosenbergs managed to obtain those precious visas. The Helft family (my grandparents’ sisters, brothers-in-law, and cousins) received theirs four days later.

  Thanks to various networks, between three and four thousand French citizens managed to reach the United States in this way. On September 20, 1940, Paul and his family disembarked in New York. They were lucky: about 75,000 French citizens died in Nazi concentration camps.

  Seventy years later my visit to Floirac brings their exodus chillingly to life. I now understand why my mother never wanted to see that house again, even though it would be her last link with France for five years.