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

by Sinclair, Anne

  So yes, my grandfather Paul Rosenberg was a dealer. It wasn’t a new profession. Rembrandt bid up the prices of his paintings at public sales in order to increase the value of artists’ work. Bernini did the same in the seventeenth century. Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin also understood the workings of the market. Ambroise Vollard wasn’t just an intermediary for the impressionists; he wasn’t just the dealer of Cézanne and Gauguin: he was also their advocate. Paul Durand-Ruel was another who knew how to create interest in his beloved impressionists, engaging qualities transcending those of the mere businessman.

  Paul was a dealer, just as they were, a successful dealer, even though his aesthetic judgments governed his decisions more than a desire for commercial success. Certainly, his passion for modern painting developed gradually. The same was true of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, whose biographer Pierre Assouline says that his attachment to contemporary art was not apparent at the start of his career. Kahnweiler was a banker who knew little about art, and his fascination with the painters of his day was “the fruit of a slow process of maturation,” an apprenticeship.1

  The parallel between the two men is interesting, given the importance of their respective images in the art world. Kahnweiler was a gifted art dealer who first set up his business during the early years of the twentieth century, but whose success was finally established after the Second World War, according to Assouline. A character not very dissimilar, in my view, to Paul: “sober,” “imperious,” “tough in his professional dealings,” “a bit old-fashioned,” “sensitive to the slightest hint of fawning, and enormously proud.”2

  Their backgrounds were quite similar, one from a family of art dealers only recently arrived in France from Bratislava, the other from a German banking family; both members of a bourgeois class sheltered from material hardship. Both men understood the revolution in twentieth-century painting, although Paul’s tastes inclined toward Picasso and Braque, while Kahnweiler was drawn more to Juan Gris, his great friend, and to Maurice de Vlaminck. Both men refused to show the surrealist painters in their galleries, asserting that while surrealism was legitimate and innovative in literary terms, it was not sufficiently pictorial. Both dealers completely ignored Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, Joan Miró and René Magritte.* Neither man was willing to write a memoir. Paul considered it vulgar and inappropriate to dwell on himself, while Kahnweiler set out his life story in broad terms in his book on Gris.

  There the similarities end. The differences are many.

  First of all, their relationship to the wars. Paul had been a soldier, mobilized in 1914, and very concerned about what was going on politically in the 1930s. He campaigned against the acquisition of the art that was being sold off cheaply by the Nazis, and was forced to flee his country in 1940, hunted by the Germans. Kahnweiler, on the other hand, had been an ardent pacifist, refusing—and this took courage—to fight for either side in the First World War. He was thoroughly anti-Nazi, but did not believe in a second world war right up to the eve of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and managed to hide in France between 1940 and 1944. He sold his gallery to his sister-in-law Louise Leiris, a Burgundian Catholic, and was somehow able to maintain his place within the establishment under the occupation.

  Paul’s and Kahnweiler’s careers also took different trajectories: my grandfather, who had made a name for himself in impressionist painting, rose to fame in the world of modern art after the First World War. Kahnweiler was initiated into contemporary art earlier, at the very start of the twentieth century, and carved out a fine reputation for himself fairly quickly. But then he spent a long period in the shadows before returning with full strength in 1945. By that time Paul was far beyond the shores of France.

  Paul quickly developed a sense that the United States would overtake Europe both in the art market and in terms of cultural excitement. From 1922 onward he set about awakening Americans to the exhilaration of modern art. Kahnweiler was still convinced that Paris was the global art capital, and he maintained his belief in the supremacy of old Europe until he died in 1979.

  The century’s turbulence affected the two men in similar ways: the Second World War cut Paul off from his artists, just as the First World War had done for Kahnweiler. Much the same may be said of their success: Paul’s fame in the art world exploded only after the First World War was over. Kahnweiler’s triumph came chiefly after the liberation, when he won back his representation of the painters who had left him during the 1920s, becoming, most important of all, Picasso’s exclusive dealer.

  On a personal level, the two men did not get on well. There are no records of any unpleasant remarks from Paul about Kahnweiler, but Pierre Assouline portrays the subject of his biography as harsh in his treatment of all his colleagues, notably my grandfather. He was probably angry and hurt about the behavior of Paul’s brother Léonce, who had attracted the cubist painters to his gallery while Kahnweiler was exiled in Switzerland during the First World War. Besides, Léonce’s reputation was tarnished by the fact that he had agreed, during the 1920s, to be an expert consultant in the liquidation of Kahnweiler’s property, which had been confiscated by the French because of his German citizenship. But the severity of Assouline’s subject also seems to extend to Paul, whom Kahnweiler treated with a degree of contempt.

  Paul, who had chosen to sell nineteenth-century canvases so that he could buy twentieth-century works and thereby provide his artists with a livelihood, decided to put more money than his colleagues did into funding the painters he represented. He wanted to pay his artists (notably Picasso, Braque, Léger, and Matisse) handsomely, in order to give them the freedom to paint. Kahnweiler, whom Picasso may have aptly described as miserly, made it a point of honor not to pay his artists more than he had to and never to bid up prices.

  When Léger came to him and said, “Paul Rosenberg gives me twice what you do,” Kahnweiler replied, “Very well, then, go to Rosenberg.”3 So in the 1920s and 1930s, after Picasso, Braque, Léger, and even, for a time in 1930, André Masson, signed with Paul, de Vlaminck left for Bernheim-Jeune, and André Derain for Paul Guillaume. Kahnweiler was left only with his beloved Juan Gris, in perpetual rivalry with Picasso and other less important painters.

  It is easy to imagine why Kahnweiler might have been bitter, but Paul had opted to pursue a policy that favored contemporary artists, providing them with both fame and material comfort. And he was one of those who embodied the golden age of French painting between the wars. This is the central thesis put forward by Michael C. FitzGerald, who writes that “the market was not peripheral to the development of modernism but central to it.”4

  If Picasso’s painting took off in the 1920s, it did so not least because Paul knew how to promote the painter and guide him in directions other than cubism. Paul also understood that it was important to view Picasso’s work in the context of the tumultuous forces of the twentieth century and French painting of the past. This was more important, in the end, than constantly promoting cubism. As the American press has often pointed out, Paul was, until the war, the biggest art dealer in Europe, dealing in a wide range of artists, from Delacroix to Picasso. “Imagine,” a major California newspaper wrote in the 1940s, “being able to step inside Matisse or Picasso’s studio twice a year, being allowed to look at forty of their best paintings and saying, ‘I’ll take the lot!’ Until the War broke out, that was just what Paul Rosenberg did.”5

  Finally, Kahnweiler and Rosenberg differed in their attitude toward museums. Kahnweiler was surely resentful about the confiscation of his property and, believing that he had already been forced to give quite enough to the state against his will, “didn’t like to give to museums. It was beyond the limit of his generosity.”6 Paul, on the other hand, was overly generous. Grateful to America for welcoming him as a refugee in 1940, he gave large numbers of paintings (by artists including Picasso, Renoir, and van Gogh) to American museums in New York and elsewhere. After the war, happy to have recovered many of his stolen paintings, he gave the French
state, including the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, roughly thirty large and beautiful works.

  * * *

  At the start of the 1950s, Paul’s innovative tendencies were still in evidence when he signed a contract with Nicolas de Staël, for example, or in his attempt to launch the paintings of Le Corbusier, which never really caught on. He also made forays into American painting previously known only to a select circle, such as the works of Max Weber, Karl Knaths, and Abraham Rattner.

  But he never moved on to the next stage, which might have led him, during his lifetime, to two very different types of contemporary painter, Edward Hopper and Willem de Kooning. He probably wouldn’t have liked Jasper Johns or Mark Rothko, had he come across them. And he would not have inclined toward the pop art of Robert Rauschenberg or Andy Warhol. Everyone has his or her own limits in the appreciation of modernity.

  For its December 1941–January 1942 issue, Art in Australia had, as we have seen, asked Paul to articulate his vision of painting and speak about the painters who had stayed behind in France during the war. Having arrived in the United States only a year before, Paul was presented as the man best acquainted with the artists of the previous era. “Painters before their time do not exist,” he said. “They are always of their epoch. It is the public who is ever behind in the pictorial revolution. The public eagerly accepts the formula of a ‘recent past’ when it has been definitively accepted, but refuses to regard or even attempt to understand that of their immediate present. How many errors have been committed, and how many great young painters have been forced to know misery because of the buyer’s ignorance and his refusal to support them; refusal because they ‘don’t like that aspect’ or because they ‘do not understand’ … Too often the spectator looks for arguments within himself against the works rather than attempting to free himself from those conventions which he believes he understands, agrees with and likes.”7

  * * *

  In a similar spirit, there was an article that Paul always kept close at hand, so that he could refer to it often, notably using it as an appendix to the catalog of the last big exhibition that he devoted to Picasso in Paris in 1936. It’s a delightful piece by Albert Wolff, an art critic from the early years of the Third Republic, which was published in Le Figaro in 1876. The “impressionists,” a term that was intended as an insult, but that the artists themselves brandished as a badge of honor, had made headlines just two years before, and curators had trouble accepting the genius of something they couldn’t understand. Paul kept this text as an antidote to the incomprehension of his contemporaries:

  “Rue Le Peletier is suffering great misfortune. After the fire at the Opéra, here comes another disaster crashing down on the neighborhood. An exhibition, said to be of paintings, has just opened at Durand-Ruel … There are people who explode with laughter when they see such things. As for me, it makes me heartsick. These so-called artists call themselves the intransigents, the impressionists; they take canvases, paint and brushes, throw on a few colors and sign the thing. So it is that at the Ville-Evrard, lost souls are gathering pebbles along their way and imagining they have found diamonds … So please be so kind as to inform M. Pissaro [sic] that the trees are not purple, that the sky is not the color of fresh butter, that in no country will you see the things he paints … Try to make M. Degas see reason … Try to explain to M. Renoir that a woman’s torso is not a heap of decomposing flesh with purple and green patches denoting the state of complete putrefaction of a corpse!… And it’s this pile of vulgarities that is being displayed in public with no thought for the fatal consequences that they might provoke! Yesterday, on rue Le Peletier, they arrested a poor man who, leaving this exhibition, was biting passersby.”8 The article is well enough written, the charge is effectively leveled, but the mockery was turned against its author a few decades later.

  * * *

  Paul was combatting precisely this sort of thinking. But was he a visionary or merely—and this in itself would be something—going along with innovative painters and showing their work alongside the masters of the previous century in order to gain acceptance for the modernists? How daring was he, really? How did he see the role of an art dealer in a profession that was rapidly becoming organized?

  After the war he wrote to Lucienne, Léonce’s daughter, who wanted to open a gallery herself: “Don’t make the same mistake as your poor father did, restricting yourself to very avant-garde painting. Mix up your exhibitions in such a way that they attract the whole of your clientele, the part of it that considers itself advanced and the other, more conservative part. Maintaining without money a policy entirely ahead of its time is a cul-de-sac. These things have to be done gradually.”9

  * * *

  That was basically how Paul started out, like his own father before him.

  My great-grandfather Alexandre was a grain merchant. A long way from the world of art. When he was nearly ruined by a cargo of rotten goods, he decided to put his last savings into the thing that he really loved, “objets d’art and curiosities.” Farewell to the grain trade. He became an antiques dealer, at 38 avenue de l’Opéra.

  I remember looking at the building’s façade indifferently. It’s at the end of the avenue, practically on the place de l’Opéra, one of those buildings that now house insurance companies and airlines. I still have trouble imagining an art gallery in this setting, a place that seems designated for trade, for the tourists, in the shadow of the Palais Garnier.

  One day, turning up early at the Salle Drouot, my great-grandfather, who had recently become an art dealer, bought a painting he liked for 87.50 francs. It was a Sisley, the first impressionist painting he brought home, and at a time when practically everyone, apart from Vollard and more particularly Durand-Ruel, was ignoring this new artistic school. The great battles fought to win it recognition were drawing to a close, but still the public hadn’t come. Intrigued, my great-grandfather went on to discover Manet, Monet, and Renoir.

  It was probably this that reconciled me to the word “dealer.” Coming from nowhere, my great-grandfather trained his eye, trusting his own instincts, his own daring taste. So was it really about commerce, if the canvases that he bought—and that sold badly—were the work of illustrious unknowns? It seemed a passion first and foremost, a calling that had become a profession.

  * * *

  “One day when I was about ten, my father led me to the shop window of a dealer who kept a gallery on the rue Le Peletier, to show me a painting that made me shriek with horror,” writes my grandfather in the fragment of an autobiography that he began during the war years in New York. “Imagine a very thickly painted picture made with violent colors, representing a modest bedroom with a wooden bed covered with a red blanket, an ordinary wooden table with a water jug, a bowl and, hanging from the walls, shapeless old clothes. The floor looked oddly bowed to me, and the furniture seemed to be dancing, as if it wanted, as in a cartoon, to leap off the canvas and fly out through the window. My father calmed me down and said, ‘I don’t know this artist, and the canvas isn’t signed, but I’m going to find out about him because I’d like to buy some of his paintings.’ The canvas [Room in Arles] was by van Gogh, it’s the one that’s in the Art Institute of Chicago, and which, by an irony of fate, I myself sold about 30 years later.”

  The impressionists, van Gogh, Cézanne: this was where all of my great-grandfather’s savings ended up, much to the distress of his wife. “My mother”—Paul continues in his sketch of a family memoir—“claimed her husband had gone mad and that he was ruining his children. ‘What are our friends and customers going to think?’ she groaned. Her dismay reached its peak when a van Gogh and a Cézanne came into the house. She would call upstairs, ‘Children, your father’s going completely mad: he’s buying vann Govoghs and Ces Anes.’ It’s true that everyone who came to the house, even collectors and connoisseurs, guffawed at the sight of a blue or yellow Monet, saying that no one knew an equivalent in nature. One day, we were having lunch when the phone r
ang. My father picked it up. ‘How much do I want for my Cézanne? 6,000 francs, I can’t go any lower than that. So you’ll take it?’ He was delighted to be able to show his wife that there was someone even crazier than he was!”

  So the impressionists entered the home of Rosenberg père, at a time when not many art lovers were interested in them, and when dealers themselves preferred to sell paintings by the Barbizon school. Works by Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Sisley, Courbet, Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, and van Gogh now decorated the gallery on the avenue de l’Opéra. Renoir too, whose A Girl with a Watering Can my great-grandfather acquired, a painting that my grandfather sold much later to the great American collector Chester Dale. It was the first painting, and one of the most beautiful, in the series hung in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., at the impressive exhibition of the Chester Dale collection in 2009.

  I went there to see if it was as graceful as its familiar reproduction and was dazzled by the sun that illuminates the child’s blond hair, bringing alive the shadows on her cheeks.

  CHTEAUDUN, OPÉRA, AND MADISON AVENUE

  I have found Paul’s torn and yellowed birth certificate: he was born on December 29, 1881, in the Ninth Arrondissement of Paris, in rue de Châteaudun, the son of Alexandre Rosenberg and Mathilde Jellinek. The strange-sounding names come from Hungary—Bratislava, in fact, which is now the capital of Slovakia and was at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  My mother always said proudly—no doubt a legacy of the traumas of 1940—that she had been French for two generations. And yet that’s somewhat inaccurate: her father, even though he was actually born in France, wasn’t automatically French by birth. The law of June 26, 1889, which sought to grant full citizenship to all children born on French soil, applied to children born in France of foreign parents, but only once they had reached their maturity. So in 1902, when he turned twenty-one, Paul should have applied for naturalization. But at the time he was in London learning his trade, and he let the deadline slip. Is it possible that our family’s national identity has been imperiled since the start of the twentieth century?