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

by Sinclair, Anne

  * * *

  Those who knew Paul less well give a more effusive description of him.

  Pierre Nahon depicts him as a “man of middle size, of meticulous elegance,” “enterprising and tenacious,” “pursuing audacious strategies … He has a rare flair, his eye is excellent, he has contacts in the best society.”5

  According to Alfred Daber, a great dealer between 1920 and 1970, as cited by Hector Feliciano, Paul’s “body began to tremble like that of an impatient child when he saw a work that he craved. A trembling that subsided only when he had obtained the painting.”6

  René Gimpel gives a less flattering picture of him: “A fox’s face with too short a muzzle. Prominent, grainy cheekbones.”7 A displeasing portrait, not least because Gimpel was a friend of Marie Laurencin, who complained that Paul had treated her harshly when she asked for an advance of the pocket money she needed to settle the bill for her Chanel coats. “Stop ordering them, then!” Paul was supposed to have said to her one day when he’d had enough of her complaints, provoking a furious response.

  However, having read much of their correspondence, I had a sense that even though Laurencin sometimes pleaded poverty, she adored Paul and later my mother too. Their correspondence is more than affectionate. “My darling Marie,” Paul writes to her, adding, “Can I say that without seeming forward?”

  The delightful, feminine paintings of Laurencin, who was loved by the poet Apollinaire, stood out in the male-dominated cubist world. They have fallen out of fashion today, as paintings for gray and pink boudoirs, but they have a grace that touches me, grace in a time of war and fragmentation. Laurencin painted gentle figures when Léger was painting his industrial structures, violent in form and color. Was Laurencin behind the times? Perhaps it was more that she was out of step with a brutal world, and that strikes me as refreshing.

  Do I treat her indulgently because she painted my portrait—at my grandfather’s request—when I was four years old? Sitting still like that was a form of torture for me at that age. Apparently I had the temerity to say to her, “Don’t forget, my eyes are blue!” She smilingly obliged, blessing me with two luminous lavender orbs. My mother had hung this portrait in her bedroom, but I have trouble recognizing myself in this little girl with a pale pink smock dress and eyes that are unreasonably blue.

  There are various descriptions of the gallery owner Rosenberg, in which he is depicted as “a shrewd dealer with good taste.”8 Certainly, his eye was legendary. In 1952 he wrote to Braque, sending him a photograph for the authentication of a painting, but he had already made up his mind: “Looking at the knife, the lemons and the ace of clubs, I think it’s very unlikely that the painting’s one of yours.”

  In 1954, when he was in poor health, he sent his son to a Parisian auction in his stead. He was interested in several paintings and wrote Alexandre a letter giving him some suggestions merely on the basis of what he had seen in the catalog: “The Renoir number 27 isn’t interesting. Number 32, the Vuillard, is really a little masterpiece that you can buy. The Bonnard, number 82, not bad but a bit early. The Modigliani, number 91, I’m not sure it’s authentic, as to number 95, the Renoir, stay away, it’s too well known, it’s been retouched and it’s been on sale in all the markets in the world.” All this perspicacity from an ailing old man who had examined an auction catalog.

  * * *

  It would be an understatement to say that Paul was aware of his instinct for identifying art. He could be arrogant about his gifts and about the importance of his gallery, of both the unique quality of the works shown at 21 rue La Boétie and the catalogs published under his auspices for his own exhibitions. He was especially proud to have financed the publication of two important catalogues raisonnés, one of the work of Cézanne, written by Lionel Venturi in 1936, and the other, in 1940, of Camille Pissarro’s work, which was assembled by the painter’s son Lucien in collaboration with Venturi.

  In large part, my grandfather attributed his success to his belief that “Great paintings sell themselves.” Knowing that outstanding work would be coveted by collectors, he refused to bargain when masterpieces were at stake.

  Paul held his colleagues and rivals in high esteem, but not excessively so. He particularly valued Ambroise Vollard, his mentor and colleague of more than fifty years, who represented Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro and was, most important of all, the dealer and friend of Cézanne’s. He gives a wonderful portrayal of Vollard in one of his letters: “You never had a sense that he was trying to sell you anything. Quite the contrary: as soon as he had mentioned the price of the painting in question, he would feel his client’s lapel and ask him who had made his suit. Then he moved on to something else that had nothing to do with paintings, leaving the client to his own devices.” Though Vollard was the predecessor of the great French art dealers, his gallery, on rue Laffitte in the Ninth Arrondissement, was famously shabby, crammed with dusty canvases, the only furniture a cot on which Vollard would sometimes sleep. Vollard’s gallery was far from the comfort of 21 rue La Boétie.

  * * *

  At the Galerie Rosenberg, exhibitions were held year-round and lasted three weeks each. My grandfather hung the paintings himself, a sacred ceremony for any art dealer, and one to which he gave his full concentration. It was only when I saw the profusion of his catalogs that I realized the wealth of works that he’d hung over the years.

  In 1962, when Paul had been dead for three years, his colleague Alfred Daber wrote to my uncle Alexandre, who had succeeded his father as head of the New York gallery: “Between 1924 and 1937, such lovely exhibitions I saw at his gallery on rue La Boétie! We sometimes talked until eight o’clock at night about subjects that seemed to have nothing to do with painting, but that painting brought us to: philosophy, metaphysics. I already wanted to correct the prevailing taste, and he told me with lucidity that it was as vain an idea as wanting to channel the waves of the sea.”9

  * * *

  Displays of paintings by Picasso, Braque, Derain, Matisse, Léger, and Laurencin were interspersed with exhibitions by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1914); of French art of the nineteenth century, the preimpressionists (1917); Ingres and Cézanne (1925); Pierre Bonnard (1936); and Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier, or customs officer, in 1937.

  During the Great Depression, Paul returned to the nineteenth century, which was easier to sell than modern painting during those difficult economic times. In 1933 there was a Monet exhibition, and in 1934 one by Renoir. Indeed, 1936 was dazzling: Braque in January, Seurat in February, Picasso in March, Monet in April, Matisse in May, Laurencin in July.

  Paul’s big exhibitions of works by Picasso were always an event. The first one, in 1919—and I shall come back to it—was devoted to 160 unpublished noncubist drawings. The 1926 exhibition was one of the most imposing and was followed ten years later by a one-man show, featuring twenty-nine paintings and drawings, that attracted six hundred visitors a day, and in which Rosi (Picasso’s nickname for Paul) was so excited, it was “as if the paintings had been created especially for him,” observed a colleague amazed by the beauty and profusion of the works.10

  * * *

  Paul loaned many canvases to other institutions. For example, he contributed to the first French retrospective of Picasso’s works in 1932 at the Galerie Georges Petit, but also on the other side of the Atlantic at the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1934. Picasso was a huge draw in the art world and caused an enormous stir in the United States. Paul had insisted that the exhibition contain a verse from a fable by La Fontaine, “The Camel and the Floating Sticks,” which he then republished in the catalog of the 1936 Paris exhibition and which he thought might open the eyes of the skeptics:

  Those things we find uncanny or alarming,

  Custom can make acceptable and charming;

  Your earlier intense desire to flee them

  Is lessened further every time you see them.

  He spent months with his friend Alfred Barr selecting the works and u
ndertaking the preparation for the first big Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and then in Chicago, at the Art Institute. That was in 1939 and 1940. Paul loaned more than thirty canvases to this exhibition, which meant these paintings had escaped the clutches of the Nazis. Barr was deeply grateful for Paul’s willingness to enable this momentous show.

  The other great painters of the Rosenberg “stable” followed in the aftermath of the Picasso exhibition. For instance, Paul devoted to Braque three major exhibitions—in 1936, 1937, 1938—and one, from April 4 to April 29, 1939, probably one of the last to be held at the Galerie Rosenberg in Paris, on the eve of the war. To complete the trio, Léger had joined the roster of artists represented at 21 rue La Boétie in 1924.

  As for his “fourth musketeer,” Matisse, Paul had also known him for a very long time. The correspondence between Matisse and my grandfather is still the property of the painter’s family, kept, like all his archives, in the house where he lived at Issy-les-Moulineaux, near Paris. The house hasn’t changed since Matisse’s day, but the street, formerly route de Clamart, has been renamed avenue du Général-de-Gaulle.

  * * *

  It’s autumn. I push the gate open. It’s cold; dead leaves are scattered on the lawn. I step inside an old-fashioned little house that makes a sharp contrast with the modernity of the conservation of the family archives. All the documents are digitized, and I’m settled at a computer by the curator, beside the radiator, in the very room that served as the painter’s model for one of his most important transitional period paintings, The Piano Lesson,* a key canvas in the Matisse oeuvre. The double windows, the railing of the balustrade, the garden: They’re all there, just as they are in the 1916 painting, giving me an immense appreciation of the artist’s genius for conveying light and color.

  The exchange of letters between Paul and Matisse began that same year. Their correspondence was regular and warm, apart from a few digs from Pierre Matisse, the artist’s son, who thought that his father had become too dependent on Paul for representation.

  In 1922 Matisse loaned Paul some canvases from his own collection, a Cézanne and a Courbet, for the Galerie Rosenberg exhibition The Great Masters of the Nineteenth Century. “This exhibition,” my grandfather writes, “will also prove that the artists of our time … remain within the tradition, and that in their turn they honor French painting.”11 He was still obsessed with the idea of showing the through line of art, that the works that he showed and that provoked howls of outrage from the bourgeoisie were in the tradition of the art history of his country.

  On December 22, 1934, Henri Matisse writes to his son Pierre that “business isn’t going well. I sense a general feeling of apathy. Only Rosenberg has shown any warmth and offered me an exhibition.” Two days later, in another letter to his son, Matisse confides: “I saw Rosenberg, who galvanized me, told me I was wrong to allow myself to be forgotten. He told me he had big names—the likes of Matisse and Picasso. That he wanted me to have an exhibition at his gallery, that he would put his exhibition space at my disposal … He showed me many beautiful paintings, van Gogh, Corot, Renoir, all new on the market. He told me how painting was everything for him, that it was the place where he lived.”12

  But things aren’t always idyllic between a painter and his dealer. On January 22, 1938, again in a letter to Pierre, who was based in New York and was warning him against the exclusive deal he had made with the Galerie Rosenberg, Matisse acknowledges that he has no illusions about his dealer, even though he knows that he can’t do without him: “As for Rosenberg … I’ve known him for a long time … Particularly when he yelled at me before signing a deal with me. I’m not with him for sentimental reasons, it’s just so that I can use him … And then there are all the favors he has done me, and above all he knows how to glorify painting.”

  That was exactly what Picasso had understood in 1918, and it was likely one of the reasons that he made an extremely rare gift to Paul.

  MOTHER AND CHILD

  Initially it was called Portrait de Madame Rosenberg et sa fille. Later it appeared in various postwar catalogs, under the more American title of Mother and Child, before reacquiring its original name. Today it is prominently displayed in the Musée Picasso in Paris.

  This portrait of my mother on my grandmother’s lap was Picasso’s gift to his new dealer, to mark the agreement they signed in Biarritz in 1918, even though Paul had tried to commission the piece. The painter even used the gesture to switch genres.

  The painting is large, very large, and a bit academic, in the style of Ingres or Renoir but without the innate grace of those painters. It shows my grandmother sitting in an old tapestry armchair, holding my mother on her lap, a plump little doll in a white dress with blue ribbons. This painting, which scandalized the cubists, who thought that Picasso was “betraying” them, marks his return to neoclassicism.

  * * *

  I saw that painting throughout my childhood, first at my grandparents’ Parisian apartment, then at my mother’s. Paul attached great importance to it, and it was one of the first paintings he tried to retrieve after the war. The painting was said to have been stolen for Göring, perhaps because it reminded him of the old masters.

  I used to look down on it a little, finding it too conventional, a sort of Virgin and Child on an Henri II armchair. Now I come to sit and meditate before it at the Musée Picasso, where I always thought it belonged. Since the days of André Malraux, the minister of culture under de Gaulle, the state has allowed anyone inheriting a work of art to donate it to a museum in lieu of paying a considerable inheritance tax. This measure was introduced to enrich French collections, which were poorer than many collections abroad, and to keep works that belong in national museums from being dispersed. That was what nearly happened to this family portrait: a rich Texan offered to buy the painting for a very good price, much higher than the inheritance tax that I was obliged to pay. But the idea of seeing this treasured painting leave for Houston was too painful in the end. It certainly would have distressed my mother. Fortunately, I recognized that donating it to the Musée Picasso was the right thing to do for the legacy of my family. I’m proud that the painting now adorns the walls of this Parisian institute of the arts.

  In autumn 1918 the portrait was a sensation. On September 27, Paul wrote to Picasso: “Everyone knows that Picasso has painted the portrait of my wife and my daughter. Léonce heard Cocteau talking about it, and obviously he was hoping it would be cubist, even though Miche is rondiste.”1

  My grandmother’s face is, more than the rest of her, characteristic of Picasso, in a vein that is similar to the portraits of Olga, his wife. The painting is highly valued by art historians, even though I find it rather severe. Looking at it for the hundredth time, I try to work out why Picasso gave my grandmother such a melancholic face. At the same time I wonder why my mother, who seems so vital, is made to look so plump. Might Picasso have been prefiguring his series of Giants?

  Surely my grandmother would have preferred to have had her portrait painted by Giovanni Boldini, a mundane painter of the early twentieth century. Margot, who was inclined to be outspoken, admitted as much to Picasso. In response, Picasso drew a sketch in Boldini’s most flattering manner, with flounces, a parasol, collars, and feathers, and sent it to my grandmother, signing it “Boldini.” I’m not sure which one Margot found more gratifying in the end … The Picasso was stolen by the Germans but recovered just before it left for Berlin. The fake Boldini disappeared during the war, never to be seen again.

  There were other family portraits by Picasso. A gouache of my mother, in a blue dress by the sea, a little girl with red cheeks and windblown hair, was painted a year after Mother and Child, in 1919, on the beach at Biarritz. Amazingly, this was identified by an alert collector having an anisette in a café in central France in the 1960s, who recognized it as the portrait of Mlle Rosenberg. The café owner, who had been given it during the occupation by a man in need of a sandwich, kindly ret
urned it to my grandmother, who rewarded him handsomely.

  The portrait of Paul himself, a drawing whose lines have faded since 1919, is even more touching. Paul is an elegant figure: mustache, high-buttoned shoes, and double-breasted suit. He is sitting in a relaxed pose, on an armless chair, his left arm casually resting on its back. His well-manicured right hand, holding the inevitable cigarette, rests on his knee. This little picture is drawn, like the big family portrait, in the style of Ingres, but with a particular focus on the piercing, mischievous eyes of my grandfather; very Picasso. In the words of Michael FitzGerald, it is “[a] blend of ease and sophistication … coupled with the intense scrutiny of [Paul’s] gaze [that was] noted as his trademark.”2

  I still have the photographs of two vanished portraits of my mother, Micheline with Rabbit and Micheline as a Nurse. She must be four or five years old at the time of their creation. The drawings were done in charcoal. Stolen like the others by the Germans but never recovered, they may have gone up in smoke in the courtyard of the Musée du Jeu de Paume, in the bonfires of the occupying forces, or perhaps they were hung in a child’s bedroom somewhere in Russia, or Berlin, or Paris, between the Seventh and Sixteenth Arrondissements, in the apartment of a wealthy French family that either collaborated with the Nazis or looked away from the question of the drawings’ provenance.

  PAUL AND PIC

  That Mother and Child sealed a covenant, an unshakable agreement. Rosenberg and Picasso: Was theirs a story of fraternal friendship or a professional alliance? Where did it come from: this mutual fascination between the establishment dealer and the bohemian painter? What did these two men have in common: the gallery owner (accustomed to the work of Renoir and Monet) and the painter who once pronounced dealers “the enemy!” to Léonce, when he was one of Picasso’s dealers between 1914 and 1918? How was it possible for Picasso and Paul to have had such a close friendship when the artist saw the artist-dealer relationship in class terms?