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

by Sinclair, Anne

  * * *

  Paul is consumed with worry about Alexandre, having had no news of him since he left England, except that he is somewhere in Africa. Naively, he imagines that he might be granted leave. He doesn’t know that this is the eve of the Normandy landings. On May 24, 1944, he writes to Guérin de Beaumont, the agent general for the Provisional Government of the French Republic in New York, hoping in vain to have Kiki brought over, after having been separated from him since June 1940: “We’re very depressed. His mother is in despair. It’s really a miracle that she goes on despite her enormous pain … As for my own personal activities, apart from the Renoir Centenary exhibition organized for the benefit of the Free French Relief Committee, and the exhibition of Cézanne’s works organized for France Forever and the Fighting French Committee, I don’t need to mention them. My every action is that of a patriot who loves his country, particularly when it is in danger. I can say that I have spent my whole life fighting against the Germans who are after me, and that if I had stayed in France I would certainly have been taken hostage and faced the firing squad a long time ago.”

  In fact, he will find out nothing for a long time, either about the atrocities of the Nazis and their Vichy accomplices or about the looting. Above all, this “patriot,” as he terms himself, is unaware that on July 23, 1940, while he was still in Portugal, a law stripping nationality of any French citizen who has gone abroad was passed by Vichy France.

  Though he probably did know that on October 3, Le Journal officiel published the Jewish Statute, with its notorious Article 1: “In terms of the application of the present law, any person will be regarded as Jewish if he is descended from three grandparents of the Jewish race or two grandparents of the same race if the spouse is also a Jew.” After this come prohibitions concerning posts or honors awarded by the state and access to teaching positions, the army, high administration, or the courts. Jews would also be excluded from journalism and the management of newspapers, as well as work in cinema or the theater.

  The Casino de Paris, other clubs, and certain parks and gardens were “forbidden to dogs and Jews,” as the signs put it. But as the writer Dan Franck notes bitterly, “the duck with blood sauce at the Tour d’Argent retained its reputation.”3 Franck also relates how the Opéra and its director, Serge Lifar, a French ballet dancer and choreographer, welcomed Hitler and Goebbels, and how the young Herbert von Karajan conducted Tristan and Isolde there. As for the famous actor Sacha Guitry, “all was just fine.”

  Paul knew only scraps of all this. One thing he was certainly in the dark about was the deportations that followed upon the loss of nationality. On February 23, 1942, an order decreed the “denationalization” of Paul Rosenberg and his family. These orders complemented the law of July 23, 1940.

  A month later, on March 26, 1942, Paul sent a telegram to “The President of the Commission for the Examination of Cases of Forfeiture of Nationality, Ministry of Justice, Vichy, France,” stating: “I am learning of my denationalization by order of 23 February 1942. Protest energetically and have strong reservations. Letter follows.” A letter, addressed to the same commission, did in fact follow, on April 16, 1942, revealing great ignorance of the situation as well as total candor. Five pages in which Paul made rather clumsy attempts at self-justification: “I learn that by an order of 23 February 1942, in accordance with the law of 23 July 1940, I have been stripped of French nationality for leaving France without a valid reason, between 10 May and 30 June 1940 … I protest indignantly against the interpretation of the aforementioned text as regards my case … I have always fulfilled all my duties, my past is one of honor and probity, etc.” This is a “flagrant injustice … It was only during my stay in Portugal that I discovered the conditions of the armistice. This prompted me to continue my journey. In fact, after some reflection, I determined that I could make myself more useful by staying in the United States than by going back to France … Being stripped of one’s nationality implies a dishonor that no worthy man can accept without attempting to defend himself. I am not begging for clemency for a crime I have not committed, but calling for justice to which I have a right like any other citizen.”

  The opening words of this letter reflect the state of mind of French Jews in 1940: unable to believe that while they were good enough to serve as cannon fodder in the First World War, they could be dismissed as traitors twenty years later just because they had been born Jewish. We come across this uncomprehending reaction in every country that has known discrimination and deportations, even in the state of mind of the people crammed into the cattle cars. It was impossible for a sane mind to imagine the Shoah in 1940.

  Paul obviously knew little about what was happening in his homeland. He had asked his friend Gilbert Lévy, in whom he had complete trust, to keep his papers and to ensure that wages were paid to the staff who remained at the gallery. To Lévy, who was to be deported and gassed in Auschwitz while one of his sons fought with my uncle Alexandre in the African campaign and died in his arms in Normandy, he writes with disconcerting naiveté on March 20, 1942: “I learn that I’ve been denationalized. Can you contact my brother, as I am asking him to find a lawyer should I need to defend my case to the commission[?]” Paul was as yet unaware that there are some cases that cannot be pleaded.

  * * *

  But let’s return to the letter my scandalized grandfather sent to Vichy in 1942. The last paragraph, about the dishonor inflicted and the refusal to ask for a pardon that he judged to be defamatory, captures his state of mind. On the other hand, the feeble excuse that he would be more useful to France in the United States does not seem to match his indignation. My grandparents fled because their lives were in jeopardy, and they had no need to be ashamed. Yet admitting that others stayed on in their homeland and actually risked and often paid with their lives undoubtedly filled him with shame.

  As Emmanuelle Loyer writes, “Unlike the history of Poland, in which the exile is integral to the national story of the last two centuries, the French tradition is characterized by a disparaging image of the exile, which places him somewhere between flight and treason … Since the French Revolution, the exile has been accused of antipatriotism, and assimilation is seen as an active metonymy of the France of the Counterrevolution.”4

  Paul experienced the loss of his nationality inflicted by a regime he loathed as a wound and humiliation that imposed upon him a constant need for self-justification. If he had no plans to move his gallery back to Paris after the war and chose instead to stay in New York, it was probably because the art market was more vigorous there, although many Parisian art dealers, beginning with Kahnweiler, did prosper in France after the liberation. But the deepest reason was that unlike the French, who had stripped him of his nationality and some of whom were even involved in the theft of his property and would doubtless have had him deported, the Americans welcomed him along with his family, protected him, and enabled him to relaunch his career. They recognized him as a great practitioner of his trade and helped him recover his soiled dignity.

  I found the same tone in my father’s war diary. Demobilized in 1940, unable to bear life in occupied France, he managed to leave for the United States. Once in New York, he felt very uneasy about being “sheltered.” He enrolled as a noncommissioned officer with the Free French and embarked with two compatriots on a British troop carrier, the only Frenchmen among eight thousand American soldiers. Traveling via South America and the Cape of Good Hope, he eventually came back up the Red Sea, disembarked, and went on fighting.

  My father kept a journal throughout those three years, and even in his account of that two-month zigzag voyage across an ocean infested with mines and German submarines, followed by his time fighting for the Free French Forces in Beirut and Cairo, he expresses a constant need to rehabilitate himself, to “redeem” himself for his supposed passivity. Consumed with anxiety about his relatives who had stayed in Paris or were hidden away somewhere in France, he was hardly any happier about his life as a Gaullis
t envoy to the Middle East than he was with his life as a refugee in New York.

  * * *

  My grandfather would refuse all contact with Vichy to “plead his own case.” To someone who had suggested acting as an intermediary, he wrote on April 24, 1942: “Given recent events in France, I do not wish to communicate in any way with a government run by a man like Laval.* I would rather lose all I possess.”

  And that was what happened to his paintings, indeed to his illusions of a just world.

  PREOCCUPATIONS OF THE HEART

  My grandfather thought constantly about the lives of the painters who stayed behind in France, hoping they would be hostile to the occupying forces. Some of them were, but overall, the artists who remained in Paris didn’t distinguish themselves one way or another. “As soon as the Nazis were the adversaries of culture and freedom, any free expression of the spirit became an act of courage,” wrote Laurence Bertrand Dorléac.1

  In fact, as Paul suspected, Braque, Matisse, and Picasso showed no sympathy for the Germans. Other artists, like André Derain, Otto Friesz, van Dongen, Paul Belmondo, and de Vlaminck, did not hesitate to go on tour in Germany. Some even returned as propagandists, so in thrall were they with the Nazi regime.

  Braque wasn’t even invited along. “Fortunately my painting didn’t please them; I wasn’t invited, otherwise, perhaps I would have gone, on account of the promised exchange of prisoners,” he candidly confessed in retrospect.2 He had been a close friend of Derain, who had taken this politically charged tour, but he had no wish to disavow him. As Braque’s biographer Alex Danchev writes, “He was a moraliste, not a moralizer … But something was broken. Braque and Derain were never as close again.”3

  Paul was aware that Braque was no activist and that a painting like Guernica was not his style. Besides, Braque could not understand Picasso’s commitment to communism or, later on, his decision to paint a peace dove. Braque’s sole concern was the validity of his art. “There is no scream in Braque, just a whisper,” Danchev explains.4 But the war destabilized him, and he even dreamed of going to Switzerland. For the first time since 1917 he had stopped painting, as he wrote to my grandfather when Paul was still near Bordeaux, in Floirac.

  After he returned to Paris and before settling in Pacy-sur-Eure, where his aged mother lived, Braque started painting very dark still lifes (including his famous black fish). Until 1943, only his two great writer friends Jean Paulhan and Francis Ponge, both résistants, had the privilege of seeing his paintings.

  But in 1943, a small exhibition was held in a room dedicated to Braque in the Salon d’Automne and hailed by the collaborationist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, but denounced by Lucien Rebatet in Je suis partout, the emblematic publication of the collaboration.

  Georges Braque had rejected the advances of the Reich, refused to prostrate himself before the Reich’s official sculptor, Arno Breker, unlike Jean Cocteau, and dared turn up at the funeral of Max Jacob, who had died to general indifference in Drancy, shortly before his convoy left for Auschwitz. Braque also declined Marshal Pétain’s invitation to design the Vichy emblem, “Work, Family, Homeland.” “He wasn’t part of the Resistance. But he was dignified,” writes Dan Franck, “a serious quality in a time of compromises.”5 My grandfather, who for his article in Art in Australia imagined Braque “in blue smock, confined to his home, standing before his easel, his pots of colour ground by himself, hand full of brushes, creating another new canvas for our pleasure,” was right about the character of his old friend, to whom he displayed the most brotherly attachment. Paul described Braque as being very different from Picasso, “always placid and a quiet conversationalist.”6 “He never sings out of tune,” Picasso once declared about him. “He seeks only harmonies and symphonies in his canvases. There is never the clash of colour like some strident note of a cymbal or trumpet. He represents all the beautiful French tradition of Corot, Chardin, and like these painters he is full of humility.

  “Like Picasso,” my grandfather continued, “he [Braque] never paints from nature. His works are re-creations … He is never a mixer, living quite isolated, abhorring honours and receptions … The sight of certain uniforms must trouble his heart and soul.”7

  Paul was severe in his judgment of artists like Derain when he learned that they had accepted Vichy honors, but he moderated his condemnation. In August 1942, according to papers found in the family archive, Paul abandoned an exhibition of twentieth-century artists in New York: “It is impossible to show artists who have been in Germany, while at the same time it is not a French custom to condemn people without having heard their side of the story, so it is impossible to hold this exhibition.”

  He was mistaken about other standard-bearers for fauvism, such as de Vlaminck, however, believing that they were resisting the occupying forces. Conversely, de Vlaminck, who was jealous of Picasso, took advantage of the occupation to tear into “that Catalan with the look of a monk and the eyes of an inquisitor,” as he wrote in the magazine Comœdia. “Cubism! Perversity of spirit, inadequacy, amoralism, as far from painting as pederasty is from love.”8

  Picasso couldn’t afford to reply. He had left rue La Boétie, where the Nazis were now his next-door neighbors, and was living at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins, in an apartment found by Dora Maar, his companion at the time. He represented “the ultimate scapegoat meant to embody the thousand and one facets of evil, displacement, disorder and blasphemy,” writes Dorléac.9 The Gestapo could have arrested the painter at any time, but at Cocteau’s request, he was given some protection on the German side by the all-powerful sculptor Arno Breker.

  * * *

  Since Picasso had opposed Franco very early on in the conflict, the republicans had appointed him honorary director in exile of the Prado. After the April 26, 1937, bombing of the small Basque village of Guernica on a market day by the German pilots of the Condor Legion, Picasso, who had been commissioned to create a mural for the Spanish Republic Pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, painted Guernica, one of his greatest masterpieces. Picasso never forgot that Pétain had been the French ambassador to Franco’s Spain, which may also explain his antipathy toward the Vichy regime.

  There is a legend about this world-famous painting. German officers, visiting Picasso in his studio in rue des Grands-Augustins and seeing that most accusatory of paintings in a corner, were said to have asked him: “Did you do that?” According to legend, the painter shot back, “No, you did.” A sublimely dramatic reply, although I suspect it may be apocryphal. My grandfather and my mother visited Picasso in the same studio just after the liberation. As they congratulated him on the courageous statements he had made, statements that had crossed the seas as a symbol of the resistance of artists and intellectuals to the occupying forces, Picasso replied, slightly embarrassed, “Yes, I must have said something like that. Well, all right, let’s say I did…” This was a story often told by my grandfather and later by my mother.

  But I have no other evidence of Paul and Picasso’s discussing the war, not even at its start. At that point in early 1940, Picasso was at Royan, a small fishing village on the Atlantic coast, while my grandparents were living in Floirac. In any case, the letters don’t so much as mention the declaration of war on September 3, 1939. Perhaps they spoke on the phone that day.

  On October 25, 1939, Paul alludes to the war when he sends birthday wishes to “mon vieux Pic,” roughly two months before his own: “It’s a sad birthday,” he writes. On December 29, 1939, Paul, who turned fifty-eight that day, sends Picasso “my best wishes for 1940. You will cost me two times two 30 franc stamps for the telegram. And yet our authorities said we had to economize!”

  So the war always seems to be mentioned with some detachment in the correspondence between the future refugee and the Spanish republican. Certainly, this battle-free conflict must have seemed like an abstraction at that point, but I am still struck by the fact that there was so little room for it in their exchanges, in which they continue to “talk paintings.”
My grandmother even sent a message to Picasso expressing her relief that my grandfather finally had paintings on his walls in Floirac, which had been bare until then. He had in fact had them sent from Paris, thinking they would be safe south of the Loire. “Your paintings from 1940 are in the dining room,” Paul writes. These were probably the tormented paintings the artist made that year, such as the Standing Female Nude, cited by Laurent Fabius as an example of the art of a painter devastated by the war.10 “Thanks to you,” Paul continues, “our meals are less monotonous, your canvases provoke both appreciation and hilarity.”11 In the same letter, he announces the death of Diola, his children’s dog; my uncle Alexandre gave the dog’s name to the plane he piloted in the Second Armored Division.

  The last letter from Paul to Picasso, before they met again in the painter’s studio on rue des Grands-Augustins, is dated May 9, 1940, the eve of the Nazis’ offensive in which the Allies were taken by surprise in the Ardennes. Paul tells Picasso about his plan to go to Paris on May 14. After all, for almost everyone, this phase of the war—which became known as the Phoney War—had turned out to be only virtual. My grandfather fled Floirac through Spain and Portugal one month later.

  * * *

  And yet Picasso is very attuned to current events. During the Phoney War, he takes a quick trip to Paris from Royan. It’s spring 1940, and Picasso bumps into Matisse. “Where are you going like that?” asks Picasso. “To see my tailor,” replies Matisse. “What, you don’t know that the front has been broken? The Germans will be in Paris by tomorrow!” “What about our generals?” Matisse asks him. Picasso looks at him seriously and replies (his response is in all the books): “Our generals are equivalent to the École des Beaux-Arts!” Which tells us a lot about both these painters’ attitudes toward that school, so fearful of innovation, as well as of the French Army, which was stuck in the days of the First World War.