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

by Sinclair, Anne

  The Germans are well informed and already know everything about Louis. “I was stunned by the amount of information they had about me,” Louis later said. Lamarthonie, the trucking company based at 17 cours du Chapeau-rouge in Bordeaux, was to accept delivery of the trunks and crates. It never did so, however, instead requesting the list of objects twice, also asking for the number of paintings. “Then Lamarthonie told me the border was closed. The attitude of M. Lamarthonie and M. and Mme Ledoux toward the ‘Israelites’ led me to think it unlikely that they were strangers to the information [that the Germans had about me],” Louis Le Gall would testify.10

  * * *

  The German police search the house from top to bottom and take everything they find to the German Embassy in Paris, before it is transferred to the Jeu de Paume and then dispersed around Germany and Switzerland, or in France.

  A certain Comte de Lestang and someone by the name of Yves Perdoux, probably an obscure art dealer, had apparently made a pact with the Nazis: they would tell them the two addresses in the department of Gironde, that of the house in Floirac and that of the vault in Libourne, where Paul had stored his paintings. In return for this spectacular bounty, they asked for 10 percent of the value of the collection. They tried several times to negotiate their price before finally supplying the Libourne address. In the end, they accepted three Pissarros and a Renoir, far beyond their wildest dreams. But even if you’re an informer, do you really negotiate with Nazis?

  * * *

  What was the actual conduct of M. and Mme Ledoux? It was probably not very different from that of many people who witnessed the looting, who were powerless but often indifferent and sometimes opportunistic. The postwar trials were not categorical about whether M. and Mme Ledoux did or did not take part in the embezzlements; the Germans weren’t given to sharing the fruits of their plunder. But it’s more than likely that they did take advantage, even if only by preventing Louis Le Gall from removing the crates that could have been saved.

  Later, when objects were found hidden under a woodpile in the garden shed, Mme Ledoux revised her initial statements: “Contrary to what I claimed before, I was in fact able to salvage a painting by Renoir, another by Degas, a case of silverware, a case of books. My intention was to keep them from the Germans. I planned to return them to M. Rosenberg as soon as possible.”11

  The Germans occupied the property in Floirac until August 27, 1944, when Bordeaux was liberated. M. Ledoux was detained for a time at the camp of Mérignac because of his behavior during the occupation, and then M. and Mme Ledoux regained their property, which they enlarged during the 1950s and ultimately sold to the municipality. That was the same Le Castel to which I paid my emotional visit, seventy years later.

  As for Lamarthonie, the hauler, he declared: “I was not aware of any request for transportation being made to me in 1940 by a M. Rosenberg or any of his representatives. However, it is possible that such a request was received by my authorized representative, now deceased, but I can find no trace of this matter in my archives…”12

  The BNCI vault in Libourne, in which my grandfather had imagined his paintings would be safe, was broken into on April 28, 1941, at the request of and in the presence of the occupying authorities. Everything was transferred to a second safe, and this time, on September 5, 1941, a German ERR officer removed the 162 paintings from the BNCI vault. The works were immediately dispatched to Paris, where they fell into Göring’s clutches. They were major paintings: Degas, Manet, Bonnard, Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Ingres, Corot, van Gogh, Cézanne, Renoir, Gauguin.

  Some of these paintings from Libourne found their way to Parisian dealers. Others found takers in Switzerland and were recovered after several suits brought by Paul against certain Swiss dealers who demonstrated a remarkable lack of curiosity regarding the provenance of the works they were selling. After all, the backs of many of the canvases that passed through their hands in those years bore labels put there by the ERR meticulously identifying the collections from which they came.

  * * *

  “No case,” Lynn Nicholas writes, “illustrates these difficulties better than the decades-long struggle of Paul Rosenberg and his heirs, whose possessions reposed not only in France and Germany but also in the neutral country of Switzerland.”13

  Ironically, the most delicate battle of all was fought on Swiss soil.

  In September 1945, Nicholas relates, Paul arrived in Zurich armed with lists as well as photographs of paintings that belonged to him. He went straight to the dealers, one after the other. “The dealer Theodor Fischer, in Lucerne, acquired numerous paintings belonging to Paul Rosenberg in Germany, and sold them to private individuals. Paul Rosenberg at last discovered this and launched an action against the Federal Tribunal of Switzerland. The claim was granted, and the defendants were condemned to restore to the plaintiff the paintings demanded from each of them.”14 It was then up to them to make their own claims against the Germans!

  Paul’s complaints referenced thirty-seven paintings, twenty-two of which were in Fischer’s possession. It is easier for me to understand his determination in this case than it is to grasp the impulse that led him to bring suit against small-scale profiteers.

  Paul discovered one of his paintings by Matisse, Woman in a Yellow Armchair, at the Neupert Gallery in Zurich, where he was even told it was from a private collection. Going higher up the chain, he went to see Emil Bührle, another dealer, “who was surprised to see me, because he had chosen to believe the rumor that I was dead,” as Paul told the story. Paul then accused him of knowingly buying stolen goods. Bührle replied that he would return them to Fischer if he got his money back. The two dealers tried to bargain with Paul: he could take back 80 percent of his paintings, leaving the rest. “But Rosenberg was on a crusade and wanted an official, government-to-government settlement,” believing that the Swiss government would be willing to negotiate at any price, in order to avoid a scandal.15

  If my grandfather had to wait for the liberation to find out the extent of the dispersal of his art, as early as 1942 he had been concerned about the fate of stolen paintings all across Europe. He saw it as an attack on the artistic legacy of the war-torn continent. Trying to motivate the Allies, he offered his assistance and cooperation to the profession as a whole, pro bono.

  Paul was resolved to return to Paris, to hunt down his scattered collection since 1944, but the War Ministry had not yet authorized French citizens to come back to their country.

  As soon as he was able to make contact with the painters closest to him, he asked them for certificates, as he did in this telegram to Matisse in November 1944: “Do you have pictures of last paintings I bought from you, because all taken by Boches [Germans] and resold.”

  He also insisted, as he did with Braque and Picasso, that Matisse provide a statement that when he visited Floirac in May 1940, he saw one or the other of his own paintings on the walls, proof that Paul had not had sufficient time to sell them before his hasty departure.

  * * *

  It was up to the countries in which these acts of plunder had taken place to decide who rightfully owned the recovered works. In France, this task fell to the Commission de Récupération Artistique (CRA, the French Restitution Commission), which was set up in 1944 under the tutelage of Jacques Jaujard, the director of the National Museums of France under the occupation, and of the intrepid Rose Valland.

  The CRA quickly returned the works recovered on the Aulnay train, and these were followed by others found at Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. As an expression of gratitude, Paul donated thirty-three of these paintings to major French museums, including the Louvre.

  Even today there are works stamped “MNR” and found by the Allies but whose owners have never been identified. And I dare to say it: lying in the basements of prestigious French museums there are still unidentified paintings, whose owners disappeared into the camps and whose inheritors may one day be traced after a vetting of the archives. The museums make no secret of t
his. They are awaiting the return of those who will not come back.

  * * *

  All those battles waged in Paris (whether against big fish or small) or in Switzerland revitalized Paul after long years of waiting. They made him feel that he was achieving a measure of personal justice. At the same time he was gaining perspective. He was clearly aware that these battles were trivial compared with the catastrophe of the Shoah, the atrocities of which were just coming to light. In April 1945 he writes: “We recovered some paintings looted by the Germans, or by dishonest Frenchmen. But I am not going to complain, it’s as nothing when you look at the horrors that the Nazis inflicted on human beings of all races, creeds, and colors.”

  Like the other dealers whose collections had been plundered, he applied for reparations from the Federal Republic of Germany, which in July 1957 passed a law providing financial restitution for losses caused by spoliation. Two years later, in 1959, the Germans proposed a settlement of less than half the sum Paul had claimed. He had died by then, and my grandmother, my uncle, and my mother, wearied by all the procedures involved, accepted their offer.

  In 1970, and again in 1980, restitution was back on the agenda, and my mother and my aunt reclaimed paintings by Monet and Léger. Alexandre went so far as to buy back a Degas from its illicit owners. “I do not like so enriching the successors to thieves,” he said, as Lynn Nicholas records, “but have come to learn that the defence of one’s own and one’s family interests is somewhat like politics and indeed life itself. It is principally the art of the possible.”16

  My grandfather’s battle to recover his assets, which occupied the latter years of his life, was certainly legitimate, but I can see how it might have been perceived as unseemly by families whose relatives’ ashes are forever buried beneath the crematoriums at Auschwitz or even to those who survived the camps. My grandfather was safe, and so was his family. His son had come back a hero of the Second Armored Division, and he still had enough paintings to do business and live well.

  Without wishing to play psychologist, I think he needed to make the thieves pay, to do his part in the work of remembrance and of bringing the truth to light. Perhaps he had adopted the phrase that the French Jesuit and scholar Michel de Certeau applied to his historical research, and that was quoted by Annette Wieviorka in the conclusion to her work for the Matteoli Commission, as his credo: “a burial of the dead, that they may return less sadly to their graves.”

  EPILOGUE

  When I began my research, I didn’t set out to write a biography. Rather, I wanted to create an homage to my grandfather, a series of impressionist strokes to evoke a man who was a stranger to me yesterday, yet who today seems quite familiar. I wanted to conjure a world, the world of modern painting, one that was mysteriously restored to me, in a random sequence of opened cardboard boxes, and was a product of the French national obsession with security that manifested itself as a bureaucratic aberration.

  Yes, this improvised portrait is about a forgotten era, that of France in its greatest glory, the expression of a resplendent artistic culture in the early years of the twentieth century.

  About the mutilations of the “world of yesterday”—to quote the title of Stefan Zweig’s moving autobiography—which disemboweled Europe, tested the planet, and shattered millions of lives.

  About a family that is mine, which I might at last describe—if I allow myself to borrow from Jean-Paul Sartre—as a whole family, composed of all families and “as good as all of them and no better than any.” But a family dearer to me than I would have believed and to which I owe more than I could have imagined.

  * * *

  In May 2011, under painful circumstances, I found myself forced once more to live in New York, a prisoner, to some extent, of America. The city of New York itself, which seemed enchanted to me in my childhood, had now become, for both me and my family, a place synonymous with violence and injustice. I had trouble regaining the pleasure of wandering along its streets.

  I went back, of course, to Fifty-seventh Street, to the stretch of pavement once occupied by the first Galerie Rosenberg, where the luxury boutiques now extend, between Fifth and Madison. I walked along Seventy-ninth Street, in front of the last of the family galleries, on the Upper East Side, which now strikes me as prodigiously ordinary.

  In midtown, I sauntered through the Museum of Modern Art, where, in the room reserved for the impressionists, so rich in dazzling works, I fix my attention on the portrait that stares pointedly at the visitors: that of van Gogh’s friend and model Joseph Roulin, the famous postman with the bushy beard, the word “Postes” proudly emblazoned on his cap. That painting was given to the museum by my grandparents, who were so grateful to Alfred Barr and his country for offering them asylum and the recovery of their dignity. How could I allow the chaos of my recent reality to trample cherished childhood memories? How could I resent the entire city over one grueling experience? I never expected these pages, which opened with an identity denied in France, to finish on a forced, turbulent stay in America.

  But that of course is another story. If I were a journalist, I might one day write a book about it.

  NOTES

  RUE LA BOÉTIE

  1. E. Tériade, “Feuilles volantes,” supplement, Cahiers d’art 10 (1927).

  2. Quoted in Pierre Nahon, Les Marchands d’art en France, XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1998).

  NUMBER 21 UNDER THE GERMANS

  1. Quoted in Neil Levi, “‘Judge for Yourselves!’: The ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition as Political Spectacle,” October 85 (Summer 1998): 41–64.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

  4. See the historical and intellectual treatment of this passage in ibid.

  5. Ibid., 13.

  6. Ibid., 7.

  7. Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, L’Art de la défaite, 1940–1944 (Paris: Seuil, 1993).

  8. Ibid.

  9. Rose Valland, Le Front de l’art: Défense des collections françaises, 1939–1945 (Paris: Plan, 1961; repr. Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997).

  10. Laurent Joly, Vichy dans la “solution finale”: Histoire du Commissariat général aux questions juives, 1941–1944 (Paris: Grasset, 2006).

  11. Ibid.

  12. Joseph Billig, Le Commissariat général aux questions juives, 1941–1944 (Vichy: Éditions du Centre, 1955).

  13. Quoted in Dorléac, L’Art de la défaite.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Lettres, edited by Henri Godard and Jean-Paul Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 2009).

  FLOIRAC

  1. Correspondence quoted by Alex Danchev, Braque’s authorized biographer, in Georges Braque: A Life (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2005).

  2. Ibid.

  3. Document quoted in the lawyers’ notes for recuperations after the war. Family archives.

  4. Henri Matisse archives.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Paul Rosenberg, “French Artists and the War,” Art in Australia, December 1941–January 1942.

  7. Emmanuelle Loyer, Paris à New York: Intellectuels et artistes français en exil 1940–1947 (Paris: Grasset, 2005).

  8. Quoted in ibid.

  9. See Dan Franck, Minuit (Paris: Grasset, 2010).

  10. Family archives.

  11. Loyer, Paris à New York.

  GENNEVILLIERS

  1. Loyer, Paris à New York.

  DEALER

  1. Pierre Assouline, L’Homme de l’art: D.-H. Kahnweiler, 1884–1979 (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1989).

  2. Ibid.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Michael C. FitzGerald, Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

  5. Family archives.

  6. Assouline, L’Homme de l’art.

  7. Rosenberg, “French Artists a
nd the War.”

  8. Albert Wolff, “Le Calendrier parisien,” Le Figaro, April 3, 1876.

  9. Family archives.

  CHTEAUDUN, OPÉRA, AND MADISON AVENUE

  1. Paul Rosenberg: “Je suis né…,” autobiographical sketch, from which the quotations in this chapter are taken. Family archives.

  2. Tériade, “Feuilles volantes.”

  3. Henri Matisse archives.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Nahon, Les Marchands d’art.

  6. Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

  7. René Gimpel, Journal d’un collectionneur: Marchand de tableaux (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1963).

  8. The New York Times, December 7, 1953.

  9. Family archives.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Henri Matisse archives.

  12. Ibid.

  MOTHER AND CHILD

  1. Picasso archives, Musée Picasso.

  2. FitzGerald, Making Modernism.

  PAUL AND PIC

  1. The language is from FitzGerald, Making Modernism.

  2. Nahon, Les Marchands d’art.

  3. Ibid.

  4. FitzGerald, Making Modernism.

  5. Family archives.

  6. Roland Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

  7. All the letters that follow in this chapter are from the Picasso archives.

  8. FitzGerald, Making Modernism.

  9. Pierre Daix, Dictionnaire Picasso (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995).