Before Alex shut his salon for good, he had one last gift to give a favoured customer: a young Chinese architect called Ieoh Ming Pei, better known now as I.M. Pei. Alex and Pei met in Paris in 1951 when the latter was on the Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship, and Pei and his wife, Eileen, had been told about Alex’s salon by the American architect Philip Johnson. Alex never lost his knack for spotting who was worth schmoozing, and as his alliance with Perré proved to him, befriending powerful and prominent people could only be beneficial. Alex spotted early on that Pei was worth keeping in his life, and in the hope of achieving this, he wrote in his memoir, one of his last gestures as a designer was to send the Peis a small Modigliani sketch as a token of gratitude for their support. I emailed Pei’s sons, Chien Chung and Li Chung, to verify this story and initially they thought it unlikely as they doubted if their parents had ever owned such a sketch. But a few days later they emailed back. They had found the Modigliani in the back of their father’s closet. Pei might have never bothered to hang it, but, once again, Alex had told the truth.
But while Pei might not have been overly awed by Alex’s present, he liked Alex: whenever Pei would spot him at parties he would call out, ‘Shalom, Alex!’ much to Alex’s delight and everyone else’s bemusement. In the early 1980s, when Pei was being widely vilified for his plans to build a small pyramid in front of the Louvre, Alex was one of the very few who supported Pei, and stood up and said so. He wrote letters to Pei and about Pei to newspapers, saying that what French art needed was Pei’s pyramid. Pei later returned the favour by putting Alex, by now extremely wealthy, in touch with Moshe Mayer, a real estate developer who worked with Pei, about planning the Alex Maguy Foundation in Israel, which had it been built would have been the ultimate proof of Alex’s social ascendency. The foundation never actually materialised, probably due to cost and Alex’s health, but yet again Alex was proven right about the value of having successful friends.
Alex finally shut down his salon in the mid-1950s, ending that chapter of his life. The next chapter would bring him the immortality and enormous wealth he had always longed for, and expected.
ALEX’S CAREER IN art began, naturally, with his friends. He first sold off his last fashion pieces, settled his most urgent debts, and with what was left, opened a small gallery on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, just around the corner from Avenue Matignon, where he’d had a salon before the war. He named it Galerie de l’Élysée, emphasising its proximity – and insinuating a connection – to the Élysée Palace, the residence of the French president. Alex had always longed to be established in French society, and being neighbours with the president proved his establishment status. In characteristic fashion, he threw a glamorous opening night party for the gallery to which he invited all his old friends and colleagues, including Dior.
‘I’ve come to wish you good luck, Alex. Have no regrets. Don’t forget, I began with paintings and you will finish with paintings,’ Dior said to him.
Another person from his fashion past who supported Alex in his move to the art world was the illustrator René Gruau. He helped Alex to decorate his gallery, and shortly afterwards he painted an extraordinarily evocative portrait of Sala on one of her trips to Paris. This painting originally hung in my grandmother’s apartment and now hangs over my parents’ fireplace in London, and it captures her elegance and wistfulness better than most photographs. Her elbow is leaning on a table and her chin rests on the back of her hand while she gazes behind her; he immortalised her as always looking back, towards the past. In its tenderness and precision, it was clearly painted by someone with enormous feeling for the subject and her family. In 1974, almost forty years after they first met, Alex hosted an exhibition of Gruau’s work in his gallery which he called ‘Alex Maguy Présente Son Ami Gruau’. For the chosen very few, Alex could be extremely loyal and sentimental. (Kisling also painted a portrait of Sala; Alex had told Bill at that fateful dinner in Chaya’s flat in rue des Rosiers that famous artists loved to paint his sister and, decades later, thanks to Alex and his extraordinary career path, that lie eventually became true.)
Alex’s idea with the Galerie de l’Élysée was to have shows that featured only seven paintings – seven was his lucky number, and it’s also a significant number in Judaism, representing creation and fortune. Each of his shows would be centred on a theme, and his first show was called ‘Paris, Parisians, and Parisiennes’; his second was ‘The Landscapes and Faces of France’. When he was a designer he made adoring near-pastiches of French style, and as a curator he put on shows specifically celebrating French style. Little Sender was still enchanted with the fantasy of the country his father used to describe to him on Kostalista, despite everything it had done to him and his family.
Over the next decade, he built up a hugely successful gallery, showing works by, among others, his old friends Chagall, Pascin and Kisling (who sadly died soon after the gallery opened), as well as Bonnard, Renoir, Monet, Braque, Miró, Bacon and Boudin, and sculpture by Giacometti, Henry Moore and Gauguin. Alex had exceptionally good taste in art, the kind only someone with a deep love of his subject can have, as opposed to someone merely chasing after the hot new thing in the art world. The gallery quickly developed a reputation for having the finest pieces from the greatest modern artists, and Alex became a name again that was cited in the gossip magazines:
‘Among the many notable celebrities at the party, we saw Jacqueline Auriol [a French aviator] in the company of Alex Maguy’, read a typical caption from a French magazine, which Alex cut out and sent to my grandmother and which she faithfully saved. But there was still one goal he hadn’t achieved yet: meeting Picasso.
Alex had been trying to attract Picasso’s attention for decades. He genuinely revered him as a lover of art but he also liked him as a person: short, tough, sexual, a fighter, deeply moral but complicated, adored by men and women, one who didn’t obey the rules and was rewarded for it; Picasso was an idealisation of Alex’s own self-image. After the war, Alex had a tangential connection with Picasso through his friends Georges and Suzanne Ramié. Like Alex, the Ramiés had been involved in Resistance activity in the south of France, but now ran a pottery, called Madoura, on the Côte d’Azur. Fortuitously for Alex, this workshop became one of the most important centres of twentieth-century ceramics, because it was the exclusive producer of ceramics by Picasso. Alex tried in vain to utilise this connection. In 1949 he’d designed a dress covered with images from Picasso’s paintings and wrote to the artist to tell him, under the pretence that he was asking for permission but really just making his presence known to his artistic hero. (If Picasso did reply to that request it has long since been lost, but Alex did make the dress.) Alex became friendly with a young woman, named Jacqueline Roque, who worked at Madoura Pottery. But Alex was not the only male friend of the Ramiés to have noticed Jacqueline: in 1953, at the age of 26, she caught the eye of Picasso, who was more than four decades older than her, and he embarked on a long campaign of seduction. Now Alex had yet another connection to the artist, and once he opened his gallery, he wrote to him more frequently, asking for his blessing to feature this or that painting, inviting him to his shows, even sending him birthday greetings. ‘Dare I ask you to do me the honor of being my guest for the baptism of my little yacht?’ he wrote on 13 April 1960, referring to the boat he’d recently bought and kept moored down in Cannes. (Picasso declined that invitation.) Undaunted by constant refusals, Alex tried again almost exactly a year later, saying that he had a proposal for Picasso that involved Alex’s ‘very, very close friends at the House of Dior’. A few days later the phone in his gallery rang: it was Jacqueline, inviting him to their house in Cannes, Villa La Californie. Barely able to breathe with excitement, Alex said he would be there. Once again, a personal connection worked in Alex’s favour. Eventually.
Alex on his yacht in Cannes.
In April 1961, Picasso was eighty and a newlywed, having married Jacqueline the previous month. Jacqueline was devoted to
her new husband, sorting through his correspondence, attending to the daily chores, fending off the endless stream of visitors and collectors, dealing with the lawyers, and generally arranging their lives.[19] After Picasso died in 1973, the degree to which Jacqueline controlled Picasso’s life would become a somewhat controversial subject, when she stopped his children from a previous relationship, Paloma and Claude, from attending their father’s funeral, and was later accused of stealing their inheritance. But Picasso was besotted by her, and at the very least grateful for her attentiveness: he made four hundred portraits of her, more than of any other single person, and for the last seventeen years of his life she was the only woman the former womaniser painted.
Almost certainly, Alex’s friendship with Jacqueline helped to get him his long sought-for invitation to meet Picasso. But the artist guarded his time and privacy fiercely, and he was certainly not opening his doors to every art world hanger-on who Jacqueline had met at Madoura. So there had been something about Alex’s letter that ‘captured Picasso’s attention’, Jacqueline explained, and it turned out that had less to do with art and more to do with Alex. Picasso had lived in Paris during the occupation and was fascinated by Alex’s story of fighting in the Foreign Legion alongside Spanish Republicans in exile, as Picasso was himself a Spaniard essentially in exile. (Franco was then still in power in Spain, and Picasso was seen as an enemy.) And so he summoned him to Cannes, and that is when Alex first met Picasso at Villa La Californie.
As much as Alex saw himself in Picasso, Picasso apparently saw himself in Alex. When he entered the sitting room Picasso stood up, walked towards Alex and – reaching up because, for once, Alex was the tallest man in the room – jabbed a finger into his chest: ‘T’es juif, comme moi!’ Picasso barked.
Alex assumed at the time that Picasso was speaking metaphorically, that he thought of himself as an outcast and a fighter, two qualities associated with Jewish Resistance fighters, and that Picasso, rightly, saw in Alex. The two men talked for about half an hour. It doesn’t sound, however, like Alex talked that much. Instead he listened to Picasso and didn’t explain what, exactly, it was that he wanted from him after all this time: ‘I did not dare distract from our precious moments together to talk to you about something that is very dear to my heart,’ he wrote to him after the visit. In fact, Alex wanted Picasso to design a scarf for a collection Dior was putting together that year; Dior had asked Alex’s assistance in contacting Picasso, and Alex realised that, if he pulled this off, it would make him look like a big player in both the fashion and art worlds.
I couldn’t find any evidence that this scarf project ever happened. But Alex got something else from Picasso even he hadn’t dared to hope for: friendship. Picasso took a genuine shine to him and they entered into an extraordinarily regular correspondence. In the National Archives in Paris there are sixty-two letters from Alex to Picasso, far more than from almost any other business associate. They are all addressed to both Picasso – who Alex always refers to as ‘grand maître’ – and Jacqueline, as was common with all of Picasso’s correspondence, such was the degree of Jacqueline’s involvement in her husband’s business affairs. But they are also written with a fond familiarity unusual in both men. Among the various business discussions – Alex asking Picasso to authenticate a painting, Alex inviting him to a party at his home – are chummy postcards from Alex’s trips to the United States, as well as a joint postcard, sent from the south of France, signed by both Alex and Maurice Chevalier, in which they tell him they’ve been speaking of him fondly.
Alex with Picasso.
Picasso occasionally asked Alex to check on an exhibition of his work for him, especially in Spain, as the artist was still ostensibly exiled from his home country. In April 1962, Alex went to Barcelona, as Picasso had recently donated a huge number of works to the Aguilar Palace, and he wanted to know they were hung and received properly. Alex sent back a typically effusive telegram: ‘Everyone from and around Barcelona is embracing your wonderful present. Even the sun shone on the party.’ Some of Alex’s artist friends were understandably jealous of how clearly starstruck he was by Picasso. Chagall, who had known Alex for almost forty years, would make pointed comments about his constant name dropping and ask, ‘So tell me, how’s your Spanish friend?’ But Alex couldn’t be teased out of bragging about Picasso.
Shortly after returning from Barcelona, Alex’s loyalty paid off. He asked Picasso to look at the selection of paintings for his next show – only seven, as usual, including a work each by Chagall, Braque, Renoir, Monet, Degas, Dufy and Picasso – and he wanted Picasso’s approval. Picasso didn’t just look at the paintings: he took the unusual step of summoning Alex to his home in Mougins, where he almost never had visitors because he considered it a place of solitude and work. His attitude was so extreme that even those close to him looked at his life there as ‘a form of self-imprisonment’.[20] For Alex, Picasso broke this self-imposed imprisonment.
It turned out that Picasso did more than approve of Alex’s exhibition: he made a poster for it.
‘This is for you,’ Picasso said, presenting him with the drawing when he arrived.
It was a portrait of a face with curly hair and big eyes, on top of which Picasso wrote Alex’s name, as well as the name and address of his gallery, and beneath which he wrote the name and dates of the exhibition. And then he signed and dated it: 15 April 1962.
‘No one can know the joy I felt. It was more than a surprise, more than a gift – I looked at the lithograph as a reward,’ Alex writes.
A reward for what, he doesn’t say – surviving? Perseverance? Someone – Jacqueline, or more likely one of Picasso’s assistants – captured the moment Picasso gave Alex the poster. Picasso is looking at the camera and Alex at Picasso, and he looks like a cat who knows he has caught the prize mouse. For the rest of his life, when he talked about the poster he would say, ‘Picasso gave me my birth certificate.’ Reaching the zenith of the art world, through his own determination, gave Alex his identity.
But even winning the prize couldn’t stop Alex from burnishing this story a little more. In his memoir he claimed that Picasso drew the portrait the first time he met him, which was not true. He also insisted that the big-eyed, curly-haired figure in the poster was a portrait of him. In fact, it is most commonly identified by Picasso scholars as Jacqueline, which would make a lot more sense: Alex had small eyes and his hair had long since given up the fight, whereas Jacqueline was a wide-eyed, wavy-haired beauty. And considering how much Picasso painted her, it seems a lot more likely that she would be the subject rather than Alex. Even at what felt to him like the summit of his achievements, Alex couldn’t resist giving himself a few extra inches of height.
But whoever was actually portrayed in the poster, getting it was an enormous coup for Alex. Picasso occasionally made posters for other small galleries, particularly ones around Avignon and Arles. (He also, the year before, made one for a show in Haifa, further confirming his solidarity with the Jewish people.) But by 1962 such gestures were rare, further proving the exceptional nature of his relationship with Alex.
Picasso presenting Alex with the poster.
The two men met several times over the next decade. Photos of those meetings show Picasso talking excitedly and Alex bowing his head with uncharacteristic humility, listening to him. Picasso was always intrigued that Alex had come to art via fashion, and when Alex was one day fussing about what frames he should put on Picasso’s work, the artist thought for a moment and said, ‘You were a couturier, and you must dress them. It is absolutely right.’
Just as Alex knew it would, his alliance with Picasso gave him a new level of credibility in the art world. By the late 1960s, the French newspapers referred to him as the ‘célèbre marchand de tableaux du Faubourg Saint-Honoré’ (the famous art dealer of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré) and invariably described him as Viennese, due to society journalists’ inability to differentiate between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Austria. He wa
s photographed at parties, often alongside Georges Pompidou, the prime minister of France and a regular at Alex’s gallery, as the Élysée Palace was just next door. In 1964, the foreign correspondent of The New Yorker, Janet Flanner, wrote a long and glowing review of one of his shows that featured, as always, only seven paintings: ‘What a joy to see so few, and those so fine!’ Flanner wrote,[21] praising in particular the ‘superb’ Cézanne painting, ‘unfamiliar’ work by Soutine, and ‘immortal’ Toulouse-Lautrec sketch. Her references to the paintings’ buyers give a sense of how important, and global, Alex had become in the art world: a watercolour by André Derain had been bought by Brandeis University in Massachusetts, and the ‘Proustian interior’ by Bonnard was going to the National Gallery in Washington. Alex was so proud of this praise in an American publication, he wrote to his sister and instructed her to buy every copy of the magazine she could find and send them to him, which she immediately did.
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