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

by Sinclair, Anne

  * * *

  The dossier painstakingly compiled by Serge Klarsfeld enabled the justice system to find Jean Leguay guilty of crimes against humanity. I remember taking my father along to the press conference at which Klarsfeld argued that the legal proceedings to charge Bousquet and Leguay with crimes against humanity were fully justified. This was in 1979. My father told me, as he left Klarsfeld’s office, “You’ll see, he’ll die after me, peacefully, in his sleep.” Indeed, my father, who was the same age as Leguay, died the next year, while Leguay died in 1989, but before his trial could begin. According to the ruling that stated that legal action had been abandoned, “there was information to establish that he had taken part in crimes against humanity.”

  * * *

  My mishap at the police station was pretty harmless in the scheme of things, but the questioning of my identity brought a tidal wave of family memories surging forward. For years I had refused to listen to the stories of the past told over and over again by my mother. Not out of a desire to reject my family, but the story of my maternal grandparents, even though I thought I knew it, never felt as if it belonged to me, as if it related to my life. It even bored me a bit. What I liked was politics, journalism; my father’s world rather than my mother’s. My father, who had joined the Free French in the Middle East during the war; my father, who, under the name of Jacques Breton, had delivered editorials on Radio Beirut on behalf of General Charles de Gaulle; my father, so proud to show me the agency dispatch in which Joseph Goebbels had condemned him to death and railed against “the Jew Sinclair”; my father, having returned to Paris after the liberation, paying a final visit to his own father, who had been seriously ill since Drancy. Even though my father himself built an industrial career as a business executive far from my own areas of interest, I felt closer to the war stories he recorded in his notebooks than I did to my mother’s side of the family, which lived under the shadow of my art dealer grandfather, who had died when I was only eleven years old. In short, I secretly felt I was on the same side as “My Father the Hero,” who gently mocked “My Mother Who Sat Out the War on Fifth Avenue.”

  My father, Robert Sinclair, who was called Robert Schwartz throughout his youth, was sent to the front in 1939 as a thirty-year-old soldier, on meteorological duty. He was stationed at a border post (might it have been the Maginot Line?) and played chess, one move per day with a colleague who had been sent to a different strategic location, taking advantage of their daily call to compare weather conditions on the front. They sat there and waited for the enemy, who never came because they had decided to avoid that predictable line of defense. (I like to imagine him moving his rook or his knight, occasionally sticking his hand outside and saying, “It’s raining,” to his friend, who would reply, “Here too!”) When he was finally demobilized, he returned to Paris and, like many others, wept at the sight of flags bearing the swastika fluttering over the Champs-Élysées. He remembered the day he had stood there with his mother, on November 11, 1918, applauding Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s troops as they celebrated the victory of the First World War. He was just a nine-year-old boy, but he told me he knew that he was destined to enlist from that time.

  Unaware of the networks that would have enabled him to pass through England, he managed to reach the United States via a series of complicated routes, and it was there that he enrolled in Free France, which ultimately sent him to Damascus, Beirut, and Cairo. Before boarding the ship bound for the Middle East via the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, all lights extinguished so as not to alert the enemy, he was told that the Germans were aware of the surnames of French officers who had enlisted with de Gaulle and whose families had stayed in France. To protect his relatives, he was compelled to change his name. Wanting to retain his initials, he opened the New York City phone book to the letter S and stumbled upon the name Sinclair, perhaps no more unusual in the United States than Martin or Dupont in France.

  I have always been a bit irritated with him for wanting to keep the name Sinclair and then legally adopting it as his surname after the war. It meant losing a part of our identity. But he had earned a name for himself under that nom de guerre; he bore it proudly and probably wanted to allow his descendants—me, as it happened—to avoid the dangers that a Jewish name had inflicted on his family. This was not unusual among those traumatized by the war in the years that followed the liberation, but I confess that I’ve always experienced it as a sort of denial. That’s probably why I laid claim to my Jewish identity very early on. And why I’ve been distressed by those who, playing with proportional representation, allowed the extreme-right Front National (FN) to exist politically in France. It’s why I fought bitterly against the media access so generously granted to the FN in the 1980s and why for ten years I refused to have Jean-Marie Le Pen on my television program, 7 sur 7, which was a discussion of the previous week’s political news. The pointlessness of this battle became apparent on April 21, 2002, and in the years that followed, when Le Pen came in second in the general election, the consequences of which we are still living with today.

  So much for rummaging around in the cardboard boxes of family archives. As I went through all those random papers, I eventually came across my original birth certificate, rather than the copy generally required by the administrative services. What would the clerk at the prefecture, who prompted this book, after all, have said if he had seen that I had been born Anne Schwartz, dite Sinclair, and that my name was only officially changed in 1949, when I was one year old?

  * * *

  In my youth I was more receptive to the story of my paternal grandparents, who had stayed in France, than I was to the fate of those who, pursued by the Nazis, had managed to flee and were then dispossessed, plundered, and stripped of their nationality. Besides, I wanted to build my own life, preferring television to art galleries, the public life to the artistic one, old newspapers to old paintings.

  In 2006 my mother passed away. And as always after the death of a parent, you’re struck by all the things you’ve neglected to ask or didn’t want to know, whether out of laziness or weariness at hearing the same stories again and again. In my mother’s flat, I emptied cupboards crammed with dusty memories: old keys, outmoded furs, family photographs, and stacks of papers that had accumulated over the course of decades.

  Then I turned sixty and happened to spend a few years in the United States, a country that constantly brought me back to my childhood and to the part of the family that had sought refuge there. And here were the French authorities, playing with dangerous ideas, reminding me that French nationality can’t be taken for granted even if you’ve had it all your life. How fragile it is to those who bear it and how inaccessible to those who wish to lay claim to it. And reminding me that it wasn’t the first time this had happened in my family.

  I realized I hadn’t even had time to unpack the boxes from my mother’s apartment, which I’d stacked in a closet. They were full of letters and old files that I’d picked up without even giving them a thought. Suddenly unable to contain my curiosity, I plunged into the family archives, in search of the story of my past. To find out who my mother’s father really was: my grandfather Paul Rosenberg, a man hailed as a pioneer in the world of painting, of modern art, who then became a pariah in his own country during the Second World War. I yearned to fit together the pieces of this French story of art and war.

  I am the granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg, a gentleman who lived in Paris and who owned a gallery at 21 rue La Boétie.

  RUE LA BOÉTIE

  Number 21. I’ve passed by it hundreds of times. My mother liked to show me the 1930s façade with its stone arches. I’d noticed various shops on that street—ice cream, pizza—but I’d never stopped to take a closer look. Now, seventy years after my grandfather had left the premises, I wanted to see the building for myself. I couldn’t imagine that three years later I would unveil a plaque on this very building that I had not yet entered.

  Today it’s an office of the Veolia Enviro
nmental Services company. I call them up: “My grandparents used to live there. I’d love to take a look around, really just a look. I don’t want to disturb you … It was before the war, I’m sure there are few traces left … Of course I understand if it’s not possible.” I detected the ambivalence in my own voice. It was almost as if I worried that they might actually let me in.

  They did. Why would they resist? So one Wednesday in April 2010 off I went to Veolia, to 21 rue La Boétie, where I begin my story. Touched by my curiosity and possibly a bit incredulous that it’s taken me to the age of sixty to set foot in the building where my grandfather’s gallery was located, my hosts graciously show me around.

  The hallway has been divided, and there are white stucco columns with Corinthian capitals, which I find a bit tasteless. Are they original? And a black-and-white damier marble floor. It’s all been redesigned, modernized, the rooms, the spaces. There are spotlights affixed to the ceiling. The staircase with its old-fashioned banisters leading to the upper floors seems unchanged. Lots of Fernand Léger’s and André Masson’s paintings used to hang on the walls of this interior stairway, which led to my family’s private apartments: the one belonging to my grandparents and their children, then the one to my great-grandmother, Paul’s mother, Mathilde Rosenberg. Of course no paintings now hang in this stairway, which leads to various offices. The overall impression is dreary. Yet the elevator is modern, surely in compliance with health and safety regulations. The rattling old cage of another age is gone.

  The stairway within the gallery, the one with the cast-iron banister, seems to have retained its original look, from the 1930s, when my grandfather did some elaborate renovations. The floor is patterned with marble mosaics made with yellow stones. But there’s no way of telling exactly where the mosaic plaques went, the ones designed by Georges Braque, who also supervised their installation. Above the stairs were arches, replicas of the ones outside, adorned with pieces of mirrored glass.

  I’m in the lower of the two exhibition halls, the one that appears in so many of the photographs I’ve seen of my grandfather situated in his domain. All the exhibitions at rue La Boétie were held in this large room. A month of Braque, another of Henri Matisse, a third of Pablo Picasso. It is now a boardroom for Veolia executives. The fine oak parquet floor is still there, and I immediately recognize the wood paneling, which I’ve seen in the photographs, as well as the glass ceiling with its little star-shaped windows, which, as in other galleries of the time, diffused the light so as to soften the hard edges of cubist painting.

  If I half closed my eyes I could see them, those big paintings from the 1920s and 1930s, hanging on the walls. Soon after, those masterpieces would be replaced by portraits of the head of the Vichy government, Marshal Philippe Pétain.

  * * *

  In 1927 E. Tériade, a famous critic and art publisher of Greek descent, described the Galerie Rosenberg in “Feuilles volantes,” the monthly supplement of the influential journal Cahiers d’art: “We are introduced into a huge room, high-ceilinged, bare walls, naked light, a room in which sober brown curtains weigh down on the collection, in which two solitary armchairs upholstered with dark velvet reach toward you like two grand inquisitors; no, they’re not reaching toward you, they’re going for your throat, as masterpieces do. Hurricanes of solitude, of austerity, pass through the room … Paul Rosenberg: he’s dressed in black. He has the anxious face of an ascetic or a passionate businessman.”1

  Here’s another description of the setting, particularly interesting when you consider that the author is the notorious, extreme-right-wing writer Maurice Sachs, who later defined himself as a Jew, a homosexual, and a collaborator before being killed by a bullet to the back of the head by the Germans in whose service he had worked: “His grand seigneur bearing was part of his particular genius … You step into Rosenberg’s gallery as if entering a temple: the deep leather armchairs, the walls lined with red silk, would lead you to think you were in a fine museum … He knew how to cast an extraordinary light on the painters he took under his wing. His knowledge of painting was deeper than that of his colleagues, and he had a very sure sense of his own taste.”2

  Paul, who had taken over his father’s gallery with his brother, Léonce, in 1905, decided to set up on his own in 1910 and moved alone to 21 rue La Boétie, in the Eighth Arrondissement of Paris. Nineteenth-century works were shown on the mezzanine; contemporary art, on the ground floor. If visitors were unsure about Braque or Léger, Paul invited them upstairs to see softer-contoured works by Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, or Auguste Rodin. He hoped they might buy some of these, which would allow him to support his unknown friends, such as Picasso or Marie Laurencin, the muse of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1913 she became the first artist to sign an exclusive deal with Paul, an arrangement that stood until 1940. She was joined by Picasso in 1918, Braque in 1923, Léger in 1926, and Matisse in 1936.

  * * *

  In 1912, almost as soon as he had moved in, Paul sent out an announcement just as anyone opening a shop might do, describing his new venture: “I will shortly be opening new modern art galleries at 21 rue La Boétie, where I plan to hold periodic exhibitions by the masters of the nineteenth century and painters of our own times. In my view, however, the shortcoming of contemporary exhibitions is that they show an artist’s work in isolation. So I intend to hold group exhibitions of decorative art … Not only do I plan to offer my spaces for free, I shall not take a percentage in the event of a sale. For each exhibition I shall publish at my own expense a catalog of the paintings, sculptures, furniture, etc.”

  The critic Pierre Nahon stresses Paul’s desire to establish a connection between French painting of the past and the modernist trends of the twentieth century, noting that in the late 1930s Paul had on his walls and in his inventory a collection of Géricault, Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet, Cézanne, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, ToulouseLautrec, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Le Douanier Rousseau, Bonnard, Laurencin, Modigliani, and Matisse. “The gallery,” Nahon writes, “is becoming an essential meeting place for everyone who wants to follow the development and the work of the innovative painters.”

  My own research is centered on an attempt to conjure the grandfather I barely knew. And to summon up the riches heures of the thirties and the grim ones of the forties that are integral to his story.

  * * *

  My grandfather had great difficulty regaining possession of his gallery after the war. The state had confiscated the building from the collaborators in August 1944 and made it the headquarters of the Saint-Gobain construction company, before finally returning the building to my grandfather. By then it had endured the sinister events that I am about to relate, events with which my grandfather could never make peace. Paul finally sold 21 rue La Boetie in January 1953. He was determined never again to live in that place, its basement filled with propaganda from the darkest years, its rooms still haunted by the ghosts of the occupation.

  For a long time the building was home to the French General Information Service, Renseignements Généraux, the French police intelligence service, and the secrets of the Republic were buried with the secrets of the collaborators.

  NUMBER 21 UNDER THE GERMANS

  21 rue La Boétie was piled to the rafters with those “accursed” or decadent works, the kind that the Nazis called entartete Kunst (EK), “degenerate art.” The term referred to any art that, for the new German regime, departed from the canon of what the Nazis considered traditional.

  “German people, come and judge for yourselves,” said Adolf Ziegler, the president of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, as he infamously opened the Munich exhibition of degenerate art on July 18, 1937.1

  This vast exhibition of six thousand works, taken from every museum in Germany, was hastily assembled. The intention was to ridicule modern art before imposing a ban on its sale. These works were deliberately shown among drawings by children or the mentally handicapped: there were two adjacent halls, with official G
erman art hung in the first and the art identified as “degenerate” (Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Léger, Miró, Masson, Dalí, Chagall) exhibited in the second. Many of the works shown in the second hall had been confiscated from museums or private galleries mainly managed by Jews. Some were intentionally destroyed, while others were auctioned off for the benefit of the Nazi regime. Ironically, this attempt to ridicule modern art was to the great advantage of art lovers throughout the world. Vincent van Gogh quickly became the bestselling “degenerate” painter on the market. By the time the Reich Chamber exhibition closed on November 30, 1937, it had drawn more than two million viewers.

  * * *

  Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, had planned the show as a counterpoint to the Great Exhibition of German Art, which opened simultaneously in Munich. It celebrated female farmers and soldiers, brave mothers, and rural landscapes of Greater Germany. In Goebbels’s words, a distinction had to be made between “the art of those days and the art of these days.”2 He felt that German museums had to be cleansed of works produced after 1910.

  The German rejection of novelty in art was nothing new. As Lynn H. Nicholas explains in her remarkable book The Rape of Europa, the antimodern tradition had a long history, “reaching back to Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1909 firing of Hugo von Tschudi, director of the Nationalgalerie, for buying Impressionist paintings.”3 In 1893 a very influential book was published by the Jewish social critic Max Nordau, who first used the word Entartung, “degeneracy,” to refer to artistic disciplines. In his most famous book, Degeneration, Nordau describes modern art as symptomatic of the degeneracy of society at the end of the nineteenth century. He declares all modern art, including that of the impressionists, “pathological.” Nordau was both a Zionist and a Dreyfusard and a man developing conservative ideas about the founding principles of German culture. In the 1920s a group of philosophers put forward the concept of “degenerate art” on the basis of Nordau’s work, at the risk of somewhat misrepresenting his ideas.4