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

by Sinclair, Anne

  After Hitler came to power in 1933, many artists chose to go into exile. Not only could they no longer show their work or sell it, they were forbidden to buy brushes, canvases, or paint. “The smell of turpentine in the air or a container of wet brushes was grounds for arrest,” writes Nicholas.5

  On June 30, 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of war, the Germans held a massive auction in Lucerne, featuring 126 paintings and sculptures from the most important museums and private collections in Germany. Many collectors, unable to resist the temptation to buy outstanding works of art at low prices, attended. Paul warned potential buyers that any currency the Reich harvested from this sale “would fall back on our heads in the form of bombs.” Alfred Barr, the director of the prestigious Museum of Modern Art in New York, also tried to alert those museums that had announced their intention to buy. But to no avail. “Acceptance of these warnings was not made easier by the very mixed reception all modern art had endured for many years,” writes Nicholas.6

  From that moment Karl Haberstock, the Nazis’ chief art buyer, became one of the Führer’s personal dealers. As Haberstock began to amass a collection of old masters for Hitler, he found intermediaries in France through whom he could purge all modernist impurities. Among them was the author and Nazi apologist Lucien Rebatet, who proposed the “Aryanization” of our fine arts.

  There was a great deal of debate on this subject among Nazi officials, in particular between Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg (Hitler’s ideological theorist, who later was placed in charge of the “occupied Eastern territories”—in other words, the massacres that took place there). This unfortunate namesake of Paul’s considered any form of physical distortion on a canvas “degenerate art,” while Goebbels believed that modern painting could become part of a National Socialist revolutionary art movement. As in any totalitarian regime claiming to define a “new man” and a new world order, art was a priority for the apostles of National Socialism. Indeed, the Nazis were obsessed with the idea of turning art into an instrument of propaganda. In her book L’Art de la défaite (Art of the Defeat), Laurence Bertrand Dorléac relates how, several days after the armistice between Germany and the French Third Republic, the looting of artworks began on a massive scale. In fact, on June 30, 1940, Hitler issued an order to put artworks belonging to Jews in “safekeeping.” The term was chosen deliberately as a cover for what could only be described as theft. It was then that Alfred Rosenberg set up the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). This became the chief organization in the Nazi looting operation, which put its stamp of infamy on all works of art confiscated by the occupying troops.

  * * *

  From early July 1940, Rosenberg instructed the army to raid the big Parisian art dealers and seize their collections. This represented the triumph of the Rosenberg-Göring clan over the tribe based around Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Reich foreign minister, and Otto Abetz, Hitler’s ambassador to Paris during the Second World War. And as we know, Göring was immoderate about helping himself.7

  From October 1940, organized theft followed upon random robbery. “The artworks were first assembled at the Musée du Jeu de Paume and the Louvre, then photographed, valued, recorded, and wrapped ready for transport to Germany,” writes Dorléac.8 Naturally, this contraband included both the classical paintings from the Parisian galleries and modern works, which, as Dorléac puts it, served as “bargaining chips for pieces more in line with the Nazi aesthetic.”

  * * *

  In her classic account, Le Front de l’art, Rose Valland, the heroic protector of French artworks, relates that at the height of the war in 1943 she witnessed a column of smoke rising from the terrace of the Tuileries; it rose from paintings stamped with the letters EK (entartete Kunst), and signed Masson, Miró, Klee, Ernst, Léger, Picasso. “The men of the ERR planned to attack these paintings, run them through with swords, slash them with knives, and carry them to the pyre, as in those gigantic autos-da-fé that had taken place in the German museums, in a bid to destroy those works identified as ‘degenerate.’”9

  Valland was one of two people who tried to keep works of art from museums or private collections from being scattered across Germany. In this saga of art saved from the Nazi madness, the other hero working in the shadows was Jacques Jaujard, the director of the National Museums at the time, and the director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts after the war. It was he who suggested that the Germans draw up an inventory under Valland’s direction. In Le Front de l’art, she tells how she managed to remain in her post at risk of her life in order to create a precise inventory of the stolen paintings. Rising to the post of captain in the French Army, she was sent to occupied Germany after the war to help France recover its stolen property.

  This property came into consideration in the Nuremberg trials. Certainly, compared with the atrocities perpetrated upon human beings, the looting of art in Nazi-occupied territory seemed negligible. Still, the court considered it a war crime, on the ground that by attacking a culture, the Nazis were trying to destroy a people.

  * * *

  Consistent with their plan, as soon as the Nazis occupied Paris on June 14, 1940, they made their way to 21 rue La Boétie. But they were disappointed not to find the family patiently awaiting their arrival.

  On July 4, 1940, the Reich ambassador, Otto Abetz, demanded that the building on rue La Boétie be sequestered by the police and that the artworks be seized. He had in fact just drawn up a list of Jewish dealers or collectors for the Gestapo: Bernheim-Jeune, Alphonse Kann, Jacques Seligmann, Wildenstein, and Paul Rosenberg.

  This outrage continued with the German requisition of rue La Boétie in May 1941. On the eleventh day of that month, the brand-new Institut d’Étude des Questions Juives (IEQJ, Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions), was installed in the building with great pomp.

  I’ve examined the few existing pictures of that installation, and more particularly, I’ve listened to Radio Paris on tapes supplied by the National Sound and Video Archives. The quality of the recording is excellent, with the nasal voice and wounding words of the speaker unmistakably clear: “Today saw the rechristening of the building previously occupied by Rosenberg; the name alone tells you all you need to know.”

  The ceremony opens with remarks on the “disastrous moral influence of Judaism,” delivered by Clément Serpeille de Gobineau, a descendant of the more famous Arthur Comte de Gobineau, the author of the 1853 An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.

  In the photographs and in the National Sound and Video Archives, you can see Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a star guest with impeccable far-right credentials, parking his bike in front of my grandfather’s gallery, on which the name of that formidable new office stands out in capital letters. The porch and the famous exhibition hall are easily recognizable. A huge panel on the wall shows a woman on the ground covered with a French flag, a vulture perched on her belly, with the caption “Frenchmen, help me!”

  In the exact place where my grandfather had hung paintings by Renoir, Picasso, and Léger over the previous few years, a tricolor flag, a portrait of Marshal Pétain, and quotations from Édouard Drumont, the author of La France juive, who, according to commentary of the time, “first raised the issue of the Jewish problem in all its magnitude”: “The Jews came poor to a rich country. They are now the only rich people in a poor country.”And that other quote on the opposite wall: “We are fighting the Jews to give France back its true, its familiar face.”10

  Capt. Paul Sézille was soon appointed secretary-general of the institute, a post he held until December 1942. He was a former right-hand man of the anti-Semitic activist and far-right politician Louis Darquier de Pellepoix and his prewar Anti-Jewish Union. A retired officer of the Foreign Legion, Sézille was, according to the historian Laurent Joly, a man drowning in booze and vitriol. “He was considered one of the most grotesque figures in anti-Semitism between 1940 and 1944, trying to give voice to a healthy France as it seeks to regain its true soul,” writes Joly.11
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  He was followed shortly afterward, in January 1943, by the physician, anthropologist, and racial theorist George Montandon, who remained in office until the last days of August 1944, just before the liberation of Paris. The institute then assumed the name Institut d’Étude des Questions Juives et Ethno-Raciales (IEQJER, Institute for the Study of Jewish and Ethno-Racial Questions). From that date, the Germans wanted to make the institute appear to be what we would now call a research center with the creation of six educational courses, including “Ethnoraciology,” taught by Montandon himself, “Eugenics and Demographics,” and “Judeocracy.”

  * * *

  From the outset, the Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions, established in my family house, was an association created in accordance with the French Associations Law of 1901 and was devoted to anti-Semitic propaganda. Founded in May 1941, and cofinanced by the German Embassy and the Gestapo, it was not dependent on the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives (set up by the Vichy government and run first by Xavier Vallat, then by Darquier de Pellepoix) but was in a direct line of command from the office of Otto Abetz. It was also controlled by “specialists” from Germany, including a certain Dr. Schwarz, a representative of an anti-Jewish institute in Frankfurt.

  * * *

  The IEQJ was in fact directed by Theodor Dannecker, the head of the Jewish Section (Judenreferat) of the Gestapo. Apparently, he had little confidence in the Vichy administration and wanted to set up—under the cover of a seemingly French organization effectively run by the Nazi services—an organization of anti-Semitic propagandists answerable to him alone. According to Joseph Billig, in his three-volume work devoted to the General Commissariat for Jewish Questions, “The ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ was from the very start in the hands of Dannecker’s Judenreferat. The Judenreferat considered that it had been promised ‘supreme power’ over the Jews in France in the future … It was not primarily concerned with Jewish property. Its focus was the Jewish masses themselves. While awaiting the deportations, it organized the Jews into ghettos and prepared the raids.”12

  * * *

  Secretary-General Sézille—was he sitting at Paul’s desk?—took his orders only from Dannecker, whom he called, in the German style, “mein Leutnant.” He often asked the Propagandastaffel to support his private militia. He denounced “the spirit of indecision and the inadequate application of the [German] orders by the Commissariat for Jewish Questions.” And he had no qualms about writing to Dannecker to thank him for the order requiring all Jews to wear the yellow star.

  Though it was an organization under Nazi supervision, Sézille nevertheless sent the press a communiqué on August 21, 1941, affirming that the IEQJ “is an eminently French association, in accordance with the law of July 1, 1901, consisting of resolutely anti-Jewish men of good will … determined to resolve, at all cost and by all means, the Jewish question in France.”

  The institute’s mission was to spread propaganda, and to collect letters of denunciation and ensure that they were “followed up.” In a letter of January 31, 1942, addressed to Xavier Vallat, Sézille boasted of having thirty-three thousand members and seventy thousand signatures in his visitors’ book. The institute published its journals, Le Cahier jaune and La Question juive en France et dans le monde (The Jewish Question in France and the World), and it put on its pièce de résistance, the exhibition The Jew and France at the Palais Berlitz in 1941. Otto Abetz later claimed that it had been organized by the Nazis themselves, but under the cover of the IEQJ for the benefit of the public. Which is to say that the offices at 21 rue La Boétie were working full tilt to organize the exhibition in time.

  I went along to 30 boulevard des Italiens, to the Palais Berlitz, to see what remained of that space. But the walls are silent now. They’ve been replaced by the chain Bistro Romain and a multiplex cinema.

  The cover of the September 6, 1941, issue of L’Illustration is well known. It reproduces the official poster of the exhibition, described by the magazine as a “large allegorical composition showing a kind of long-bearded vampire with thick lips and a hooked nose, with bony fingers like the claws of a bird of prey clutching a globe.”13

  In the cinemas, audiences watched news reports devoted to the famous exhibition.* The commentary accompanying the pictures is, like everything else, difficult to listen to, even more so sixty years on: “Out of every one hundred Frenchmen of old stock, ninety are true whites pure of any other racial mixture. The same cannot be said of the Jews. They are the product of racial mixing that occurred several millennia ago, between Aryans, Mongols, and Negroes. Consequently the Jew has his very own attitudes, gestures, and physiognomy. It is comforting to see the French going to see this exhibition. Henceforth they will be able to identify the Jew and protect themselves against his actions.”

  In this terrifying exhibition, life-size portraits, in black and white, are arranged like targets at a shooting gallery, with a picture of the former prime minister Léon Blum at the center. Below each portrait is the individual’s name with a ribbon identifying his nationality followed by a question mark—“French?”—and the invariable exclamation “No, Jewish!”14

  Some five hundred thousand tickets to the exhibition were sold. Counting half-price entrants, there were a million visitors in Paris before it traveled to other French cities, including, for a time, Bordeaux, Nancy, Marseille, Nice, Cannes, Toulouse, and Lyon, meaning that it also went to the unoccupied zone. History tells us little about whether people came out feeling informed and convinced or indignant and repelled.

  * * *

  Various odd characters anonymously frequented the offices at 21 rue La Boétie. Others, more famous, sometimes complained that they hadn’t been treated very well. On October 21, 1941, Sézille received a letter of rebuke from Céline, who was “a little hurt not to see in the bookshop [of the exhibition] either one of his recent books: Bagatelles [pour un massacre] or L’École [des cadavres],* while there was a flurry of insignificant little books … I observe once again the lamentable shortage (so sensitive in this case) of intelligence and Aryan solidarity.” Sézille replied three days later: “I am myself terribly sorry not to have been able, in spite of all our requests of the publishers, to acquire the books of which you speak and which, I know, are ideally suited to wage the anti-Jewish struggle. But I wish to inform you that we have already had for sale in our shops large numbers of Beaux draps and Mea culpa [two other anti-Semitic tracts by Céline], and that these two books continue to be requested on a daily basis. Please believe me when I say that we have always done and will continue to do the impossible to distribute your works and make sure they have their rightful place.”15

  Who was this man, Capt. Paul Sézille, who was lucky enough to die on April 20, 1944, four months before the liberation of Paris? What hatred inspired him, what blindness afflicted him, what bitterness had he suffered to run this vile organization and publish his shameful books? After the liberation, my grandparents were stunned to discover whole cases of books published by the institute in the cellar of the building. Unfortunately, the notion of “bearing witness,” of the “obligation to remember,” that spread through France in the 1990s had not yet taken hold, and my grandparents, rather than keep the archives, got rid of that library of shame at the first opportunity.

  I kept for a long time the sole survivor of this collection, a book by Captain Sézille himself, whose oeuvre once filled the basement of rue La Boétie. And then, through the various comings and goings of the Rosenberg and Sinclair families, this literature and the trail of the sinister captain disappeared.

  * * *

  During the refurbishment of his gallery, which took several years and wasn’t completed until 1934, Paul asked Picasso to make some marble patterns to be inlaid into the tile floor. Giving him lots of sketches in the hopes that Picasso would create something unique, he first asked him for his designs in August 1928. But since Picasso never met deadlines and took a lot of persuading to carry out a
ny commission, Paul ended up commissioning Braque to complete the project. In each of the four corners of the gallery, Braque created a rectangular marble mosaic, faithfully scaled-down copies of four of his large still lifes: pitchers, plates, lemons, cutlery, and tablecloths well known in his paintings. It was no longer the cubist period—gray, green, and brown—when Braque and Picasso were painting similar pictures with the eternal guitar and the front page of Le Journal. So similar that partly out of a spirit of mischief and partly because they themselves no longer knew who had painted what, the paintings were signed arbitrarily.

  The still lifes in question on the floor of my grandfather’s gallery were brighter, more colorful, and more luminous than the works of that period. They lent themselves to mosaic treatment, recalling the designs on the floors of the patrician Roman villas in Pompeii or Volubilis.

  After the war, when Paul sold the building he no longer wanted to live in, he had Braque’s four marble mosaics cut out of the floor and made into low tables, framed in black marble. I lived alongside two of those tables throughout my youth and often stroked the marble, unaware of the innocent people, denounced and arrested, who had stepped upon them before being handed over to their executioners. The family house on rue La Boétie would have sheltered the executioners. I have never been able to watch Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece The Murderer Lives at Number 21, without thinking about this.

  FLOIRAC

  From the earliest days of Nazism, Paul rejected the regime with every fiber of his being. He actively opposed the sale by the German government of “degenerate art.” And as the president of the SNA, the French association of dealers in fine art and antiques, he tried to persuade his colleagues across Europe to boycott the sales. Yet few people resisted the often exceptional paintings cast onto the market in this way. But Paul would not relent. “Not a cent to the German Reich” was the slogan for a small group that saw masterpieces acquired by less scrupulous dealers disappearing before their eyes.