I too am more unsettled by the house than I’d anticipated. I must be visibly shaken, because the mayor’s deputies suggest stopping off at the town hall, just around the corner, for a glass of water. It’s oppressively hot. The mayor, Conchita Lacuey, who is also the Socialist Party deputy of the Gironde, the department that includes Bordeaux, drops in to greet me warmly, to tell me how amazed she is by life’s coincidences, and turns the moment into a photo opportunity. “You never know,” she says, on that late-summer day. Her own grandparents, hard-line republicans, arrived from Spain more or less as my fleeing family was entering the country.
AT THE CENTRE POMPIDOU
The war and the mark that it left on our house on rue La Boétie, the conditions under which my family stayed in Floirac, and finally their desperate quest for refuge in the United States are consuming me.
I need to retrace my steps, to get back to the very core of things, to my grandfather’s work, and to scour the family archives. I plan to immerse myself in them when I am in New York, though I am mostly living in Washington, D.C., at this point. But on a visit to Paris, I take the opportunity to call the Centre Georges Pompidou, to see if its archives have any information about my grandfather.
After a chilly reception from the director, Alfred Pacquement, I am welcomed more warmly by Didier Schulmann, who is in charge of the Kandinsky Library. We arrange a meeting for May 10. May 10? The twenty-ninth anniversary of Mitterrand’s victory? What’s the connection? Only that which leads from politics to modern art and back again.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing much of interest about my grandfather in the museum, Schulmann tells me, except for some photographic plates that are stored off-site. I have another pleasant interview with one of the curators at the Centre Pompidou, Christian Derouet, who was responsible for the Kandinsky exhibition there several years ago. Derouet worked for a long time on Léonce Rosenberg’s archives and told me he’d come across Léonce’s brother, Paul, in the course of his research.
The reception I get from M. Pacquement indicates that he still bears a certain degree of rancor toward my family, which had some ten years before retrieved from the Centre Pompidou basement a painting stamped “MNR, Musées Nationaux Récupération: National Museums Recovery.”* At the time the museum had been unwilling to return that painting by Fernand Léger, Woman in Red and Green, also called Knight in Armor, on the pretext that the museum directors didn’t know whether the painting, which they acknowledged had been stolen from rue La Boétie, belonged to Paul or to Léonce. So the court decided, quite logically, that if there was any doubt, the painting should go to both families and that the heirs—my mother, my aunt, and Léonce’s descendants—were to share the work, as was done without difficulty. It was understandable enough that the Centre Pompidou didn’t know to which part of the family it should restore the painting, and it wasn’t hard to grasp its unwillingness to part with such a beautiful work of art.
Because it was not realistic for all the Rosenberg cousins to share the painting, a decision was made to sell it. I wasn’t very interested in it at the time since I’d barely been aware of the research done by my family, especially my aunt and cousins in New York, who had sought the painting’s retrieval. But I do remember my mother’s telling me about the strange feeling she had had as she gazed at that painting, which was completely new to her, its having passed through the gallery without her ever setting eyes on it.
I subsequently learned that between September 1939 and June 1940 my mother and her parents had left Paris, but Léonce, my grandfather’s brother, hadn’t wanted to follow them. He spent the war in the capital, proudly wearing his yellow star, and miraculously escaped the roundup before dying in 1947. A great discoverer of new talent but always penniless, he often asked my grandfather for money in return for paintings that he owned and stored at rue La Boétie. That was what happened during the winter of 1939–40, in a transaction with Paul, who was based in Floirac. Léonce received a wire transfer from his brother and put his Léger in Paul’s gallery, where it was stolen in July 1940, when the property was handed over to the Germans and a few French opportunists. Subsumed by the state after the war, Woman in Red and Green slumbered peacefully at the Centre Pompidou, labeled “MNR,” while neither the family nor the museum were aware of its resting place.
* * *
Though there are no archives on my grandfather at the Centre Pompidou, I am granted exceptional permission to consult the photographic plates taken in the family gallery, which are kept in the Kandinsky Library archives in one of the museum’s warehouses. All collections not on display have been transferred to massive storerooms for fear that a flood, which seems to happen every hundred years or so, might once again inundate the basements of the Paris museums, as happened in 1910.
It’s the largest of those great warehouses, or at least the one that houses the treasures of the Musée d’Art Moderne that aren’t on display. Mile after mile, seemingly endless avenues are filled with mysteriously numbered crates containing sculptures that may never have been seen by anyone. Great cabinets mounted on wheels contain countless paintings that remain hidden from the human eye. Dozens of unmounted canvases on rollers, like the shelves in a rug showroom. I spot a Warhol and a Miró crying out to be hung.
In another high-security section behind a reinforced double door, for which you need a special badge to enter, I step inside the rooms where the photographic archives are kept. There are thousands of glass plates, all meticulously cataloged. A number of filing boxes represent the Paul Rosenberg collection. My mother and my uncle donated it to the Ministry of Culture in 1973 to grant researchers access to the works in their original state. Here they are, dusty and fragile, like memory itself. Dozens of cartons marked Bissière,* Braque, Laurencin, Matisse, and Léger hold heavy plates of glass, artifacts of a photographic process used before the war. Most were taken by a famous art photographer at the time who went by the name Routhier and are of peerless quality.
In those prints I see the exhibition halls that I recently visited at rue La Boétie, the paneling reaching halfway up the wall and the unmistakable glass ceiling with its little star-shaped windows. The black-and-white photographs look strange, given that these are such famous and vivid paintings, but the prints are so magical that you can almost imagine they’re in full color.
The glass plates that move me most are the ones commemorating exhibitions by Matisse or Braque in the late thirties, probably because I’ve seen other photographs taken only a few months later in the same settings; only this time the paintings of the two great masters have been replaced by the portrait of Pétain and violently anti-Semitic slogans.
I open these boxes more or less at random and delicately lift the pictures from their yellowed envelopes, those plates of glass so fragile that some of them are broken or cracked. The cracks disturb me: Is it just the damage wrought by time, or is it abuse by the occupying forces that pilfered them? Perhaps it doesn’t matter; the damage cannot be reversed. And deep in the recesses of the archives, the past somehow feels beyond reach. Why only now do I want to know who my grandfather was, what kind of person he was, how he lived? Why only now am I exploring his world?
GENNEVILLIERS
I decide to try to visit all the places where my family’s memory is preserved. So: to the furniture depository where I’ve stored most of the papers and photographs that I hurriedly gathered from my mother’s house after her death. It’s freezing in this big unit at Gennevilliers, where moving men bring in the containers on casters and open them up in my presence, as in a morgue. Why do I feel like a gravedigger, when emptying my mother’s cupboards did not make me feel that way?
I set off again quickly, very quickly, with a big cardboard box in the trunk of my car, chosen from the twenty-five or so boxes that had been stored. I’ll spend the next two nights sifting through photographs and letters. Most of these chests contain the papers of France Forever, of which my mother was secretary-general. The U.S.-based inform
ation organization was set up to relay to the Americans the efforts of the Free French and the Resistance. In 1940 and 1941, before Franklin Roosevelt entered the war, the Americans needed proof that the French deserved to be helped and weren’t just a nation that had simply capitulated to the occupying forces, as it was fashionable to write in the 1960s and 1970s. Emmanuelle Loyer speaks about France Forever as “an association set up on the initiative of a group of French who had settled in the United States, to ‘drum up sympathy and material help for Free France.’”1
I unwrap these relics as if they were remnants of a vanished world: a Cross of Lorraine (de Gaulle’s symbol of resistance); a photograph of General de Gaulle signed to my mother, Micheline Rosenberg, which she kept even after becoming a fervent anti-Gaulliste. And the collection of pamphlets published by France Forever, written and designed by my mother.
I feel guilty. She would have loved me to have shown an interest in her wartime efforts while she was alive. And yet I’d always found her glorification of France Forever a bit tiresome. I’d even told her, dismissively, in that sullen teenage way, that Roosevelt had entered the war only because of Pearl Harbor and that it certainly had nothing to do with France Forever. This wasn’t necessarily untrue, but it was cruel to try to disparage her work as an activist and to prefer the heroes of the shadows that clashed in Kiev or skirmished in the desert.
For my mother, the war years in New York were—shocking though it may seem—captivating. Though they were not the happiest years of her life, they were certainly the most fulfilling. These were the years when she had genuinely exciting tasks to perform, ones to which she had committed herself completely, with talent and imagination.
From the boxes I take notebooks and drafts of letters and reports, wondering how such an intelligent woman could allow herself to be locked away in a conventional life of marriage and motherhood without ever searching for the freedom and the friends she missed once the war was over. Such a life seemed such a waste to the young woman that I was in the 1970s and 1980s. For me, as for my contemporaries who tried to “have it all,” that conventional way of being was out of the question.
In addition to these notebooks, these brochures emblazoned with red, white, and blue rosettes, Lorraine crosses, and editorials dissecting the ideological differences between General de Gaulle and General Henri Giraud (who was preferred by the Americans since they mistrusted the head of the Free French), I find a treasure trove of personal papers and letters.
I stay up till the small hours sorting and filing that huge archive: heating bills from the Floirac residence at the beginning of the war; ration cards from the Gironde in 1940 and Paris in 1945; the rulings from cases brought—and won—by my family against certain vultures; letters from Léger or Matisse to my grandfather from 1939—so many other letters! My grandfather’s tiny, slanting handwriting, expressing a little bit of himself.
These letters date both from the war and from the years that followed and reveal the grand obsession of Paul’s life: his paintings, which he loved as if they were living beings. For him, their recovery after the war, a source of so much anguish, reflected his determination to see his rights acknowledged and to ensure that his children would have a comfortable life. There is much humility in these letters, and some shy and tender outpourings to his son, Alexandre, who relieved him of the worry of running the gallery during the 1950s; to his daughter, Micheline, who lived far away in Paris; and to me, his granddaughter, whom he called “my darling sweetie.”
* * *
There are heaps of photographs, all quite unreal to me. In this picture, the thin, distant-looking old man of my childhood appears young and gaunt. He is wearing a sleeveless bathing costume in a swimming pool in Monte Carlo (necessarily elegant). He is teaching my mother to dive. Or in 1930 he is with his wife and two children skating at Saint Moritz (elegant, always elegant), in baggy Tintin-style trousers, his hair blowing in the wind.
Was he tender? Was he cheerful, my grandfather who was a father first and foremost, a papa who asked his children to call him by his first name? That shocked the gentle Marguerite Blanchot, who worked for my grandparents for fifty years and who always said, “People will say that Monsieur is not the children’s father!”
In fact, Paul was an anxious and shy man who relaxed more easily in his letters to his beloved daughter than in his conversations with her.
* * *
During the 1950s, and throughout his life, Paul complained with less and less detachment about his health, which was poor, and about his business, which was actually thriving but which he thought was in a terrible state. He worried about political instability in France and about the Korean War, which he thought might worsen at any moment. He pleaded with my mother to come back to New York with my father and me for our own safety and suggested leaving for Argentina, which was described by relatives who had emigrated there as the new El Dorado. To Argentina, like so many former Nazis? To flee again, when there was no real threat? To resume the immigrant lifestyle, in a remote corner of the world, farther from a danger that had already passed?
Sanity prevailed. Having set off on a reconnaissance trip to Juan Perón’s Buenos Aires, Paul came back posthaste and made us unpack all the suitcases that stood in the hallway. Had he sensed that the country, once the richest in South America, was about to go into decline, into a period of galloping inflation under a series of bloody dictatorships?
He remained concerned about the future, finding little relief or reassurance in the fact that the nightmare was now over. It was as if with each successive international event, his identity and his family’s might once more be called into question. The letters were largely devoted to the arrangements he wanted to make so that my mother and her brother could keep the gallery running, reflecting his life’s work: the need to introduce people to contemporary culture, to make them understand it, to spread its message in a barbaric world.
He asked Alexandre to develop and manage this gallery, and my uncle did so scrupulously until his death in 1987. As for his sister, my mother, she had to defer to Alexandre, to place blind trust in his instincts for running the business. And above all, the two Rosenberg children were supposed to remain united. In fact, my uncle Alexandre fulfilled the promise he made to his father so loyally that he often took greater care of his sister than he did of his own family.
Alexandre was an aesthete, the first president of the Art Dealers Association of America, and a connoisseur in great demand for the infallibility of his eye. His family—his wife, cousins, sister, niece—called him Kiki, the nickname his parents had given him when he was born in 1921 in the apartment at rue La Boétie, with Picasso as witness. They probably wouldn’t have guessed that this childish nickname would later be applied to a very serious man behind a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. Although he retained his French nationality, Alexandre eventually married an American woman, my aunt Elaine, and became a true New Yorker. Yet he remained attached to French culture and was keen that his children, my cousins Elisabeth and Marianne, take advantage of their dual nationality to pursue their higher education in Paris.
Unlike his father, Alexandre had embarked on his journey through the art world more out of filial duty than his own personal taste, which inclined more toward literature, philosophy, and fifteenth-century incunabula. He was less sociable than his father—more brusque—and while his love of art was limitless, his love of commerce was not. So much so that after my grandfather’s death the Galerie Paul Rosenberg lost its dynamism and relied on its existing inventory. Though the two families were kept very comfortable for more than fifty years, the holdings gradually dwindled. Of the more than three hundred works recovered from the original collection, four major works have stayed with me.
* * *
I knew my uncle well but still have trouble envisioning Paul, his father, who lived through the final years of the nineteenth century and the first exhilarating yet tragic half of the twentieth. I have to banish the anxiety-ridden lette
rs written at the end of his life and imagine what must have given him joy: to discover works of artistic genius by his contemporaries and to become entwined with their stories. I must immerse myself in his world, the world of a passionate and original art dealer.
DEALER
For a long time the language of the dealer irritated me. Words like “objets d’art,” or “rare and beautiful things,” to quote the phrase on the façade of the Musée de l’Homme, made me cringe. If my grandfather had sold jeans or tins of sardines, I wouldn’t have considered it unseemly, but when I was young, getting rich by trading in objets d’art carried the same sulfurous whiff as the banking profession does today. Nothing dishonest, exactly, but an “impure” quality amplified by the French disdain for money.
The image of bohemian painters dying in garrets made me mistrust the trade of those who prospered from selling paintings. The idea of commerce, of trade, of buying canvases from indigent painters before selling them at a considerable profit troubled me. Julius II ensuring the glory of Michelangelo or Peggy Guggenheim buying a painting a day: these were noble efforts to preserve the arts.
On the other hand, I would have been hugely impressed by a man motivated entirely by the love of art, a kind of patron whose raison d’être was the survival of good taste and the disinterested promotion of penniless young artists.
And then I got older. I learned that the world according to Proudhon exists mostly in books, that making money isn’t necessarily a sin (that is, if you don’t exploit anybody), that you might even consider it moral to produce wealth rather than simply benefit from the wealth of society.
My Grandfather's Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War Page 5
