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

by Sinclair, Anne

  So it is that I find, in my dusty boxes, a second piece of paper from 1913, reminding Paul that he had to apply for naturalization if he wanted to become a French citizen. The paper is signed by Louis Barthou, who was the minister of justice at the time and was killed in Marseille in 1934 by a stray bullet during the attempted assassination of Alexander of Yugoslavia by the Ustashe.

  Although he was born in Paris, my grandfather became French as the result of will in a France that, on the brink of the First World War, was keen to call up as many of its young men as possible. In short, my Frenchness is fairly recent on that side of the family. There were, at this time of the Third Republic, no French laws especially favorable to the children of immigrants.

  * * *

  Paul joins his father’s business in January 1898, at the age of sixteen. “He wanted me to learn the trade while I was still young. He started by making me copy out letters and file them. After eight days, I told him I’d only keep on doing that when I’d finished my art studies. He agreed, and here I am running around museums, taking notes.”1 He begins by studying the arts of antiquity—of the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks—before ending up with the moderns. During the holidays he travels around the museums of Europe and ends up well acquainted with them. “Knowing the primitives, having studied their expression, their writings, the modes of expression they had adopted, allowed me to understand at a very young age that there was no process, that all that mattered was the laws of construction, relationships of values, volumes, lines and what it was that they wanted to express … I went out with my father, who initiated me into the antique dealer’s trade and corrected my impressions. I became presumptuous and criticized the artistic purchases he made without me.”

  For better or worse, however, he is learning. “We had an old china dinner set, pink background, and we had a barrel in the same color. One day one of our clients, the Prince de St. L., came to the house and I sold him the set, including the barrel, which cost on its own more than the rest of the set. Amazed by the price, the buyer insisted on taking the pieces away in person. Very proud of the sale, I told my father, who called me all the names of the day and declared that I would never be fit for the trade! I must admit that I wasn’t proud of my beginnings as a businessman.”

  But over time his eye improves, and Paul thinks he’s made it. “Because you know your way around,” his father tells him, “go to London, open a gallery, do some business and try not to make any mistakes.” So the young man sets off at the age of nineteen, sure that he will be lavishly praised upon his return. “Alas, my first experiences were no more successful. Without my father, I had no one to guide me.” Looking for paintings by the rather academic Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, he hurries to buy a work by an A. Stevens, who turns out to be Agrippa rather than Alfred, that has no commercial value whatsoever. But he soon makes progress. He buys two Monets for 250 pounds, two drawings by van Gogh for 40, and wins the trust of his father. Having retired from dealing in objets d’art to devote himself entirely to paintings, Alexandre hopes that his sons will become dealers in paintings in turn.

  In 1906 Alexandre, now in poor health, sets up his two sons at 38 avenue de l’Opéra, where Paul realizes that selling the impressionists isn’t going to bring in enough to earn a living. “We were forced to buy ‘salable’ paintings.” By this he means the Barbizon School, which continues to dominate the taste of the times. Still, Paul tries unsuccessfully to sell a painting by the Barbizon painter Félix Ziem to a buyer who thinks that six thousand francs for a view of Venice with a crooked campanile is pretty steep. He also tries to off-load a portrait of Louis XIV on a descendant of the Bourbons, who is disappointed when Paul naively tells him that he doesn’t look a bit like his ancestor.

  “I was successful, but I was troubled by the idea that I was selling paintings I didn’t like, certain that they wouldn’t be recognized in the future. It was then that I determined to sell everything I owned and invest in the impressionists. I realized that if I were going to compete with the big auction houses of the day, I needed to buy only the highest-quality works, and rely on time to make a name for myself.”

  These were in fact the two lessons that he drew from his apprenticeship and put to good use some years later. First repeating, with modifications, his experience with the impressionists, he deliberately chose to sell paintings that he truly loved and waited for art lovers to recognize their beauty. Over the course of ten years and two distinct phases, he moved from the Barbizon School to the works of Pablo Picasso. He would bide his time.

  From that moment on, he forged the reputation that stayed with him throughout his life. In forty years, from Paris to New York, from his father’s gallery on avenue de l’Opéra, to his own near Madison Avenue, his imprimatur was the absolute quality of the works he sold.

  * * *

  But his passion for the modernists never allowed him to forget his great love of Renoir. Sometime ago, in Paris, I forced myself to go to the Grand Palais to see the exhibition of late Renoirs, the ones he painted at the start of the last century. I confess to finding Renoir’s paintings facile, more tiresome than enchanting, perhaps because they have been reproduced once too often, printed on a thousand-and-one posters, tea towels, or place mats. It’s a bit like a lover of classical music’s not wanting to hear Mozart’s Forty-first Symphony—the Jupiter—for the umpteenth time, after it’s been played over and over again by every orchestra on the planet.

  I was convinced that Renoir’s late style—vague, reddish, and allegorical—debased the oeuvre of his glorious years. A judgment inherited, I believed, from Paul and then passed on to me by my mother, it struck me as irrefutable.

  And yet that exhibition, Renoir in the Twentieth Century, was a real gift. It brought together the paintings from 1880 to 1890, when Renoir was distancing himself from the impressionist revolution, painting en plein air, in favor of a series of portraits of sweet, dreamy girls: Gabrielle—his son Jean’s nanny—with her charming profile; bathers at their toilet; scenes of ordinary bourgeois life (girls doing their hair, reading, sewing, or taking piano lessons); voluptuous nudes not unlike those of Boucher or Rubens. Among the very last paintings was Les Baigneuses, given to the state by Renoir’s sons in 1923, just after his death. I don’t like this painting, although Renoir himself called it a “success” and a “springboard for experiments to come.” I don’t like his soft, fleshy odalisques and as a result agreed with the blunt judgment of Renoir’s work that my family history attributed to Paul.

  I say “attributed” because the exhibition finished with a big surprise: a whole wall covered with huge photographs of the 1934 exhibition that Paul had devoted to Renoir in his gallery, showing a selection of the canvases from the painter’s last years. In it I saw all the paintings that were the real treasures of the retrospective at the Grand Palais, including those baigneuses that seem so flabby and pink to me today.

  And it was one of those canvases, known by its American name, Reclining Nude, that my grandparents donated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1956, the first painting by Renoir to enter that museum, which sold it only a few years ago to buy a van Gogh, since American museums have the right to buy and sell the works in their collection. And it was one of the stellar paintings at the big Renoir exhibition at the Grand Palais in September 2009, one of the paintings that, by their own accounts, inspired Picasso and Matisse.

  * * *

  Paul carefully recorded two of his visits to Renoir’s studio, one that occurred on November 21, 1919, just before the artist died, and one on December 6, 1919, the day of his funeral.

  In November he found the old painter in the studio that he had built on the edge of his property, Les Collettes, in Cagnes-sur-Mer in the south of France: “He seemed pleased to see me, and although I had a sense that he had lost weight, he was always cheerful, happy to paint, and as charming and clever as he was always said to have been … I brought him a photograph of a big Corot figure that I had just bought. �
��Corot,’ he said to me, ‘is a creature apart in the nineteenth century, he is timeless.’ …

  “Before sunset, we brought Renoir back from his studio to his villa … he in his wheelchair, wrapped in furs and with a beret on his head. I walked beside him, bareheaded, talking to him about the beautiful spectacle of nature. The path was lined with olive trees, women picked the ripe olives, children played, dogs rested in the last rays of sunlight and the women paused to say, ‘Good evening, M. Renoir’; the children stopped playing and the dogs came to greet their master. And he, like a grand priest, lowered his head and, smiling, replied, ‘Good evening, good evening.’

  “At that moment, through olive trees that seemed to become increasingly gnarled, the sea became bluer, the women more beautiful, the sun warmer, to cry out their admiration for the man who had known how to paint women, nature, sun.”

  * * *

  Paul returned to Les Collettes only two weeks later for Renoir’s funeral, after his death on December 3. He was one of the few people present at the burial of one of the greatest symbols of French art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  “His coffin rested in a modest hearse, without horses, adorned with ostrich feathers … The cortège set off, slowed down by a number of men, down the steep coast road that leads from Les Collettes to the little village of Cagnes. A church, really more of a simple shed, welcomed the crowd and friends from the neighborhood, with rudimentary pews, the coffin placed in front of the altar against two half doors with lowered blinds.

  “The service began very simply, with no sermons, no music, no ceremonial dress, as Renoir himself would have wished. The priest, his friend, a great man, uttered the ritual prayers, but he did so with an emotion that affected the entire congregation: words of praise for the great painter, the great man of goodwill as well as the great believer who, behind his rebellious façade, always sang the beauty of nature … I think that in other times, other ages, he would have had a national funeral.”

  Apart from the story of his initiation into the business, Paul wrote very little: a preface here and there, an article in an art magazine. Besides these fragments of memoir, he felt that it was not his role or his destiny to write. Was this a result of an inability to sit still, shyness, indifference, depression, or lucidity? It is hard to know. Though Paul was keen for recognition, publishing his opinions on the theory of art did not seem a necessary part of his identity.

  Nor do I have testimony of his experiences in the First World War. I haven’t found any of the letters from the front that he should have written to the pretty young wife he had married in July, a month before war was declared. They were probably lost in the upheavals of 1940. Having enlisted, like all the young men of his age, in 1914, he was demobilized in 1916 for poor health, the first signs of the ulcer that was to plague him for the rest of his life. All I have of him from this period is a brittle, yellowed photograph of a soldier with a mustache like those worn by the poilus of times past.

  There isn’t much evidence of his political opinions either. Yet we do know that having been a fervent admirer of the de Gaulle of the Free French, he strenuously distanced himself from the man on May 13, 1958,* to become openly anti-Gaullist. Living in New York, he had harsh words for the arrogance of the general.*

  Having lived a bourgeois life, Paul was a wise man who came from the calm left and might have been called a radical socialist. As a student he had fought the anti-Dreyfusards, and he admired the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès. In 1936 he voted for the Front Populaire, the left-wing coalition. In his own way, from within the art market itself and through his actions, he resisted the fascist ideas that were poisoning Europe. The heroism of his son in the Second Armored Division was also something with which he deeply identified.

  Later I found many letters from the 1950s, including the one he wrote to my mother in 1952, in which he tells of the “mass of workers who can’t make ends meet, who live in deprivation and on pitiful wages, will in due course rise up … Too many foreign-made luxury cars, too many overpriced restaurants. Too much poverty, too much outward luxury … and only charity for those who have nothing.” This certainly wasn’t a revolutionary diatribe, but the sentiments are clearly of the left. I am not trying to pretend that my grandfather was of the extreme left; far from it. Nor am I trying to minimize his bitterness at the time toward a France that had cast him out. But such expressions of outrage—and I’ve found many of them in his correspondence—testify to his personal revolt against injustice and inequality.

  And yet Paul Rosenberg led a very comfortable life, and he certainly hadn’t made his way from bohemia to the bourgeoisie and then to the Communist Party, as his friend Picasso had done. Still, he didn’t judge current affairs purely in terms of his membership in the class that he lived within. Gauche caviar, we would now call it, “champagne socialism,” a term used to mock anyone who doesn’t automatically assume the dominant political opinions of his social milieu. As if a person’s bank account determined his actions more than his convictions; as if the wealthy could vote only for the interests of their own.

  * * *

  Few ideological confidences are revealed in his papers, but in 1927 he did give a very strange interview about his family origins to “Feuilles volantes,” a supplement of the magazine Cahiers d’art. The interviewer was E. Tériade, the famous art critic and publisher. Oddly, Tériade asks his questions very seriously and doesn’t seem at all put off by Paul’s fantastical replies, which are clearly intended satirically: “I come from a very old family lost in the mists of time. My ancestors, repelled by the mood in Palestine at that time, had wanted to sell the Tablets of the Law, but experts contested the sale. One of my ancestors authenticated the vase of Soissons … I find one of my ancestors among the Knights Templar. He died at the stake, and for the first time in his life he gave something away: his soul, to God … My father went to Mesopotamia, to examine the remains of the Tower of Babel. He visited India, Lutetia, Belleville and Montparnasse. He was a very noble man, very cultured and so generous that he saw to it that I was born on December 29, 1881, at three o’clock in the afternoon … At the age of 16, I entered the family firm. For starters, my father gave me copies of all the letters to archive. That task, which could have been terribly dreary, gave me a passion for invoices, and I already dreamed of the ones that I would later sign with my own name … My chief concern was to know whom the paintings I was to examine were by, and whether or not they were authentic. So I was obliged to find an infallible way of gathering information on those two points. For the first, I had discovered that by secretly reading the signature on the painting, I could discover the name of the painter. As to the authenticity of the canvases … I looked to see whether the paintings submitted to me were reproduced in catalogs or books. If that was the case, I maintained with great authority that they were entirely authentic. Even today, I behave in a similar fashion!”2

  “What do you think about your painters?” the interviewer asks. My grandfather’s response bears more than a trace of irreverence: “I am protected by every possible guarantee, and by the opinion of appeal court experts, distinguished chemists and manufacturers of canvases and frames, and I can assure you that I sell good, fault-free merchandise … My greatest ambition is to show in the Lépine* competition all the tricks I’m forced to come up with to convince my clients that what I’m selling are paintings.”

  “What do you think of your fellow dealers?” asks the unfortunate critic, undeterred.

  “I hold each of them in exactly the same esteem as he holds me.”

  Does that mean that this Paul, whom I see as more austere than playful, more of an ascetic than a bon vivant, also had an amusing and frivolous side? In truth, I think his character tended to be more on the gloomy side, as suggested by his correspondence with Picasso, to which I shall return.

  A four-page handwritten letter that Paul sent to Henri Matisse on December 2, 1939, three months after World War II had begun, a
dds to this portrait of a complex soul. He is writing to the painter with questions about his art. “It seems to me that you want too much out of life,” Paul replies to Matisse’s nostalgic letter. “What is it? A quarter of an hour of happiness, the rest all troubles, suffering and doubt! Do you want to be even more privileged than you are, do you want the heavenly gift of creating, of expressing yourself, without the pain that that entails? Everyone pays for what he has with what he doesn’t have.

  “Why wouldn’t you doubt it? It’s what gives you your strength, the expression of youth and creativity that are in your works. Don’t you think that others doubt as well?… I am filled with doubts, I have feelings of despair like yours … Look at our friend Picasso, who not only doubts but is gnawed by torment … Are you sure that Corot doesn’t doubt just as much as Cézanne, the master of masters, the greatest of martyrs alongside Michelangelo?… We are all moving irrevocably toward an ideal that we will never attain, and I say we are fortunate in this because [otherwise] it would mean the end of life … If you knew the despair I feel at being inactive … you would be calmer, because you at least can take refuge in your art.”3

  We encounter this idea of being an intermediary rather than a creator several times in his correspondence. There is, for example, this letter dated December 28, 1949, again to Matisse: “If only I could create something, if God had given me that gift, I would find boundless pleasure in doing it. But alas, I must content myself with enjoying my own admiration for the creations of others, not least your own works.”4