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

by Sinclair, Anne

  * * *

  In fact, much more bound the two men than a commercial contract. Theirs was an intense collaboration and aesthetic alliance. Indeed, my grandfather was recognized as the man who had orchestrated Picasso’s career, as his “impresario.”1

  More than any other artist, it was Picasso who set up the dealer not only as his spokesperson and intermediary but essentially as his agent. He had very quickly realized that if a painter were to effectively address the public, he had to have just the right dealer, someone with a deeply compatible aesthetic sensibility and nature who would thoughtfully exhibit his work and advocate for him so that the public would understand his originality, his creativity. Picasso intuitively understood the necessity of forging a deep personal bond with the person who would be identified with the exhibition of his canvases.

  Paul knew how to comply with these requirements, enabling Picasso to turn his dealer into a close adviser and traveling companion. “The artist and the gallery owner made one another,” Pierre Nahon later said.2

  Picasso was born in October 1881; Paul, in December of the same year, so they were exact contemporaries. But Paul belonged to the bourgeoisie; Picasso, to the avant-garde. Picasso soon recognized, however, that he could count on Paul to sell his paintings and even though Paul sold hardly any before the mid-1920s, the artist was in a position to wait. Paul could sell the work of his impressionists while gathering support for the contemporary painters who were his passion. Picasso quickly understood that Paul would be able to make and maintain his reputation. Both men readily grasped the significance of the press and cultivated those critics or writers like Pierre Reverdy, who understood this new style of painting and knew how to bring it to the attention of the broader public. Here again a new collaboration was inaugurated among artist, dealer, and art critic.

  It was Paul’s mission to move Picasso from his position in the avant-garde to that of a master of modern painting, “the greatest of the twentieth century,” as Michael FitzGerald was to call him.3 Between 1918 and 1939 Pablo Picasso and Paul Rosenberg promoted each other, creating Picasso’s image and definitively establishing the reputation of my grandfather’s gallery.

  From the outset Paul felt boundless admiration for the painter’s genius. This was an enthusiasm that was all the more surprising, given that, unlike his brother, he had originally been drawn to a more classical form of painting—that of Corot, of Courbet, of the impressionists, of Cézanne and van Gogh—and had never been particularly convinced by to the vogue for cubism.

  In January 1918 Picasso, in straitened financial circumstances, approached my grandfather to sell him a Renoir. But it was not until a face-to-face meeting in the summer of that year that the spark of friendship was ignited.

  * * *

  Paul called Picasso his spiritual brother, and what he felt for him was certainly something like a coup de foudre (love at first sight) of friendship. Indeed, something happened between them—to the extent of complicity, affection, and I would daresay fraternity.

  They met at Biarritz, in the villa La Mimoseraie of Eugenia Errázuriz. This beautiful Chilean woman, a patron of the arts of the belle époque, was a leading light in the world of dealers in fine arts in the 1920s. Picasso had met her through Jean Cocteau. She was a friend of Arthur Rubinstein and Sergei Diaghilev and devoted to the Ballets Russes, probably explaining the connection with Picasso, who also had strong ties with the ballet company. It was in ballet circles that he met Olga Khokhlova, whom he later married and with whom he had a son, Paulo.

  In July 1918, Eugenia invited Olga and Picasso to spend their honeymoon at her house in Biarritz. Picasso happened to be looking for a new dealer at the time. Berthe Weill’s gallery had probably been the first to sell a painting by Picasso (for 150 francs) around 1901, just as she was the first to show paintings by Matisse in 1902. But Picasso soon felt that he needed the financial stability that would allow him to paint with peace of mind. Vollard, notable for discovering Cézanne, bought twenty paintings from him for 2,000 francs in 1906, but this was not enough to free Picasso from financial worry.

  In 1910 Picasso charmed Kahnweiler, who became his dealer in his gallery on rue Vignon, near the Madeleine in Paris. In 1913, Picasso made his first “serious” money when Kahnweiler bought twenty-three paintings from him for 27,250 francs. This was the equivalent of $117,500 today, or just over $4,800 per canvas. Picasso had never had so much money in his life.

  His sense of security didn’t last long. In 1914 Kahnweiler was forced to shut down his gallery because he held German nationality. Picasso was compelled to find a new gallery.

  * * *

  Léonce Rosenberg succeeded Kahnweiler as Picasso’s dealer in 1915. At the time Léonce, passionate about cubism, said to Picasso, “Together we will be invincible. You will be the creation, I the action.”4

  Léonce, who had professionally parted company with his brother in 1910, was the more adventurous of the two. More avant-garde and more of a spendthrift too, acquiring more paintings than he sold. Paul, who was more prudent by nature, betting on nineteenth-century French painters and the impressionists, made calculated incursions into the art of his contemporaries.

  Paul the traditionalist and Léonce the modernist? For a long time the accepted wisdom was that Léonce was a gifted talent spotter but a terrible businessman, and Paul an astute businessman, more inclined toward business than art for its own sake. In fact, Paul wasn’t very interested in old masters, unlike his colleagues who did a thriving trade in these safe bets, and instead took risks by taking on contemporary painters. Laurencin was one of the first of these, in 1913.

  As late as 1943 Paul wrote, “It would be so much simpler and more lucrative for me to make exhibitions of the great French nineteenth-century masters rather than contemporary works that unsettle our visitors.”5

  Besides, in the early years of the twentieth century, dealing in Renoirs meant promoting the art of the recent past. As for the delicate masterpieces of Monet, who died in 1926, they had not yet attained the classic status they have today.

  Paul wasn’t interested in Jean-Honoré Fragonard or François Boucher, both then in vogue, or, unlike his brother, in Gris or Léger. Indeed, Léonce saw cubism as the culmination of all painting, much like those who saw the fall of the Berlin Wall not just as the end of a historical period but as the end of history itself.

  * * *

  In his Galerie de l’Effort Moderne on rue de La Baume not far from rue La Boétie, Léonce wanted to make Picasso the standard-bearer of a school of which the painter himself had wearied. Picasso wanted to break with artist theorists such as Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger and aspired to alter his style of painting. This was a time when he was distancing himself from the cubists and turning his attention instead to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, whose stage sets he wanted to design (much to the displeasure of Léonce, who believed that Picasso was keeping the wrong company if he wanted to fulfill his destiny as emblem of the new school of painting).

  Yet Picasso was in fact returning to his roots in his Rose Period and to his harlequins, who had vanished among the pure, hard lines of cubism. He fell under the influence of Cocteau and his famous Le Rappel à l’ordre, in which the poet rebuked him for allowing himself to become the prisoner of other painters who had copied him and limited the scope of his art. So partly for personal reasons that marked a genuine evolution in his work, but also to attract the patronage of cultural figures such as Cocteau and Eugenia Errázuriz, Picasso began to move from cubism toward a neoclassical style.

  By 1918 relations had cooled between Picasso and Léonce, and Picasso was ripe for his encounter with Paul, even though the artist had until then been Léonce’s most cherished artist. I have found no trace of what must have been a fraternal crisis of conscience for Paul, a source of jealousy for Léonce, or, at the very least, the basis for heated debate between the brothers. All I have found is a statement from Léonce made much later. He was a man who knew how to make the b
est of things, who saw that he was going to lose his painter anyway, and who concluded that it was better if Picasso stayed in the family.

  * * *

  The meeting between Paul and Picasso took place that summer before the end of the First World War. The Rosenbergs had taken a villa in Biarritz, a few hundred yards away from the one owned by the Errázuriz family. Also nearby was Georges Wildenstein, friend and colleague. In fact, the entire Parisian art world convened at the home of Mme Errázurriz, La Mimoseraie. Eventually a verbal agreement was reached: Paul would become Picasso’s representative in France and Europe, and Wildenstein would assume that role in America, where he had already established a gallery. But Wildenstein remained in the background, and when the two dealers fell out in 1932, Paul became Picasso’s international representative and remained so until the end of the war. No actual contract was signed, but Paul was given première vue, or the right of first refusal, on Picasso’s works. This was a model to which he later returned, first with Braque, then Matisse.

  That summer marked a milestone in the family, for both good and ill. The positive was the freedom enjoyed by Paul and Picasso to develop their business dealings and personal friendship. The downside was the deterioration of the relationship between the Rosenberg and Wildenstein families.

  From that time onward there was a very warm bond between Picasso and Paul. The painter savored the peace of mind that came from his contract with Léonce’s brother; he saw the possibility of escaping the lure of cubism, which Paul wasn’t so keen on. Picasso knew that if he showed his work at the Galerie Rosenberg, he wouldn’t be cataloged as just another avant-garde painter but would win his place in the company of masters of the century just past.

  Picasso understood early on the connections that existed between artistic creation and the marketplace, and he sought to impose careful control over the exhibition of his works. As Roland Penrose writes, “Picasso’s friendship with Paul Rosenberg was increased by the dealer’s usefulness as a protector of his interests and the organizer of exhibitions in his fashionable Gallery.”6

  Picasso was thrilled to find a dealer who grasped his desire to transcend cubism. Paul’s genius lay in his ability to effectively juxtapose Picasso and Turner, Monet and Delacroix. But Picasso was not the only one to have been guided in that direction by his dealer. Paul took the same approach with Matisse. As for Braque, with Paul as his dealer, he moved from cubism to … Braque. Paul encouraged all his artists to reintroduce the subject into their painting, even in abstract works. His sense of aesthetics aligned with his commercial instincts, and time ultimately proved him right.

  For the first Picasso exhibition at my grandfather’s gallery, in October 1919, it was Picasso who personally paid for and designed the invitation to the opening. Both men saw this exhibition as representing a break with Picasso’s previous style: there was not a single cubist work to be found among the 167 drawings and watercolors whose variety delighted visitors to the exhibition.

  By selecting these particular works, both painter and gallery owner opted to display a direction for Picasso that was less radical and largely unknown to the public. Picasso had found a way of announcing his return to neoclassicism, while at the same time revealing himself to be a more open painter than was generally thought. He was essentially declaring his refusal to be pigeonholed, to be limited to the one style with which people identified him.

  At 21 rue La Boétie, the public discovered a profusion of drawings of harlequins, bullfighting scenes, circuses, the Ballets Russes, open windows giving out over the sea at Saint-Raphaël, portraits and still lifes closer to the classics than anything that people had known of Picasso until then.

  In the autumn Paul persuaded Picasso to move to the building next door, 23 rue La Boétie, where he and Olga occupied two floors. The two men became intimate in the manner of brothers—inseparable.

  * * *

  I had a palpable sense of that intimacy when I read through a cache of 214 letters that Paul wrote to Picasso between 1918 and his death in 1959, many of them composed at the end of the First World War and continuing through 1940, when the Second World War altered the terms of their relationship.

  What remains of this correspondence is accessible to researchers at the Musée Picasso. I had suspected that a trove of letters was kept in the archive there but had never taken the trouble to consult it, especially since I had so desperately wanted to make a life for myself apart from the history of my family. Once I decided to look into the past, I spent several days perched at the end of a long table in the library, on the top floor right under the rafters, with those letters before me, hoping to gain a better understanding of what it was that linked two such seemingly different men.

  It’s strange, this one-way correspondence, in which you’re forced to imagine the absent replies, trying to fill in the blanks, to tease out the nuances of my grandfather’s relationship with Picasso in those years. Apparently, Picasso didn’t write much, and the few letters he did send to Paul were stolen by the occupying forces or by French colleagues during the war. Perhaps one day I’ll stumble across letters to my grandfather in an old chest of drawers somewhere, ones that begin “Mon cher Rosi” and that are signed by “Pic,” as my grandfather called the painter.

  I am trying to reconstruct that relationship, that singular dialogue between the two men. What did they have to say to each other? Did they exchange platitudes, details about married life, or, like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Peter Eckermann in their famous Conversations, did they talk about Racine and Delacroix? What is certain is that like children, they called to each other from the windows of their respective kitchens, which looked out on the same courtyard. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for Picasso to hold up the painting he was currently working on so that Paul could see it through the window. And few days passed without Picasso’s visiting his dealer, who already seemed a genuine friend.

  These letters have the elegant slanted cursive handwriting typical of the early twentieth century. “Mon cher ami” is followed by “Mon cher Pic” or “Mon cher Casso” (as my mother called Picasso when she was a child). For Picasso, these lighthearted notes were at odds with those he received from Léonce, who was more formal in his bearing, despite his predilection for the avant-garde.

  The familiar tu, absent for twenty years, suddenly appears with the liberation and remains throughout the 1950s, as if these two men, still almost brothers even though they were never again as close as they had once been, had decided that the turmoil of the twentieth century had swept away the polite distance of the prewar years.

  * * *

  Paul is plainly feeling his way at first, discovering the art of the painter whose greatness he senses but is still trying to grasp. “Léonce says you’re a greater painter as a cubist than you are as a painter from nature … Am I too narrow-minded?”7

  In the 1920s, Picasso is having a grand time in London. Paul is fascinated by Picasso’s celebrity and the excitement with which he is received into British high society. Picasso becomes a member of the “ultra chic” as described by Michael FitzGerald.8

  * * *

  Picasso himself confirms that in London he is “seeing the beau monde,” and he seems to love every minute of it. In fact, he retains his taste for the high life until his surrealist years, when he falls under the spell of his young girlfriend Marie-Thérèse Walter and locks himself away in his château at Le Boisgeloup.

  * * *

  In essence, these letters, which I read to soak up as much of this close male friendship as possible, deal with holidays, travels, when one or the other of them is away from Paris. And in fact, why would they have needed to write to each other when they lived within shouting distance, apart from the friendly little notes that you might drop off at your neighbor’s house? “Can we come up and see you after dinner? Please reply through the window,” Paul writes in 1918. Or in 1931, in a playful tone: “I dropped in at yours, you weren’t there. I hereby summon you to my house.�
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  Paul stays in Paris or leaves for Deauville in the summer, while Picasso—before the 1950s, the days of Brigitte Bardot and the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave—discovers the Côte d’Azur, Juan-les-Pins, Antibes (later Cannes and Mougins), and settles there for several weeks to paint. He is as intoxicated as Cézanne or van Gogh by the colors and the dazzling sunlight of the south. In those sultry days of summer Le Midi is a wild world spurned by the bourgeoisie, who prefer the cooler climates and more snobbish atmosphere of Normandy.

  * * *

  Picasso, with his paint, his brushes, and his imagination, had no need to travel far to discover new worlds. In fact, he tended not to travel much at all and never set foot in the United States, despite the fact that he was celebrated there. Paul, however, was a passionate traveler; travel delighted his senses, and he wanted his wife and children to discover Europe. Europe—or rather the museums of Europe. For the Rosenberg family, there was no time for hanging around in the square, going shopping, or dancing flamenco in Spanish bars. These holidays were studious affairs that moved from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to the Prado in Madrid and from the Accademia in Venice to the National Gallery in London. Paul adored Italy. From Florence, in 1923, he wrote to his friend Pic, “I’m getting more and more disgusted by mediocre painting. Three painters transcend admiration: Corot, Cézanne, and you. The primitive painters and the old masters make me love your painting even more.”

  He discovered Egypt in January 1936 and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the Egyptian Museum, the Pyramids, and Luxor. “Such artists, unencumbered by the weight of convention!” he wrote. Jerusalem, on the other hand, left him cold. “I don’t recognize my ancestors at all. I’d rather complain in Paris than wail like my fellow Jews by a wall.” (In those years, during the British mandate period, the Wailing Wall was accessed only through a tiny alleyway, an arrangement that persisted until the Six-Day War in 1967, when the wall was wrested from Jordan.) There was no mystical revelation for Paul, no emotion at the sight of those ancient stones from the temple that had been destroyed.