My grandfather was Jewish by name, by affiliation, by tradition, but not by assertion. I have many memories of my grandmother, a very pious woman who recited her prayers in her bedroom every morning and evening and had a regular seat in the synagogue on rue de la Victoire, like the old prewar families who were referred to as Israelites. But I have no memory of a strong connection, if it ever existed, between my grandfather and Judaism. A heavy smoker (several packs a day), he made it a point of honor not to touch a cigarette on Yom Kippur, if only to emphasize that he was making more of a sacrifice than the rest of the family in terms of fasting and piety.
* * *
Paul and Pic obviously came from very different social backgrounds, and if Picasso had his bourgeois period—suit, waistcoat, cigar—it was during the years when he was close to Paul, geographically and socially. “My dream,” he once told Léonce, is “to be rich but to live like a pauper.”
The invoices from 1920 to 1921 that I found among the family papers reveal that by the standards of the day Paul offered his painters generous terms: Paul bought a large painting by Picasso for fifty thousand francs, a watercolor for twelve hundred francs, a cubist still life for twenty-four hundred francs (as early as October 1923 Picasso, having acquired a flair for business, more than doubled his prices). In 1941 Paul told Newsweek: “From Picasso’s studio I choose the paintings I’m interested in acquiring, then we talk prices, and that’s when the fun begins. We exchange harsh words but always in a friendly tone. Once I told him I’d like to bite one of his cheeks and kiss the other!”
So one of them had what the French would now call his bobo (bourgeois-bohemian) period. The other, who wasn’t bohemian at all, frequented a society in Deauville, Évian, or Saint Moritz, yet constantly complained about everything, especially the rain in Normandy. He dreamed of the sun of the Midi.
* * *
“We’re very busy here … meeting people we see every day in Paris.” And Paul jokes to Picasso: “It’s the sort of country you’d like, very cubist and full of proportions. It’s also full of the French and foreigners, (1) of flirtatious and respectable women, (2) of gamblers and serious people, (3) of crooks and honest people, (4) of people who have gone to prison, and people who will, (5) of people who are enjoying themselves and others who just show their faces out of snobbery. There is, in fact, a disproportion,” he adds, although it’s impossible to tell in which of these categories—the amused or the snobbish—he puts himself.
* * *
But these jeremiads, which were not unusual as far as Paul was concerned, are a bit hypocritical because he didn’t really dislike those holidays among Parisian high society. He marveled at his children’s rosy cheeks and, like everyone else, stayed up late playing baccarat every night, dressed like the others in his tuxedo, while criticizing those, including his own wife, who intoxicated themselves with sybaritic pleasures during those années dorées, which were années folles for a small sector of French society.
Paul complains of being far from his paintings, which are still in Paris, and says he can’t wait to get back to his gallery once summer is over. “All the top people are here,” he writes to Picasso. “The higher the class of society, the lower their morals.” In September 1929 he writes: “I’m coming back from Deauville. No rest, it’s busier than in Paris, doing nothing useful, just parading about the place.”
A year later we hear the same refrain: “It’s all very phoney here. Everyone comes here to see and be seen. The children have the beach and the countryside; the parents have the casino and the car; and the men have the fillies. No shortage of them in Normandy! All snobs, us most of all, Margot loves all that. Soon everyone will be going to the Midi.”
* * *
That little society in Deauville in the 1920s was a privileged one, consisting of the partygoers and socialites who later flocked to Saint-Tropez or the fashionable islands of the Antilles.
“The exhibition of the artist by the name of Picasso is announced with great fanfare for the 14th February next,” Paul tells Picasso in their typically jocular tone. But in January 1921 he reminds his friend of “my harlequins, my harlequins, my harlequins!” as he is clearly concerned that the artist has fallen behind. Similar concerns are sounded in August 1929, and one feels Paul’s mounting frustration. “You left without delivering my harlequin, you’re terrible!” he says. For Paul, who is meticulous in his business dealings almost to the point of mania, Picasso’s casual approach to his commitments is maddening.
Paul also writes, “I have not yet seen your new style,” not in the tone of a fashion designer’s backer asking for photographs of his latest collection but in that of a child who thinks somebody’s hidden his new toy. He is thrilled by the painter’s genius, as the painter is well aware.
“Your trip to Russia is the talk of the town,” he writes to Picasso, who has gone to Moscow to meet Stalin and his henchmen. “I can’t wait to see your 1926 production … Give me a vision of the ‘new Picasso.’” Paul understood that Picasso’s paintings would change almost year to year.
Occasionally, as on July 13, 1921, Paul issues orders that sound a bit brusque: “I need a large number of canvases for this winter. I’m ordering 100 from you, to be delivered at the end of the summer.” It’s odd to hear Paul talking like the manager of a retail store, placing his orders with the wholesaler on the corner.
Often, in his correspondence with Picasso and later with Matisse, he expresses his regret at being only the intermediary, never the creator. Paul knew very well that he was addressing a monumental figure of contemporary art, even as he urged him to produce new work (just as Durand-Ruel did with “his” impressionists). What fascinated Paul was the process of artistic development, which Picasso must have appreciated. Between 1918 and 1932 all of Picasso’s major works passed through Paul’s hands.
In the 1920s Paul told visitors to his gallery who were intrigued by these paintings, so different from anything they were familiar with, about “my dear friend Picasso, whom I look upon as a brother and whom I have known since 1906,” as he puts it in his 1941 article in Art in Australia: “Picasso always goes beyond the boundaries; he is the greatest painter of the present day, and I am always delighted by each new series of his.” He adds: “It was he, Picasso, who overthrew past conventions and at his whim created others, and who, bored at seeing the same forms reproduced, devised his own … He has opened new horizons to us, and has brought painting to its only goal: ‘to be works of art,’ not mere decorative creations.”
* * *
Back in Paris, the social whirl at rue La Boétie continued apace. In 1929 Paul bought some racehorses. Was he keeping up with the Wildensteins? “I’ve got ten horses,” he writes to Picasso. “I’m going to name them after my painters. And if a horse with the name of Picasso wins, it’ll be excellent publicity for your work,” he jokes, while complaining about the expense of the horses.
The same year Paul was made a member of the Légion d’Honneur. When Picasso congratulates him, Paul replies: “My dear Picasso, the chevalier thanks you for your congratulations; they’ve brought me one more autograph.” That didn’t stop him, in the same letter, from discussing his friend’s current domestic and financial affairs, for which he himself assumed responsibility, and the canvases he was impatiently awaiting: “Your bills are paid … But you don’t talk about your painting, or about what you’ve done, what new genre you’ve adopted. Your Dinard Stations of the Cross alarm me. You are massacring humanity so violently that I worry you’ll do still worse damage by giving your characters a human face.” Picasso’s paintings of the 1930s already bear the early signs of his own internal turmoil and that of the world, as in the portraits of Dora Maar, which are distorted by the master’s genius, and paintings that evoke the approaching civil war in Spain.
* * *
In 1927 the Rosenbergs started “taking the waters” in Vittel or Évian, to treat Paul’s fragile health, his frequent attacks of ulcers. “No stress, just a calm, t
ranquil life. It’s a dream, except for my wife, who isn’t really enjoying herself. She wants to go to Deauville. I’ll agree, for a bit of peace,” he writes to Picasso.
What remains surprising about these letters from between the wars is the extent to which references to contemporary events in Europe are absent. It is as if the two men wanted to immerse themselves entirely in art and friendship, far from the affairs of the real world. Only the signing of the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War and the celebrations that followed are talked about with some emotion. But the stock market crash of 1929, the far-right leagues of the 1930s, the Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War, Hitler’s coming to power: none of these things is mentioned in these letters, even though the correspondence spans more than forty years. Probably such matters were mentioned in conversation. In their writings, however, it’s painting, always painting, and the daily concerns of a life shared by friends.
* * *
At times Paul seems the neglected friend who requires attention; he demands a letter or some news at the very least. The tone is affectionate, deferential, and intimate, even tender: “I haven’t seen you for a week. I’m getting worried, and my friendship with you is suffering.” There is something intense and exclusive about this friendship, almost as if Picasso were his only friend. Was Picasso perhaps the only one who understood his inner being? “I see your closed shutters, it’s sad,” Paul writes to his dear friend. “Your paintings are on my walls and I miss your daily visits.” There is a sense of brotherhood not unlike that shared by the great essayist Michel de Montaigne and his friend Étienne de la Boétie.
Then come the laments about the ceaseless work needed to modernize the Galerie Rosenberg, the sluggish art market, the scarcity of collectors, and the shortage of art lovers: “I’ve spent a fortune on antique frames. But paintings are getting so rare that it’s the frames I’m going to sell. The sauce will help people swallow the roast!” And yet, in spite of his grievances, there were splendid times when “the paintings, a real stock exchange,” soared in value, toward the end of the 1920s in France or immediately after the First World War in the United States. But to listen to Paul, business was dreadful throughout his career as an art dealer.
My grandfather was prone to depression, often related to his poor health and his chronic stomach troubles. This must have been what gave him that thin, almost gaunt look that struck me even when I was a little girl. My grandmother was all plump and gentle, her ample bosom perfect for childhood cuddles.
In September 1929 Paul confides in Picasso: “My hell must lie within, if I feel fine only wherever I happen not to be.” Such a marvelous phrase. It’s rare to read Paul’s divulging anything about his state of mind or his private life. For instance, there were disagreements between him and my grandmother that strained their relationship. In Paul’s correspondence with Picasso, however, I never found a single word on these stormy and violent episodes, despite what family members told me in confidence.
Had he ever opened up to his next-door neighbor? Perhaps it wasn’t in the spirit of the times, because Paul makes no further allusions to Picasso’s separation from Olga (although at the painter’s request he drew up the inventory for the divorce) or to the various companions who passed in and out of his life: Marie-Thérèse Walter, most often hidden away in Le Boisgeloup, Dora Maar, Françoise Gilot, or Jacqueline Roque, who became his wife only after my grandfather’s death.
* * *
Yet there are some genuine surprises; Paul sometimes allows himself to doodle shamelessly. My grandmother has no hesitation in doing the same. With her penholder (until she died in 1968, I never saw her write with anything but a Sergent-Major quill pen dipped into a big inkwell) she would try to draw the view from her bedroom in Deauville, most often ending up with a bunch of scribbles.
It must have been around this time that the painter drew an open window for Paul to use as an ex libris, that personal seal affixed to the first page of his books, which was used for both the Galerie Rosenberg’s publications and its business cards until the death of my uncle Alexandre.
At times Paul and Picasso seem like mischievous adolescents. One of the letters from my grandfather to Picasso, dated July 4, 1919, is edged in black, the border hand drawn with a shaky pencil to convey mourning. My grandfather offered his most sincere condolences. “The parrot is dead,” he writes (deliberately echoing the petit chat in Molière’s L’École des femmes). This was Paul’s announcement of the sad demise of the bird that Picasso had kept at the Rosenberg house, whose final moments Paul so liked to describe. And this followed immediately by “I’ve sold the Renoir you liked so much, Woman Taking Off Her Blouse,” which put the gravity of the death announcement in context.
Boyish jokes, intimacies, even teasing erupt. “My dear quitter” Paul says to him, “I’m going to throw myself into painting, I’m jealous of your light. But what style should I adopt? Cubist, rondiste, loyalist, royalist, republican and monarchist? In fact I want to be a brushist.”
Through all those years of complicity, they mix business, friendship, and favors: Paul takes charge of the practical side of Picasso’s life: he orders him sheets of plywood that he needs for his collages or sells him packets of tobacco. Picasso, in turn, sends Paul sweets, which he loves, from Vogade, a confectioner in Nice celebrated for almost a hundred years. “Thank you for the beautiful fatma, the beautiful Negro, your picture and candies,” writes Paul, thanking him also for his battered canvases and chocolate truffles.
And when Picasso is in London, Paul sends him off on a reconnaissance mission: “There’s going to be an exhibition with two Daumiers, a Degas, a Monet. Can you tell me if it’s worth me crossing the sea to go to it?”
My grandfather even gets into technical details with Picasso: “Can you paint with English pigment and brushes, on English canvas? Don’t use taffeta, it curls when it gets wet.”
* * *
Paul never missed an opportunity to promote his painter and friend, introducing the younger painter’s work, for example, to the seventy-eight-year-old Renoir. “Saw Renoir. Told him about you. He was amazed by some things. And even more shocked by others.” Picasso was thrilled by the fact that his revered master should be interested in his work. In fact, during those years he seemed engaged in a kind of painterly dialogue with Renoir that would mark his style throughout the early twenties.
Paul also liked to assert himself in his friend’s eyes as the expert with the infallible eye, whose business sense never interfered with his artistic vision. “I had a visit from someone who thought he had a real one and a fake,” he writes Picasso. “I reassured him by telling him they were both by you.” But Paul remained oddly old-fashioned in his response to the representations of sexuality in Picasso’s painting, and God knows there were plenty of those! (Pierre Daix, one of Picasso’s biographers, went so far as to call Paul prudish.) Apparently, Paul rejected the most graphic works, including a nude of Marie-Thérèse of which Paul was supposed to have said, “I refuse to have assholes in my gallery!”9
* * *
Yet for all their closeness, the relationship cools. Picasso becomes detached and increasingly involved with the surrealists from whom Paul, like Kahnweiler, maintains a distance, and their neighborly complicity gently turns into a more conventional commercial association. Paul, ever sensitive, realizes this, calling Picasso his invisible friend. It must also be noted that by the early 1930s, Picasso is spending less time on rue La Boétie and more in his residence at Le Boisgeloup, forty miles northwest of Paris, with Marie-Thérèse, the lover with whom he would have a daughter and who would inspire some of his most important works. This is a new Picasso, “lord of Bois Jaloux,” as my grandfather writes to him, seeing the chasm open up between him and his friend.
After the Second World War and four years of silence, it will be even more difficult to regain their former closeness. The infrequent letters between them are no longer handwritten but typed, particularly after my grandfather suffers a
stroke that keeps him from writing, and indeed from talking. However, in August 1944, when postal deliveries resume after the liberation of Paris, he warmly confesses: “There’s no point telling you how much I have missed you during my exile.”
It is then that the two men start addressing each other with the familiar tu, probably after they meet when Paul returns to Paris in 1945, to assess the state of his looted property and resume his former life. And once again, they renew their relationship with its curious blend of business and friendship, even though Picasso is no longer my grandfather’s client.
Picasso has returned to Kahnweiler, his dealer before the First World War. “My dear Picasso, I can tell you that I have landed on my feet in New York. How much would you charge me for the little still life with the fruit bowl on the right and the bunch of cherries? Je t’embrasse, Paul.”
On July 15, 1947, my grandfather expresses to Picasso his irritation over an attempted breach of copyright: “I’m learning right now that somebody in New York is about to produce some fabrics in ‘Picasso gray.’ It’s illegal to use a name as famous as yours to launch any kind of merchandise. A parfumeur took Renoir’s name, and after a case brought by the family they had to change the name. Will you give me the legal power to represent and defend you?”
My Grandfather's Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War Page 10
