What would Paul have said at the sight of the ubiquitous Citroën Xsara Picassos being driven around the streets of all the cities in France?
Between 1945 and his death in 1959, Paul would see Picasso only once a year at La Californie, his residence in Cannes. The days of calling from one window to the next were over.
* * *
It had to have been painful for my grandfather when Picasso resumed his business relations—interrupted in 1914—with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who remained his dealer until the painter’s death in 1973. But Paul was in New York at the time, and he was often ill. Picasso, who had drifted further away from his former dealer with every war, now returned to one of his first admirers from the early years of the century.
But my grandfather’s passion for this extraordinary artist remained unbounded. “The greatest artist in the world today,” he said in the 1930s. “The most prolific painter in history,” he affirmed in the 1950s.
My grandmother and then my mother kept the connection alive with a few letters and visits first to La Californie, then to the farmhouse in Notre-Dame-de-Vie, near Mougins, which I remember.
My first memories of Picasso are from a long time ago. He is wearing his striped sailor’s jersey, the one handed down to posterity in Robert Doisneau’s famous photograph, in a restaurant in Saint-Tropez, to which he invited my grandparents and me in the 1950s, one of those lunches that seem interminable to children, and at which the patronne scurried over to collect the pieces of paper tablecloth that Picasso had scribbled on.
I went often with my parents to his house in Mougins, though I surely would have preferred an outing with my cousins on the beach at Cannes. The ritual was always the same. The electronic gate opened; these were the days of Jacques Tati’s films, and the gadget seemed to me the height of modernity. Jacqueline in her capris and colorful blouse welcomed us outside the house. She was a woman filled with admiration of, devotion to, and love for the great man who was her husband. I can still envision her after Picasso’s death, when we visited her each year, always in the same place. I remember her as a somewhat haughty widow with Spanish posture—straight as a statue—and the long neck whom Picasso painted so often, either bareheaded or wearing a scarf, turban, or mantilla.
I wasn’t old enough to appreciate, let alone be amazed by, the paint-spattered parquet or the incredible disarray in the house, which at the time merely struck me as untidy. Picasso’s room was in absolute shambles, and I couldn’t understand how my mother, meticulous as she was, could swoon over such chaos. In his bedroom a recent canvas was used for a headboard, its face to the wall, so that the pillows would not rest against the paint.
Most of the time I ran about in the garden with Catherine, Jacqueline’s daughter, or Claude, the son of Picasso and Françoise Gilot, climbing their famous bronze oak. In those days I didn’t care for its neighbor in the garden, the bronze statue of Little Girl Skipping, a sculpture that was somehow less accessible than the oak tree. As a little girl, assuming that the child must be suffering some kind of infirmity, I was unsettled by the one shoe turned inward.
Back in the 1960s Évian bottles were made of glass and sealed with little metal caps. At the Picasso house, there was one glass case in particular that enchanted me, a curiosity that was, for once, accessible to children: it contained dozens of those little Évian caps, tortured and transformed into magical or monstrous animals by a man who could reinvent a set of bicycle handlebars, an old rake, or a bottle stopper into a work of art.
I must confess that I sometimes thought—like those back in 1920 who had criticized my grandfather for exhibiting scribbles “that a four-year-old could have done”—that too much of a fuss was made over the slightest creative gesture of Picasso. The lack of comprehension and skepticism of the prewar years was over, making way for unconditional admiration for contemporary art in general and for Picasso in particular.
* * *
And now more recent images come to me, of Picasso in his last years, once he had stopped leaving the house: his blue-and-white-checked peacoat; his powerful, intimidating gaze; his Spanish-inflected French, which was excellent; his approximate spelling; and especially his affection for my mother.
One day when my parents had taken me along after a hiatus of a few years, he noticed that I was growing up. “I’m going to paint your daughter,” he told my delighted mother. “I see eyes all over her face!” “No!” I squealed, fleeing in terror, imagining a face that would have been distorted like the one he had painted of Dora Maar and his wartime paintings, which have never been my favorites. A fourteen-year-old girl isn’t necessarily going to understand such a harsh artistic style. For me at the time, “that guy” Picasso was more of a predator of faces than a towering figure of the twentieth century. Would he have carried on if I hadn’t run away? Probably not. At least I still have a photograph of myself at the age of eighteen, standing next to him, leaning against the walls of his villa. And I love his expression in that now-fading photograph: it is intensely magnetic, much like the gaze he gave himself in his earliest self-portraits in the 1900s, when he was already probing the deepest mysteries of the soul.
BOULEVARD MAGENTA
Number 1 place de la République. I was following the route of the demonstrations against the National Front. On May 1, 2002, there were still several hundred thousand of us jammed outside that door, hour after hour, so dense was the crowd that had come to protest the danger represented by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right candidate for president, who had moved into the second round of the election behind Jacques Chirac. It was hot, we were anxious and thirsty, and I was, at that point, more interested in getting hold of bottles of water than in making a family pilgrimage. So I looked at the building without quite seeing it. That heavy, pompous Baron Haussmann–style edifice.
It was the building where my grandmother had lived as a girl. Margot Loévi got engaged in that building and left it on the morning of July 7, 1914, to become Mme Paul Rosenberg. (My great-grandfather Loévi, the father of Margot, her brother, Michel, and her sisters, Marianne and Madeleine, was a wine trader.) I don’t think the family knew the first thing about art, modern or otherwise. And I don’t know who introduced this old Alsatian family to the Rosenbergs, newly arrived from Bratislava. But for my great-grandfather, the important thing in the end was to let his daughter marry a businessman like himself, no matter that he sold canvases covered with daubs of paint rather than bottles of fermented grape juice. Apparently the entire family was fine with this, and my grandmother’s dowry was generous. My cupboards are still full of her monogrammed tablecloths and sheets that have never been used and are slowly turning to dust.
Paul courted her for several months. My grandmother was a beautiful girl, and my grandfather was smitten with her. Twice a week he sent flowers from Moreux, the opulent florist’s shop in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, which remained on the corner of the place Victor-Hugo until only a few years ago.
* * *
He talked endlessly about painting to my grandmother, who, according to family lore, knew nothing about it. I can just imagine Paul, hoping to dazzle her, boasting about a painting he’d bought, and hoping to show her a famous van Gogh from the series showing the town hall of Auvers-sur-Oise. And I imagine my grandmother, a naive, sheltered young girl, going home and asking, “‘My green curtains,’ ‘my green curtains,’ why is this young man always going on about ‘green curtains’?” She would not have realized that in French, “my green curtains” (mes rideaux verts) and Mairie d’Auvers sound virtually identical.
* * *
As a young woman Margot had a pretty voice and was a lover of opera and operettas. She was the first to take me to see The Merry Widow, La Belle Hélène, and Faust, passing on to me her love of song, of the human voice, whether by Franz Lehár, Jacques Offenbach, or Charles Gounod. When I was ten, she took me for the first time to the traditional opera house in Paris, the Palais Garnier, and I was impressed by the majesty of the building, with go
lden ornaments on the façade and the impressive staircase, where I could imagine Maria Callas, whom I admired and still cherish, sweeping down in evening dress, followed by countless admirers and photographers … A dream for a little girl.
She had been cheerful and outgoing at the time of their marriage, but later she became depressive and lethargic. When my father started criticizing people who complained about their lot, aiming his ire first at his mother-in-law, then at my mother, he would say, “That’s the Loévi side of the family,” contrasting it with the philosophy of his own mother, Marguerite Schwartz, an exceptional woman, whose motto was to “button up”—in French, literally to grit your teeth and get on with it. In the Loévi household, you didn’t button up in the face of adversity; you complained a lot and wallowed in your misfortune.
* * *
For me, on the other hand, Margot Rosenberg was what the French call a grand-mère gâteau. Not just because every walk I took with her ended with a stop at the pastry shop. Nor because I had only to mention my desire for a book, a record, or a four-color pen of the kind I’d craved for several months during the 1960s, only to be given them the following day. But also because she embodied the warm, generous bosom against which a child’s sorrows were swiftly comforted. She indulged my every whim, and sleeping at her house allowed me to escape my mother’s watchful eye. For me she was a very sweet old lady, and I was her cosseted granddaughter. Like my cousins, the daughters of her beloved son, Alexandre, I was spoiled rotten. And as the eldest I had all the advantages.
My grandmother spent six months of the year in New York and six months in Paris from the end of the Second World War until her death in 1968. Very stylish, she was always concerned with her wardrobe, never went out without makeup, wore hats with little veils, which I found mysterious, like a movie star of the thirties, and long black suede gloves, even in the summer, because she believed a woman couldn’t go out bareheaded or gloveless, even in the sixties. She was a very comme il faut woman, whom I liked to shock with the slang that we spoke at school. Her favorite pastime was meticulously keeping her domestic account books in ink, with her big, regular, sloping handwriting. She also wrote every day to whichever of her children happened to be on the other side of the Atlantic. Each and every morning when my grandmother was in America, the postman delivered to her a sky-blue envelope bordered with red, which became her daily reading matter. I found many of these letters, numbered one to one thousand, crammed into the shoe boxes I recovered from the furniture warehouse where my mother’s things were stored after her death. My grandmother’s letters were full of trivia, of mundane preoccupations, as well as a few words of loneliness and of admiration for her three granddaughters, whom she adored. And so many ellipses standing in for sighs and despondency.
She never went out in the evening, had few friends, and mostly spent money on household staff: maids, cooks, chauffeurs. She didn’t require this lifestyle, but she’d gotten used to it as my grandfather became increasingly successful. I remember that while my grandfather was still alive, she would ask him for a few francs before setting off to the kitchen to arrange the meals for the following day. I was aware of Paul’s irritation as he reached into his pocket for such tedious expenses. If I wasn’t consciously aware of the humiliation that she must have felt as she stretched her hand out toward the man with the wallet who, each evening, protested, I at least understood that a woman should try not to be dependent on her husband and that my grandmother would have been better off working. But it was not the way of her generation.
Morning and evening she said her prayers in her bedroom, far from the synagogue that she attended on Friday evenings. If you risked visiting her during the morning or late afternoon, she would lift her head from her prayer book, delighted by the family visits that penetrated her solitude. Religious practices aside, my mother was very much like her. She too was lonely throughout her life, which was punctuated—after my father’s death—only by my daily visits or by the arrival of my children when they were home from school.
My grandmother didn’t eat pork or shellfish and might have memorized a few words of Yiddish, yet she didn’t speak or read Hebrew. She had her seat, which her mother and her grandmother had occupied, in the synagogue on the rue de la Victoire, where the cantor, the young and charming M. Adolphe Attia, was showered with compliments for his golden voice when he chanted the Sabbath prayers.
She was, like my grandfather, the epitome of those prewar Jewish families that were known in France as Israelites until the 1960s: people of Jewish descent, more or less observant, but deeply assimilated into French society, even after the horrors of the 1940s.
* * *
That was how I had always thought of my grandmother, who died in July 1968, at least until April 2010, when I opened those shoe boxes in the warehouses at Gennevilliers. Since then I’ve had a terrible time reconciling my memory of my grandmother with what I found.
Apparently she had had an affair with a man who was one of my grandfather’s major competitors in the art world, Georges Wildenstein, who (as I have said) for a time was Paul’s business associate. I remembered how it was decided in 1918 that Paul would represent Picasso in France and Europe and Wildenstein would represent him in America. I had never understood why the association collapsed in 1932, when Paul became the artist’s sole representative. Or why it was taboo to utter the name of this family in ours.
But then one suddenly unearths artifacts from the realm of the unspoken, tucked away at the back of a chest of drawers. Do we pass over these secrets in silence? There’s nothing shameful about them, even though they must have been painful at the time. Why reveal them now? They have nothing to do with anybody, except the protagonists, who died so long ago … I loathe absolute transparency, finding it voyeuristic at best and a bit totalitarian at worst.
But these letters provide a better understanding of my grandfather’s psychology, which was skeptical and suspicious, and of my grandmother’s personality, which became so withdrawn, in total retreat from the social world.
I feel unmoored in the face of such intimacy, and I turn the letters around in my hands, trying to work out what to do.
* * *
For my grandparents, it was a family crisis. For their children, my mother, my uncle, it was a secret shame (my mother never talked to me about it before her death) much like an open wound. My mother, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, in 1932 or 1933, was sent off to spend a few weeks with my grandmother’s youngest sister, Marianne, and her husband and children, while Alexandre, who was only eleven, went to stay with my grandmother’s other sister, Madeleine. The atmosphere at rue La Boétie must have been very tense. The servants, the family, their Parisian milieu: everyone must have known, and that open secret must have been the talk of every prewar Deauville soirée.
* * *
I’m still pacing, clutching those letters as if I’d stumbled upon a written piece of the Kabbalah that could singe my fingers if I were ever to hide it again, leaving me with a curse lasting seven generations.
I wouldn’t even have mentioned this affair if I hadn’t also discovered, in the boxes recovered from the depository, a poignant document written by my grandfather in 1942, when Alexandre was fighting with Philippe Leclerc’s army in Africa, sometime between the battles of Bir Hakeim and El Alamein. Paul had planned to visit his son, whom he missed terribly, but he abandoned the idea at the last minute in the face of such a difficult journey and the risk of being shot down by the Germans. It was in this period that he filled a ten-page letter with his delicate handwriting and tucked it away in the drawer of an office on Fifty-seventh Street in New York. The desk went with him to his gallery on Seventy-ninth Street, but the drawer remained locked. A few months after my grandfather’s death, Alexandre, while sorting through his father’s papers, happened upon this document, typed it out to make it more legible, and sent it to my mother—my grandmother had just arrived for one of her extended stays in Paris.
“You will w
eep as I did when you read this letter,” Alexandre writes his sister. “We have understood our father even less than we thought … I think that in any event you will have to show this letter to our mother.” Did my mother do this? Something tells me she did not. It would be better to assume that my grandmother Margot died peacefully in Paris, in 1968, a few weeks after the May événements.
Because the letter is harsh, very harsh. Written by Paul, it was intended to be read posthumously, as indeed it was. The letter was addressed to his wife and daughter—“his two darlings”—and the son he had been preparing to visit in Africa. It is a meditation on life, his life, on what he wanted for his family, and on the pain he felt over not having brought happiness to his beloved wife.
“My own youth was not as happy as my children’s,” he begins. “But when I met you, my dear Margot, I hoped I might at last hold that happiness in my hand. I thought I had found in you the companion I would cherish, the one for whom I would do anything at all to make your life more beautiful.”
It seems that Margot’s disappointment dated back to the First World War, which broke out immediately after her wedding in July 1914. Paul, old enough to be conscripted, was sent to the front, causing them to miss out on the first carefree years that a young couple should enjoy. He goes on at length about his nerves, his desire to establish himself, and his need to earn a living in order to keep his family in comfort. “Alas, the more I worked, the more money I made, the more I became a slave to business, a slave in chains, a Sisyphus with his rock,” he writes.
He had always been financially prudent by temperament. But his anxiety about keeping up with his wife’s expensive tastes was palpable. Right before her eyes she had the model of the Wildenstein family, whose lavish lifestyle must have dazzled her, though the life she led with my grandfather was certainly luxurious by any measure.
My Grandfather's Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War Page 11
