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

by Sinclair, Anne

  * * *

  As New York winters were notoriously harsh, my grandfather’s frail condition meant that he didn’t go out much. His health had further deteriorated over the previous few years after a stroke that, while leaving his mind intact, deprived him of fluent speech and gave him a dreadful stammer. I was sometimes frightened by his damaged voice and by his little finger, gnarled with arthritis.

  * * *

  In Paris, Paul and I often visited his colleagues, outings that I found slightly boring, but that were always followed by a fresh-squeezed orange juice at the Relais du Bois in the Bois de Boulogne, where we drank in silence to keep from frightening the squirrels.

  One day he took me to see Paul Pétridès, who ran a well-known gallery but whose reputation had been tarnished by collaborationist activities during the war. Back in the car, Paul grumbled, “That man is a pheasant,” which seemed an odd expression to use for someone. When I asked what he meant, he said he was referring to a rotten game bird. I brought that hunting term back home with me, much to my family’s amusement.

  My grandfather had an amazing eye: long after looking at a painting that he found interesting at a colleague’s gallery, he would ruminate over it. Driving toward the Bois de Boulogne, he would suddenly announce: “That painting is a fake!”

  * * *

  Every summer, I set off with my grandparents for the south of France, along the old Route Nationale 7, a road lined with plane trees that were magnificent to look at but lethally distracting to those driving cars. The highway leading to the south didn’t yet exist, and it took us three full days to get to Cannes. We always stopped at the same places—Saint-Étienne on the first day, Avignon and Aix on the second day—before we arrived, the third stop being on the shores of the Mediterranean. Once we were there, within two days we absolutely had to go to the Galerie Maeght in Saint Paul de Vence and above all to see Picasso in Mougins.

  By visiting museums with my grandfather—the Louvre, one bit at a time, the Orangerie, and the Musée d’Art Moderne—I learned what was worth looking at and what wasn’t worth so much as a second glance. The quality of the works was gauged by the speed with which I crossed those exhibition halls at my grandfather’s side. The Flemish masters or, of course, the Italian quattrocento were carefully examined, but paintings of the French and English seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were skipped over. The Gainsboroughs, with their very English solemnity, weren’t considered particularly noteworthy. Our interest revived again with Corot (at last), Courbet, and, obviously, the impressionists. Looking at certain paintings by fashionable painters—I’m thinking of Bernard Buffet, for example, whom Paul couldn’t stand—Paul allowed himself the luxury of saying that “they weren’t worth a fig.” Some were simply declared “ugly” or “without genius,” if not “without talent.” Various minor paintings by Renoir, Gauguin, or Monet were decreed “too red” or “too dark,” “too vague” or “too soft,” “lacking mastery” or “lacking power.” And these judgments, fifty years on, still have the force of law as far as I’m concerned. “Don’t waste your eyes,” my grandfather would say to me, “on works that are not exceptional.” The moderns—Braque, Matisse, Léger, and, above all, Picasso: they were his world.

  But that gentle life belonged to Paris. In New York the rhythm was different: my grandfather worked, I strolled about the city with my mother and my grandmother, and for the child I was in those days it was a paradise.

  * * *

  During the winter of 2009 I couldn’t wait to board the train from where I was living in Washington, D.C., to get back to New York, to East Seventy-ninth Street. That’s where the gallery’s archives are kept, devotedly guarded by my aunt Elaine, who worshipped her father-in-law. She had done a marvelous job organizing all this material with the help of an archivist from the Museum of Modern Art, to which the papers had been donated.

  I immersed myself in those files for days at a time, in the course of several visits. An old desk in a little room, six feet by ten, windowless—I’m sure it’s the room where I suffered my mathematical torments—but with a skylight, rather gloomy, old linoleum, all on the same floor where I had lived with my parents as a child.

  The internal staircase that leads both to this room and to my aunt’s apartment is the one on which I used to hide. Often when I couldn’t sleep, I would sit on the steps, hiding in a corner, and try to make out what the grown-ups were saying downstairs. From there, I would also listen to the classical music that my uncle was passionate about. And so it was, that in my pajamas I was allowed to listen to my first concerts of baroque music. I remember noticing, for example, that Georges Bizet had borrowed his tune for L’Arlésienne from a theme by Michel-Richard Delalande, and having heard my grandmother humming the music from Carmen when I was very young, I felt it was a dreadful fraud.

  * * *

  My aunt wonders about my recent obsession with a grandfather and a family history that I’d barely acknowledged until now. She and my mother didn’t really get on and never truly understood each other. My mother was so close to her brother that my aunt often felt excluded. Alexandre seemed to pay my mother more attention than he did his wife. Not surprisingly, this caused my aunt, who was excluded from the affairs of Pi-ar-enco on which my uncle faithfully reported to my mother, a great deal of torment.

  In short, my aunt Elaine, still laser sharp and quick on her feet at eighty-nine,* looks over my shoulder at the documents I’m consulting and the notes I take. Should I tell her that I’m feeling my way around the archive? She’s taken the trouble to file away even the most insignificant scraps of paper from the Galerie Rosenberg. Should I express my surprise at my grandparents’ personal life, which I’m sensing was more turbulent than legend allowed? I’m not sure. So I go on investigating, making sense of the voluminous papers as best I can.

  Photographs of every prewar exhibition at rue La Boétie. Invoices for wine bought in 1928. Letters to Alfred Barr in the years before and after the war. Pieces of paper scribbled on by my grandfather, the beginning of an autobiography that wouldn’t get beyond page ten. Fairly dry letters from Paul to unknown painters who wanted him to represent them. A bill from a picture framer in the 1920s and, most of all, telegrams or letters from 1942 revealing the ignorance of refugees about what was happening in occupied France. Files in Russian too, containing archives looted from the gallery in Paris by the Germans in 1940, then by the Russians in Berlin in 1945, carefully filed away in big boxes with titles written in Cyrillic. These archives were recovered a few years ago, thanks entirely to the perseverance of my cousin Elisabeth and the postglasnost transparency of the Russian authorities, who gave them to the French government, which in turn was gracious enough to restore them to us.

  That precious immersion in the family archives on Seventy-ninth Street allowed me to reconstruct my grandfather’s life after the upheavals of the 1940s. Upheavals, sure. But at the same time, he felt close to this continent, which he had so loved exploring twenty years before.

  A LONG RELATIONSHIP

  Paul knew America quite well, as he had tried hard to establish his beloved modern painters across the Atlantic.

  John Quinn, an American lawyer and collector, corresponded with Paul in the 1920s and tried to explain to him that his efforts to sell modern art in America were premature. “Just five or six years ago,” he explains in a letter found in the family archives, “Knoedler had put on a Cézanne exhibition and people laughed, which they wouldn’t do now…” In May 1922, Quinn tried to convince Paul that no New York gallery, “not Knoedler, Gimpel, Wildenstein or Durand-Ruel, will show any Picassos because their clients aren’t open to this kind of painting. Dealers don’t believe in modern art.”

  But Paul persisted. He was in Chicago that same year. And from New York to Kansas City, of all places, he preached contemporary art and was keen, in spite of the lack of enthusiasm from the American public, to show his beloved Matisse, Picasso, and Braque to the New World, which didn’t get it at all.


  On November 23, 1923, Paul put on—probably at the Georges Wildenstein Gallery, with which he was affiliated at the time in the transatlantic representation of Picasso’s works—the Spanish painter’s first New York show. He wrote to Picasso, “Your exhibition is a great success, and like all great successes, we’re not selling a thing! You’d have to be mad like me, or a crank like me, to embark on such an undertaking.”

  In a letter written to Picasso in November 1923, he was critical of America: “Order reigns here, but there is a lack of European sophistication. The golden calf is more revered than ever, and the moneyed class is all that matters. Everything is colossal, even the museums. The worst of our painters is the best here … They have a collection of Rembrandts, just as I have a collection of Picassos, an incalculable number of them. Every self-respecting gallery has its Rembrandt or its Titian … Your paintings have arrived, they’re wonderful, but I fear they don’t like that kind of thing here. I’m expecting a vast crowd, meaning three visitors a day!… When nostalgia takes hold of me, I talk to my paintings, including yours. Ah, mon cher Paris, it’s the only place one can live.”

  A few weeks later he looks more favorably on the excitement of New York: “I’m enjoying myself more: there’s a spirit of will and strength,” but he still rails against the aesthetic limitations of the Americans: “Your exhibition is a great succès d’estime. But while in Paris there would have been a great crush, not many people came. Out of a population of six million, sixty visitors a day! But it’s all over the papers, so what do buyers need? The New Continent doesn’t go and see the New Painting, that is, the painting that is essentially timeless. They feel more at home with the painting of the past, with conventions.”

  In 1934, during one of his trips to New York, he writes to Picasso again. And he is still skeptical: “The Bonnard exhibition was totally unsuccessful here. It’s too fine for them. Too tasteful. Too tasteful and without enough forms!”

  Even at the start of the war, when he was still able to correspond with Matisse, he could be severe in his judgment of those citizens of the New World, after seeing portraits by Matisse and other French artists in Life magazine. “Very late,” he notes, “because the ones shown have been established in the rest of the world for over thirty years! Better late…”1

  * * *

  In 1934 Paul decided to mount a major exhibition devoted to three great artists, Braque, Matisse, and Picasso. He wrote to Picasso: “This exhibition will do a lot of good because it brings to the eyes of the public the new forms of expression of artists they had heard about but never seen. The public is divided, they all stay for a long time, upset that they don’t understand … My previous exhibition, from Ingres to Cézanne, was splendid, but its splendor was rehashed. It was from the past, and there was no merit in admiring works that, dating as they did from 1814 to 1910, have had time to enter men’s minds. But this exhibition represents our era, more than thirty-three years of our lives. Since it is the first of this kind, it has an absolute virginity, it must create the same effect as the impressionist show.”

  He himself attended to the smallest details of the exhibition, just as he did in Paris, and sent Picasso the plans for the hanging of each individual painting. “Evidence of the power [of your paintings]. I had to balance them out with two Braques!” These words, which might come across as so much flummery, are in fact meant quite sincerely. Paul was not given to effusive language. He could even be severe in his judgment of certain contemporary geniuses who were recognized as such, not least by him. “The only weak point is Matisse,” Paul writes. “He can’t take it. He flickers and goes out between the two of you [Braque and Picasso]. He … has forgotten about forms and volumes. Color is too important and you have the feeling you could add layers of color by painting the walls themselves. And that gives a sense of painted canvases, while you are creating the sense of colored sculptures.” To me this assessment seems unfair because the light that floods Matisse’s paintings makes them masterpieces in blue or yellow. It’s true that Matisse’s work, which is more accessible than that of the great abstractionists, struck Paul as more decorative and less innovative.

  In that same letter Paul spoke bitterly about a different exhibition elsewhere in the city—apparently dedicated to artists he didn’t represent—that enjoyed great success with the public, “with 2,000 idiotic paintings that represented the most grotesque parodies imaginable. People must actually realize this! But I shall stick my neck out and say that stupidity and bad faith will always prevail among the living, and both of us may be in our graves when the same people’s descendants glorify this art, demolishing the achievements of the creative generations to which you yourselves have given birth … But Galileo is right, ‘eppur si muove’ nothing will stop the progress of truth; beauty will always be beauty.”

  Sadly, this country, which my grandfather had initially seen as a continent to explore, was about to become his land of exile.

  THE WAR YEARS IN NEW YORK

  Paul disembarked in New York with his wife and daughter in September 1940. They stayed at the Hotel Madison on Fifty-eighth Street until Paul decided to rent a new gallery on Fifty-seventh Street in 1941. Still in the throes of despair, Paul remained as anxious as refugees throughout the ages have been: “No one can understand how comforted I felt when an immigration officer said to me, ‘Don’t worry, you’re among friends now.’”

  He managed to correspond with France to a certain extent. His letters seemed to reach Nice, at any rate, in the unoccupied zone, where Matisse was still living. On November 27, 1940, he writes to the painter from his hotel room: “I don’t yet know what I’m going to do, but I might settle here as I did in Paris … No news of Pablo, or the other Parisians, which disturbs and worries me. I have in front of me a Cézanne of the area around Aix, with an atmosphere so clear and pure that it delights my eyes and sings to my heart.”

  Grieving for his gallery on rue La Boétie, Paul corresponds with his painter friend as frequently as possible: “We miss your paintings here because we’ve severed contact with Europe. The market needs your works, the American school is already taking advantage of this. They’re bringing out all the Sunday painters, people who started painting when they were 72 and who are 92 now. I’m going to San Francisco to give a lecture as I did in Chicago, about art in general and about all of you in particular. It’s the only thing that amuses or interests me. Too many things that I was once fond of, which were my life, are far away from me now. Even the beautiful countryside of Provence, that mild, gentle light, that serene landscape, comes to mind as I write to you.” He continues, on February 18, 1941, after Matisse has had surgery and Paul is inquiring after his health: “You are lucky to have painting; by creating you forget the hardships and anxiety of our times. Separation is painful, because everything I love is far from me.” He adds in semicoded language, alluding to the last canvases that he had bought from the artist and that he suspected had been stolen from him: “I don’t know what became of your children of 1940. They were close to my heart, they were my joy. What can we do to get them back … [?]”1

  In November and December 1940, in two letters to his son Pierre, who had himself opened a gallery in New York, Matisse asks for news of his dealer and friend, disguising his name for the benefit of the censor who opened the mail: “How is Paul Floirac? Tell him plenty of things from me, but don’t tell him that I’m writing to tell you that Pablo is worried about his future. Essentially he has lots of resources, and might return to his Blue or Rose periods, which are still highly prized.”2

  Paul becomes increasingly homesick and loses contact with his family, who remained in Paris and miraculously escaped the roundups of the Jewish population, as well as his friends. Though he is anxious about the situation in occupied France, he’s unable to find out much.

  Later, in March 1942, he writes to his friend Henri de Vilmorin: “You must have news about France and know what’s happening there. The massacre of innocent people, wh
ether from malnutrition or from cold, whether from diseases contracted in the concentration camps … Oh, how our brothers are suffering, and I imagine their pain at seeing our beautiful country looted and exploited by its enemies … Luckily we are confident and we have the firm hope that we will once again see the whole country purged and regenerated.”

  Paul is frustrated, going on about feelings of impotence in the face of war, and tries to make himself useful. His wife and especially his daughter are working for France Forever. He himself organizes benefit exhibitions for the Free French, donating considerable sums to the effort. In February 1941 Paul gives the Free French Relief Committee a Stinson 105, the first air ambulance to be deployed in French Equatorial Africa. General Edgard de Larminat, one of the first French officers to have joined the Free French Forces, who is later made a Compagnon de la Libération, sends a telegram of appreciation from Brazzaville to the “generous donor” who wishes to remain anonymous.

  Paul, in a state of agitation, writes to absolutely everyone. To his French friends, even though there is no hope that his letters will reach them. To his comrade and modern art collector Alphonse Kann, who is in England. To the efficient and generous secretary in his London office, Winifred Easton, who is taking care of the “children” that arrived in June 1940 and who is to survive the blitz: “I know you are working hard, and that your morale has not been affected. We too are keeping our chins up, and we do not doubt for a second that we have been through the worst of the war, and that the end will soon come, with victory for all of us. Yes, the situation in France is terrible. That is why we are working so hard to identify and describe those horrendous characters who are insulting the reality of my country. We are publishing pamphlets and books that show the true face of France. But don’t worry: when the war is over, the French will sweep all that aside, and those who did not resist will perhaps pay with their lives for the dirty job they’ve done…” This letter, with its forced optimism, dates from October 1942, the darkest hours of Europe at war.