* * *
Picasso returned to the capital after the armistice. Why did he stay in Paris? My grandfather thought he was frightened by the idea of exile. “Staying wasn’t a form of courage, but … of inertia,” Picasso later said to Jean Leymarie, an art critic and the future director of the Musée d’Art Moderne.12 Picasso wanted to devote himself exclusively to his work.
In 1943, Picasso met Françoise Gilot, who became his companion and the mother of two of his four children, Claude and Paloma. Around that time he invited to his house some of his politically committed friends, figures like poet Robert Desnos, but he didn’t join the Resistance, as his friend Paul Éluard had done. “He refused the Germans’ coal, and the material advantages they wanted to give him,” writes Franck.13 “He was primarily concerned about his artistic work. Picasso was entering an intensely prolific phase that was to last the rest of his life, and he abstained from anything that kept him away from that ‘galleon’s rhythm.’”14
In 1941 Paul imagined his Pic in a state of revolt, since he was “the freest of men.” “What pleasure can he possibly have in painting now?” Paul wonders. “It had always been his joy to confront a canvas, mold it, work it meticulously in terms of depth, form and color, knead it, even torture it, and force it to give way to his titanic will.”15 That suffering doubtless existed, as did the artist’s anxiety and discomfort with fascism. But they didn’t stop him from making art.
In April 1940 Picasso had once more petitioned for naturalization, but this had been refused on the grounds of his alleged anarchist sympathies. He chose to stay, even though he still feared being handed over to Franco. Police reports from 1939—they would still have been the police of the Third Republic—had him on record for making “anti-French” statements at the Café de Flore. “A curious way of thanking the country that welcomed him, and in the current circumstances his conduct is inconvenient at the very least,” said one police report of the time.
That same report, written even before the German invasion, stresses that “this foreigner who has made a reputation for himself in France in so-called modern art, allowing him to make considerable sums of money, is said to have declared several years ago to some of his friends that when he dies he wants to leave his collection to the Russian government and not to the French government.” The stage was set for blacklists and xenophobia.
So Picasso was the holder of a residence permit, weirdly confused at the time with a kind of identity card, renewed on November 30, 1942, and valid until November 30, 1945. In the margin of the document was a note: “Catholic.” And this, written by hand: “I certify on my honor that I am not Jewish in terms of the law of 2 June 1941”—the law that repeated and hardened the terms of the 1940 Jewish Statute. It was signed “Picasso.”16
Troubling. Paul would have been shocked. But the artist needed to survive both the tragic events around him and the looting.
THE TRAIN, SCHENKER, AND THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE
August 27, 1944, and the troops of the Second Armored Division under the command of General Leclerc had just liberated Paris. Members of the Resistance had alerted them that a train containing one final convoy of looted works of art was about to leave the capital for Germany. A detachment of six volunteers, led by Lt. Alexandre Rosenberg, planned to stop the train at Aulnay, in the suburbs of Paris. On board were some dazed, homeward-bound old German soldiers and 148 crates of modern art, a small percentage of which belonged to the father of the lieutenant in question. Alexandre had last seen their contents on his parents’ walls at 21 rue La Boétie, in 1939.
That train, which was leaving for Germany, was the final act of the huge program of looting that the Nazis had pursued in France and in all the countries of occupied Europe. Two weeks after the armistice, Hitler, on the pretext of bringing these works to safety, issued an order that all art objects belonging to the Jews should be “protected.” “It is not an appropriation,” said the memo that had come from Berlin, with the cynicism of those who think that the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed, “but a transfer under our guard, as a guarantee for the peace negotiations.”1
The first of the raids had begun in the summer of 1940. It was then, as the art historian and résistant Rose Valland writes, that “the German Embassy became the Nazi ministry of culture in an occupied country.”2 It was not until October 30, 1940, that about 450 crates left the rue de Lille (where the Reich Embassy was located) for the Musée du Jeu de Paume, to be submitted to the meticulous and systematic classification process perfected by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR).
On July 4, 1940, Otto Abetz, the Reich ambassador in Paris, sent the Gestapo a list of the leading Jewish collectors and dealers in the city: Rothschild, Rosenberg, Bernheim-Jeune, Seligmann, Alphonse Kann, etc. It was on that day that the house at 21 rue La Boétie was sequestrated, along with the works of art that Paul had left there, a library of over twelve hundred books, all the furnishings (from the antique furniture to the kitchen utensils), several hundred photographic prints, and the whole of the gallery archives dating back to 1906.
The objects looted included a number of sculptures, which had remained in Paris because they were difficult to transport, among them a large Aristide Maillol and the two famous Auguste Rodin statues Eve and The Bronze Age, which had adorned the foyer. The same fate awaited The Thinker, which was recovered after the war and which as a child I saw so many times, welcoming visitors, while I looked down from the top of the stairs to the gallery at Seventy-ninth Street.
The French police supplied the trucks; the Gestapo, the men. As for the paintings that came from the most important collections in Paris, these were stacked up at the German Embassy.
The route taken by the stolen art objects is now well documented: the German forces looted about thirty-eight thousand apartments. The German dealer Gustav Rochlitz acted as a clearinghouse, exchanging the art favored by the Nazis—old masters—for works that appealed to Parisian dealers with their more contemporary taste. From this immense act of larceny perpetrated in France by the Nazis, about two thousand works have been recovered and remain unrestored to their rightful owners. Stamped “MNR,” they belonged to families who had fled or been deported and will never return to claim them.
Including the paintings remaining at rue La Boétie, the 75 on the walls of the house in Floirac or rolled up in the garage there, and the 162 from the vault in Libourne, a total of 400 paintings were stolen from Paul. About 60 of them are still missing (are they in France, in Germany, in Russia?), most of which will probably never be found. The paintings that were recovered by Paul himself formed the inventory of the Seventy-ninth Street gallery, which has been almost entirely depleted since his death more than half a century ago.
Some of these works still show up from time to time, in estate sales or auctions. How I wish I could make them speak, so that they could tell the story of their odysseys, or rather of how they ended up tucked away in the apartments of families that never mentioned a word to anybody after fraudulently getting hold of them. In most cases the people who inherit them today know nothing of their provenance, which is buried along with the memory of those who appropriated them during those dark years.
* * *
After the conclusion of the last restitution cases in the mid-1960s, the subject of the looting of artworks during the Second World War remained hidden until the early 1990s, when the issue of the wartime persecution of the Jews in France slowly reemerged in the public eye. The books of Lynn Nicholas and Hector Feliciano also helped bring the issue back into public scrutiny.
In 1997 the Matteoli Commission, set up by Alain Juppé’s government and continued under Lionel Jospin, was charged with studying the spoliation of Jewish assets during the occupation. “The looting had nothing to do with the circumstances born of the conditions of the victory of the Reich, but only with a fundamental and founding intention, matured and developed along with Nazi expansionism,” as one of the contributors to the com
mission put it.3
In an article based on this investigation titled “From Spoliation to Restitution,” Annette Wieviorka brings out the subtle distinction between spoliation and looting: “Spoliation, as defined by Gérard Lyon-Caen, is ‘legal theft.’ It is essentially a product of the Aryanization process, in which a property passes from ‘Jewish’ to ‘Aryan’ hands … Beyond the spoliation is the problem of looting. This is essentially undertaken by the German authorities. Two kinds are identified: First is targeted looting planned by the Germans. The Germans kept their eyes on the artworks of the great Jewish art dealers or collectors such as Alphonse Kann, Paul Rosenberg, Wildenstein, and the Rothschilds. This spectacular haul involved valuable works that were taken to Germany. The second type of looting began in 1942 and involved emptying Jewish apartments of all they contained.”4
* * *
In the course of my research into the recovery of artworks owned by my grandfather, I discovered an extensive document that I’d never heard of before, the name of which reminded me of the title of the Steven Spielberg film Schindler’s List. In contrast with the plot of that film about a righteous gentile who saved Jews from the Nazis, this is a collection of documents titled the Schenker Papers, which was declassified in 1995. Drawn up by the German Schenker transport company and reproduced on microfilm by the OSS, it lists the galleries and individuals that sold works of art to German museums, providing thirty-seven names. These include the dealers “who never declared sales made to the Germans, even though they had, to our knowledge, concluded numerous deals with the occupying forces—we have proof of it.”5 Among the names on this document were Martin Fabiani and Roger Dequoy, the latter being, as we have seen, employed by the Wildenstein family, as manager of its gallery during the occupation.
An exhibition organized in 2008 by the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Direction des Musées de France, and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, in collaboration with the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, set out a clear account of suspicious purchases made by equally suspicious dealers: “Martin Fabiani”—compromised in all the documents and quoted in the context of that exhibition—“sold many paintings during the Occupation and was found guilty for this after the liberation.” My grandfather would describe Fabiani’s reaction after being shown pictures of various paintings he was trying to retrieve. Fabiani denied having possessed any of them, including the ones he himself had returned to my grandfather. “He probably hadn’t noticed,” my grandfather said ironically, “that all the paintings stolen by the Germans bore on the back of the frame the words ‘Paul Rosenberg—Bordeaux,’ followed by the initials PR and a number, a note appended by the Germans, and which would still have been there when he bought the paintings. And he handed over several canvases without asking for either proof or photographs!”6 In the end, Fabiani returned twenty-four artworks without a word of protest.
Regarding Paul Pétridès, who died in 1993 at the age of ninety-two, the same 2008 exhibition said that he had been sentenced to three years in prison in 1979 but was freed at seventy-eight because of old age. His claims, after the liberation, that he knew nothing about this illegal trade and that like his colleagues, he had not knowingly bought a single canvas stolen from a Jew, left my grandfather cold: “It is not customary in the trade to buy canvases without first investigating their origins, and to be satisfied with the explanations of German intermediaries unknown to the Paris market.”7
In the end my grandfather did not bring a case against either Pétridès or Fabiani. So why did he instead decide to pursue unscrupulous Swiss dealers, and why was he more lenient toward the French dealers when some of his paintings were recovered? Was it because he feared that political networks favored those dealers who had collaborated, as they did many civil servants who had been even more seriously compromised? Or because he suspected that the entire art market would be discredited if the public were told about dealers who had behaved badly? Or because he preferred to force them to return his property in his presence and to recover his paintings one by one, in a kind of Count of Monte Cristo–style personal vendetta?
Another paradox that makes me uneasy: my grandfather treated the petty thieves with even greater severity than he did the major crooks, suing them for fraud, abuse of trust, theft, or embezzlement. This was the case with M. Picard, the concierge at 21 rue La Boétie, who had worked there since 1931.
Picard had stolen some objects with the intention—he said in a 1945 statement he prepared for the trial—of safeguarding them before ultimately returning them to the Rosenberg family. “One day,” Picard testified, “I was instructed not to let anybody into the house that had been sequestrated by the Germans. On April 25, 1941, the Gestapo moved into the building and I had to give all the keys to the Germans. Two days later they moved out M. Rosenberg’s library. On May 2 they moved the furnishings into German cars and replaced them with office materials.* On June 28, I was ordered to leave the premises. In the meantime, I had managed to take various objects from the apartment and the Galerie Rosenberg with the intention of giving it back and only with a view to saving them. It was never my intention to take anything at all for myself.”8
The testimony of Marguerite Blanchot, the Rosenbergs’ housekeeper since the 1920s, is categorical about the building’s concierge. “I had the keys to number 21, and Monsieur Rosenberg had told me to move into his apartment. But M. Picard advised me against it and even added that it would be unwise to keep the keys. So I returned them to M. Picard and I came every day until November 1940 to wrap up the linen and the silverware with M. and Mme Picard. It was he who sealed the cases that we filled, and he refused to do it in my presence in spite of my requests. I went back to rue La Boétie several times, but the Picards refused to let me in. The concierge at 20 bis can testify to that. The day before the building was occupied by the Germans, I went to the apartment. When I wanted to get the furniture out, the concierges wouldn’t let me.”
René Duval, who worked at the office in the Galerie Rosenberg, testified that he too tried to save some of the belongings from rue La Boétie but that the Picards were opposed. “I never saw anyone taking anything, but I noticed a number of gaps among the paintings, some of which were hung on the walls at the homes of the concierges who told me they had only put them there to save them.”
* * *
Léa Roisneau had been Paul’s secretary since 1936. It was she who first alerted him to the looting. In March 1941 she sent my grandfather a letter, saying, “There’s nothing left, nothing, nothing, nothing.” Her former boss, three thousand miles away in New York, was unaware of so many things. He had no idea that the looting was orchestrated at the highest level of the Nazi hierarchy and that the raids were being carried out against “all the enemies of the Reich” in the occupied territories.
Roisneau also went several times to rue La Boétie, to try to rescue the objects that struck her as most important: the library and the photographs of the paintings. She too observed that the Picards not only took refuge behind the Germans but were further distinguished by their ill will. “One day he—Picard—told me that he wasn’t going to let me back into the building, and added that if the Jew Rosenberg came back, he would throw him out the door,” said Roisneau in the records.
In fact, Picard had stored objects everywhere: with neighbors, with his relatives. He had even taken Rodin’s Thinker to an expert, along with a big wood-and-bronze clock. Initially he said he had given my grandfather’s youngest brother, Edmond, everything that belonged to Paul; then he confessed that he had lied. Edmond began the inventory of looted objects after the liberation and before Paul returned to France. Mme Picard confirmed: “My husband didn’t tell the truth. And after the exodus, we took different things out of M. Rosenberg’s house and stored them at the furniture depository: bronzes, a marble bust, an inlaid side table. Also between 140 and 150 bottles of fine wine and champagne (we consumed about fifty of those bottles), and a portrait drawing of Mme Rosenberg.”
9
Pathetic, petty larcenies! Picard had his curtains cut from my grandfather’s tapestries and confessed that the Regency barometer mentioned by his wife was actually found in a furniture depository stored in his name. But was my grandfather really more appalled by this than he was by the crimes of the collaborationist art dealers?
The rest—the antique tables, the mahogany chests of drawers, the buffet tables, the chairs—was sold by Captain Sézille, the secretary-general of the IEQJ, to his own employees or used at the Palais Berlitz to furnish the notorious IEQJ exhibition The Jew and France.
* * *
In Floirac the scenario was almost identical: enter, in order of appearance, the occupying forces and the innocent bystanders who, by their own accounts, only wanted to help the family but who ended up taking advantage of the situation.
On September 15, 1940, the Germans arrive at Le Castel de Floirac at dawn; five vehicles filled with German soldiers and policemen stop outside the house.
The Germans demand to see Louis Le Gall, Paul’s chauffeur, who has unsuccessfully been trying for days to persuade the hauler Lamarthonie to send the paintings that have remained in Floirac to Lisbon: some Monet water lilies, a Delacroix, some works by Picasso, Léger, Matisse, Sisley, Vuillard, and Utrillo. In a letter of July 6, 1940, three weeks after his hasty departure from Floirac, Paul has asked Louis for an inventory of all the objects he wants dispatched, including the seventy-five paintings stored at Le Castel. “Don’t forget the ones that were left in the chest above the garage, and please be kind enough to check that none is missing,” writes my grandfather.
My Grandfather's Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War Page 15
