My Grandfather's Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War
Page 17
BOULEVARD MAGENTA
1. Vincent Noce, “L’Histoire contre Wildenstein,” Libération, May 13, 2000.
A LONG RELATIONSHIP
1. Henri Matisse archives.
THE WAR YEARS IN NEW YORK
1. Henri Matisse archives.
2. Ibid.
3. Franck, Minuit.
4. Loyer, Paris à New York.
PREOCCUPATIONS OF THE HEART
1. Dorléac, L’Art de la défaite.
2. Danchev, Georges Braque.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Franck, Minuit.
6. Rosenberg, “French Artists and the War.”
7. Ibid.
8. Maurice de Vlaminck, “Opinions libres … sur la peinture,” Comœdia, June 6, 1942.
9. Dorléac, L’Art de la défaite.
10. In his book Le Cabinet des douze, Laurent Fabius mentions this canvas, as well as The Charnel House of 1945, showing how during this period Picasso’s clashing, violent, broken painting symbolizes the trauma of war.
11. Picasso archives.
12. Dorléac, L’Art de la défaite.
13. Franck, Minuit.
14. Dorléac, L’Art de la défaite.
15. Rosenberg, “French Artists and the War.”
16. “Picasso” file, document requesting naturalization, November 30, 1942, Archives of the Paris Police Prefecture.
THE TRAIN, SCHENKER, AND THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE
1. Valland, Le Front de l’art.
2. Ibid.
3. “Le pillage de l’art en France pendant l’Occupation et la situation des 2,000 œuvres confiées aux musées nationaux” (The Looting of Art in France During the French Occupation and the Location of the 2,000 Works Confiscated from the National Museums), a contribution from the administration of the Musées de France and the Centre Pompidou to the works of the Matteoli Commission on the spoliation of Jews in France, 2000.
4. Annette Wieviorka, “Des spoliations aux restitutions,” in Tal Bruttmann (ed.), Persécutions et spoliations des Juifs pendant la seconde guerre mondiale (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2004), 13–22.
5. Records of the Office of Strategic Services (RG 226); formerly Security Classified Intelligence reports (“XL” Series), 1941–1946. Document in English and French. For the latter, the list is signed “Michel Martin, chargé de mission au Département des peintures, rue de Tocqueville, November 7, 1944.”
6. Family archives.
7. Ibid.
8. Trial record, family archives.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Nicholas, Rape of Europa, 415.
14. Journal des tribunaux, Geneva, August 1948.
15. Nicholas, Rape of Europa, 418.
16. Ibid., 421.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Assouline, Pierre. Le Dernier des Camondo. Revised and expanded edition. Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1999.
______. L’Homme de l’art: D.-H. Kahnweiler, 1884–1979. Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1989.
Billig, Joseph. Le Commissariat général aux questions juives, 1941–1944. 3 Volumes. Vichy: Éditions du Centre, 1955.
Cabanne, Pierre. Le Siècle de Picasso. 4 volumes. Revised and expanded edition. Paris: Gallimard Folio-Essais, 1992.
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand. Lettres. Edited by Henri Godard and Jean-Paul Louis. Paris: Gallimard, 2009.
Daix, Pierre. Dictionnaire Picasso. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995.
Danchev, Alex. Georges Braque: A Life. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2005.
Desprairies, Cécile. Paris dans la Collaboration. Paris: Seuil, 2009.
______. Ville lumière, années noires: Les Lieux du Paris de la Collaboration. Paris: Denoël, 2008.
de Staël, Françoise. Nicolas de Staël: Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre peint. Neuchâtel, Switzerland: Ides et Calendes, 1997.
de Vlaminck, Maurice. “Opinions libres … sur la peinture.” Comœdia, June 6, 1942.
Dorléac, Laurence Bertrand. L’Art de la défaite, 1940–1944. Paris: Seuil, 1993.
Duncan, David Douglas. Goodbye Picasso. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1974.
Fabius, Laurent. Le Cabinet des douze: Regards sur des tableaux qui font la France. Paris: Gallimard, 2010.
Feliciano, Hector. The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
FitzGerald, Michael C. Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Franck, Dan. Minuit. Paris: Grasset, 2010.
Gee, Malcolm. Dealers, Critics, and Collections of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market Between 1910 and 1930. New York: Garland Publishing, 1981.
Gimpel, René. Journal d’un collectionneur: Marchand de tableaux. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1963.
Green, Christopher. Cubism and Its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916–1928. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
Joly, Laurent. Vichy dans la “solution finale”: Histoire du Commissariat général aux questions juives, 1941–1944. Paris: Grasset, 2006.
Levi, Neil. “‘Judge for Yourselves!’: The ‘Degenerate Art’ Exhibition as Political Spectacle,” October 85 (Summer 1998): 41–64.
Loyer, Emmanuelle. Paris à New York: Intellectuels et artistes français en exil 1940–1947. Paris: Grasset, 2005.
Nahon, Pierre. Les Marchands d’art en France, XIXe et XXe siècles. Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1998.
Nicholas, Lynn H. The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.
Noce, Vincent. “L’Histoire contre Wildenstein.” Libération, May 13, 2000.
Penrose, Roland. Picasso: His Life and Work. 3rd edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
Rosenberg, Paul. “French Artists and the War.” Art in Australia, December 1941–January 1942.
Tériade, E. “Feuilles volantes,” supplement, Cahiers d’art 10 (1927).
Valland, Rose. Le Front de l’art: Défense des collections françaises, 1939–1945. Paris: Plon, 1961; reprint edition, Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997.
Vollard, Ambroise. En écoutant Cézanne, Degas, Renoir. Paris: Grasset, 2003.
Wieviorka, Annette. “Des spoliations aux restitutions.” In Persécutions et spoliations des Juifs pendant la seconde guerre mondiale, edited by Tal Bruttmann, 13–22. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2004.
Wolff, Albert. “Le Calendrier parisien.” Le Figaro, April 3, 1876.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All the letters and quotations from Paul Rosenberg cited in this book are previously unpublished. Most of them come from my personal archives, as well as those kept by my aunt Elaine Rosenberg. I should particularly like to thank her, as well as my cousin Elisabeth Rosenberg-Clark, for graciously granting me access to the many boxes of documents from my grandfather’s gallery, from before and after the war. These archives were preserved in New York, at my aunt’s house, before being passed on to the Museum of Modern Art.
Thanks, of course, to Anne Baldassari, the director of the Musée Picasso, who, before the construction that forced the museum to close for more than two years, granted me shelter in its library so that I could dig around in the ample collection of letters from Paul Rosenberg to Pablo Picasso, which were given to the museum by the Picasso family. She generously and enthusiastically allowed me to reproduce extracts from that correspondence here.
Wanda de Guébriant, the director of the Matisse archives that were kept in the painter’s house at Issy-les-Moulineaux, helped me access the archives of Henri Matisse and allowed me to reproduce some of the painter’s correspondence with my grandfather, again previously unpublished. I am extremely grateful to her.
Finally, I should like to mention Didier Schulmann, the curator at the Musée National d’Ar
t Moderne, Centre Pompidou, who was so kind as to grant me access to the photographic documents of the exhibitions at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg and to allow me to reproduce them.
1. My grandfather in morning jacket before the First World War
2. My uncle Alexandre “Kiki” Rosenberg, a lieutenant in the Second Armored Division, at the liberation of Paris. He served for four years under General Leclerc. After the war he succeeded my grandfather as the director of the gallery Paul Rosenberg & Co.
3. The catalog of a 1926 exhibition of recent works by Picasso
4. Paul Rosenberg & Co., East Fifty-seventh Street, New York, 1941–1953
5. Micheline en infirmière (Micheline as a Nurse), a drawing of my mother by Picasso that disappeared during the Second World War and has yet to be found
6. The foyer of the gallery on rue La Boétie, featured on the cover of a 1935 exhibition catalog
7. A view of the interior of the gallery on rue La Boétie, featured on the cover of a 1936 exhibition catalog
8. Micheline au lapin (Micheline with Rabbit), another Picasso drawing of my mother that vanished during the Second World War and has not yet been recovered
9. Portrait de Madame Rosenberg et sa fille (Mother and Child), painted by Picasso in 1918, at the Musée Picasso
10. Postcard sent by Picasso to my mother from London in 1919, when she was two years old
11. The catalog of a 1927 exhibition of one hundred drawings by Picasso
12. A photograph of Picasso in the 1920s, which he inscribed to my grandfather
13. The main stairway of the gallery on rue La Boétie, with paintings by Picasso and André Masson
14. The gallery on rue La Boétie during a Picasso and Marie Laurencin exhibition
15. A broken photographic plate of a 1937 Braque exhibition at rue La Boétie
16. The photograph of a painting by Georges Braque that was used as a model for the design of the marble mosaics set into the floor at rue La Boétie
17. An exhibition of drawings by Matisse at rue La Boétie, June 1937
18. The Matisse exhibition of October–November 1938
19. My grandfather with a Matisse painting in the 1930s
20. The Institut d’Étude des Questions Juives (IEQJ, Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions) was inaugurated at 21 rue La Boétie in May 1941. This photograph shows the notoriously anti-Semitic author and guest of honor, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (left), in front of the building.
21./22. Posters advertising The Jew and France, an exhibition organized by the IEQJ and on view at the Palais Berlitz in 1941
23. The installation of a portrait of Marshal Pétain in the foyer of 21 rue La Boétie for the inauguration of the IEQJ
24. Céline at the IEQJ in May 1941
25. The slogan in the events hall at the IEQJ reads, “We fight against the Jew to give France back its true face: a native face”; beneath it is a poster “explaining” genetics.
26. A poster of the “Jewish bird of prey” devouring a bloodied France in the IEQJ’s events hall. The paneling and glass of my grandfather’s exhibition space are visible in the photograph.
27. My grandfather, in one of his favorite poses, examining a painting
28. My grandfather in New York, cigarette holder dangling from his lips, showing a magnificent Renoir to W. Somerset Maugham
29. With my grandparents Paul and Margot in the summer of 1950, when I was two years old
30. Marie Laurencin painted my portrait when I was four.
31. With Picasso at his farmhouse in Notre-Dame-de-Vie, near Mougins, in 1968
32. My grandfather at rest—a rare sight. This photograph was taken by my aunt Elaine in the 1950s.
33. My grandfather as he remains in my childhood memories
34. With my grandfather in the early 1950s. In his hand is an ever-present pack of Lucky Strikes.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anne Sinclair is Paul Rosenberg’s granddaughter and one of France’s best-known journalists. For thirteen years she was the host of 7 sur 7, a weekly news and politics television show for which she interviewed world figures of the day, including Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Madonna. The editorial director of Le Huffington Post (France), Sinclair has written two bestselling books on politics.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Frontispiece: Private collection/Succession Picasso, 2012
COLOR INSERT
1: Family archives/All rights reserved
2: Family archives/All rights reserved
3: Musée Picasso, Paris/Succession Picasso, 2012
4: Family archives/All rights reserved
5: Family archives/Succession Picasso, 2012
6: Family archives/All rights reserved
7: Family archives/All rights reserved
8: Family archives/Succession Picasso, 2012
9: Musée Picasso, Paris/Succession Picasso, 2012
10: Musée Picasso, Paris/Succession Picasso, 2012
11: Family archives/All rights reserved
12: Musée Picasso, Paris/Succession Picasso, 2012
13: Family archives/Succession Picasso, 2012
14: Centre Pompidou—Mnam—Bibliothèque Kandinsky—Fonds Paul Rosenberg/Succession Picasso, 2012
15: Family archives/All rights reserved
16: Centre Pompidou—Mnam—Bibliothèque Kandinsky—Fonds Paul Rosenberg/ADAGP, Paris, 2012
17: Centre Pompidou—Mnam—Bibliothèque Kandinsky—Fonds Paul Rosenberg
18: Centre Pompidou—Mnam—Bibliothèque Kandinsky—Fonds Paul Rosenberg
19: Family archives/All rights reserved
20: © Roger-Viollet
21: © LAPI/Roger-Viollet
22: © LAPI/Roger-Viollet
23: © Roger-Viollet
24: © Roger-Viollet
25: © Roger-Viollet
26: © Roger-Viollet
27: Family archives/All rights reserved
28: Family archives/All rights reserved
29: Family archives/All rights reserved
30: Private collection/ADAGP, Paris, 2012
31: Family archives/Succession Picasso, 2012
32: Family archives/All rights reserved
33: Family archives/All rights reserved
34: Family archives/All rights reserved
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2012 by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle
Translation copyright © 2014 by Shaun Whiteside
All rights reserved
Originally published in French in 2012 by Bernard Grasset, France, as 21, rue La Boétie
English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2014
Owing to limitations of space, illustration credits appear at the back of the book.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sinclair, Anne, author.
[21, rue La Boétie. English]
My grandfather’s gallery : a family memoir of art and war / Anne Sinclair; translated by Shaun Whiteside.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-25162-8 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71179-5 (ebook)
1. Sinclair, Anne—Family. 2. Rosenberg, Paul, 1881–1959. 3. Journalists—France—Biography. 4. Art dealers—France—Biography. I. Whiteside, Shaun, translator. II. Title.
PN5183.S54 A313 2014
709.2—dc23
[B]
2014004038
www.fsgbooks.com
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Frontispiece: Drawing of Paul Rosenberg by Pablo Picasso, winter 1918–1919
*A French lawyer who, along with his wife, Beate, dedicated his life to deportee
s. The Klarsfelds were known as Nazi hunters.
†Maurice Papon was sentenced in 1998 for “complicity in crimes against humanity” for his actions between 1942 and 1944, when he was the official representative of Vichy in the prefecture of Gironde, and especially for deporting Jews.
*Translator’s note: Both of Anne’s grandmothers were named Marguerite. For clarity, Anne’s paternal grandmother is referred to here and throughout as Marguerite, while her maternal grandmother is called by her family nickname, Margot.
*Translator’s note: The Bettencourt affair was a 2010 French political scandal that erupted over Liliane Bettencourt’s illegal political campaign donations to members of the French government associated with Nicolas Sarkozy.