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

by Anne Sinclair Narrated by Kate Reading

Overview

On September 20, 1940, one of the most famous European art dealers disembarked in New York, one of hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing Vichy, France. Leaving behind his beloved Paris gallery, Paul Rosenberg had managed to save his family, but his paintings-modern masterpieces by Cézanne, Monet, Sisley, and others-were not so fortunate. As he fled, dozens of works were seized by Nazi forces, and the art dealer's own legacy was eradicated.



More than half a century later, Anne Sinclair uncovered a box filled with letters. Drawing on her grandfather's intimate correspondence with Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and others, Sinclair takes us on a personal journey through the life of a legendary member of the Parisian art scene in My Grandfather's Gallery. Rosenberg's story is emblematic of millions of Jews, rich and poor, whose lives were indelibly altered by World War II. Sinclair's journey to reclaim her family history paints a picture of modern art on both sides of the Atlantic between the 1920s and 1950s that reframes twentieth-century art history.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

07/14/2014
In this splendid memoir, journalist Sinclair, director of the French Huffington Post, explores a chapter of her family history colored by Vichy France and Nazi theft. From his elegant gallery at 21 rue La Boétie, Sinclair’s grandfather, Paul Rosenberg, became an apostle of modern art, tactfully promoting work by Lauren­cin, Matisse, Braque, Léger, and Picasso. (In 1939, Rosenberg helped organize Picasso’s first American retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.) Forced to flee France for New York in 1940 (with assistance from MoMA director Alfred Barr), Rosenberg’s Paris gallery was overtaken by the Germans, its collection seized and dispersed, and the building converted into the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question. Drifting back and forth in time, Sinclair’s narrative presents a complex picture of a sharp-eyed, industrious, and melancholy man. Some of the most vivid moments are devoted to Rosenberg’s personal and professional relationship with Picasso. The agreement between the two provided “Pic” (as Rosenberg affectionately called him) security and support while he advanced beyond Cubism. Long reluctant to engage the Rosenberg story, Sinclair calls attention to the difficulties of searching out the past and of grappling with what is found there. Agent: Michael Carlisle, Inkwell Management. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

Sinclair's captivating tale of two cities will change the way we look at modern art.” —Alice Kaplan, author of Dreaming in French

“My Grandfather's Gallery tells Paul Rosenberg's story in bits and pieces that construct a life and a legend through association.... A detailed and important record of twentieth century art.” —The Boston Globe

“This book's fascination comes from the feeling that the reader is discreetly looking on, brought up close to the author's own emotional experience as she roams back and forth across time ... into a past that emerges as truly another country.” —The Guardian (London)

“In shifting back and forth from the Vichy years to the early 1920s to the aftermath of the war, Ms. Sinclair offers revealing glimpses into what made the gallery such a prime target for the Nazis.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Sinclair, a renowned journalist in France, pulls no punches.... [An] absorbing account.” —W

“My Grandfather's Gallery paints a vivid portrait of a moment of exceptional brilliance in French artistic life…the speed and greed with which it was so brutally destroyed, and the efficiency with which these deeds of destruction were covered up and forgotten.” —The Spectator (UK)

“More memoir than biography, this book's fascination comes from the feeling that the reader is discreetly looking on, brought up close to the author's own emotional experience as she roams back and forth across time…like a set of wistful glimpses, meticulously analysed, into a past that emerges as truly another country.” —Sue Roe, The Guardian (UK)

“[A] splendid memoir…Sinclair calls attention to the difficulties of searching out the past and of grappling with what is found there.” —Publishers Weekly

“Readers interested in WWII and art under fascism will find this a fascinating read. Sinclair's memoir contextualizes yet another aspect of this tumultuous time.” —Booklist

“An intriguing window into the art scene of the early to mid-1900s.” —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY

"The book shows the birth of modern art midwifed by a man we'd like to know better." —Kirkus

Kirkus Reviews

2014-06-18
French TV journalist Sinclair carefully accesses a wealth of family archives in her study of the biggest art dealer in Europe until World War II, her grandfather Paul Rosenberg (1881-1951).Rosenberg and his brother, Léonce, owned separate Parisian galleries; Paul concentrated on 19th-century French painters while his brother saw cubism as the culmination of all painting. It was Léonce who spotted the newest modern artists—in particular, Pablo Picasso. Eventually, in 1918, Paul took over as Picasso’s agent.Rosenberg and Picasso were inseparable, Paul effectively orchestrating Picasso’s career while Picasso established Paul’s reputation. He hedged his bets by carrying traditional art in his gallery separate from his exclusive relationships with Picasso, Braque, Matisse and others. The author uses her grandfather’s correspondence to paste together the story of their flight from Paris and the loss of more than 400 works of art to the Nazis when they took over his gallery. The building became the Gestapo-runInstitute for the Study of Jewish and Ethno-Racial Questions; classical art was sequestered for “safe keeping” while the “degenerate” art of the modernists (“any art that…departed from the canon of what the Nazis considered traditional”) was sold or burned. Sinclair’s grandfather vociferously opposed the Nazi auction of the modern art, realizing that any profit the Reich received would “fall back on our heads [as] bombs.” The Rosenbergs fled to New York in 1940, and Paul remained in the forefront of the art world until his return to Paris and the fight to recover his artwork.The book shows the birth of modern art midwifed by a man we’d like to know better. Did Sinclair feel a need to protect some family history? Even so, she offers an intriguing window into the art scene of the early to mid-1900s.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170868032
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	09/16/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

RUE LA BOÉTIE

Number 21. I’ve passed by it hundreds of times. My mother liked to show me the 1930s façade with its stone arches. I’d noticed various shops on that street—ice cream, pizza—but I’d never stopped to take a closer look. Now, seventy years after my grandfather had left the premises, I wanted to see the building for myself. I couldn’t imagine that three years later I would unveil a plaque on this very building that I had not yet entered.

Today it’s an office of the Veolia Environmental Services company. I call them up: “My grandparents used to live there. I’d love to take a look around, really just a look. I don’t want to disturb you … It was before the war, I’m sure there are few traces left … Of course I understand if it’s not possible.” I detected the ambivalence in my own voice. It was almost as if I worried that they might actually let me in.

They did. Why would they resist? So one Wednesday in April 2010 off I went to Veolia, to 21 rue La Boétie, where I begin my story. Touched by my curiosity and possibly a bit incredulous that it’s taken me to the age of sixty to set foot in the building where my grandfather’s gallery was located, my hosts graciously show me around.

The hallway has been divided, and there are white stucco columns with Corinthian capitals, which I find a bit tasteless. Are they original? And a black-and-white damier marble floor. It’s all been redesigned, modernized, the rooms, the spaces. There are spotlights affixed to the ceiling. The staircase with its old-fashioned banisters leading to the upper floors seems unchanged. Lots of Fernand Léger’s and André Masson’s paintings used to hang on the walls of this interior stairway, which led to my family’s private apartments: the one belonging to my grandparents and their children, then the one to my great-grandmother, Paul’s mother, Mathilde Rosenberg. Of course no paintings now hang in this stairway, which leads to various offices. The overall impression is dreary. Yet the elevator is modern, surely in compliance with health and safety regulations. The rattling old cage of another age is gone.

The stairway within the gallery, the one with the cast-iron banister, seems to have retained its original look, from the 1930s, when my grandfather did some elaborate renovations. The floor is patterned with marble mosaics made with yellow stones. But there’s no way of telling exactly where the mosaic plaques went, the ones designed by Georges Braque, who also supervised their installation. Above the stairs were arches, replicas of the ones outside, adorned with pieces of mirrored glass.

I’m in the lower of the two exhibition halls, the one that appears in so many of the photographs I’ve seen of my grandfather situated in his domain. All the exhibitions at rue La Boétie were held in this large room. A month of Braque, another of Henri Matisse, a third of Pablo Picasso. It is now a boardroom for Veolia executives. The fine oak parquet floor is still there, and I immediately recognize the wood paneling, which I’ve seen in the photographs, as well as the glass ceiling with its little star-shaped windows, which, as in other galleries of the time, diffused the light so as to soften the hard edges of cubist painting.

If I half closed my eyes I could see them, those big paintings from the 1920s and 1930s, hanging on the walls. Soon after, those masterpieces would be replaced by portraits of the head of the Vichy government, Marshal Philippe Pétain.

*   *   *

In 1927 E. Tériade, a famous critic and art publisher of Greek descent, described the Galerie Rosenberg in “Feuilles volantes,” the monthly supplement of the influential journal Cahiers d’art: “We are introduced into a huge room, high-ceilinged, bare walls, naked light, a room in which sober brown curtains weigh down on the collection, in which two solitary armchairs upholstered with dark velvet reach toward you like two grand inquisitors; no, they’re not reaching toward you, they’re going for your throat, as masterpieces do. Hurricanes of solitude, of austerity, pass through the room … Paul Rosenberg: he’s dressed in black. He has the anxious face of an ascetic or a passionate businessman.”1

Here’s another description of the setting, particularly interesting when you consider that the author is the notorious, extreme-right-wing writer Maurice Sachs, who later defined himself as a Jew, a homosexual, and a collaborator before being killed by a bullet to the back of the head by the Germans in whose service he had worked: “His grand seigneur bearing was part of his particular genius … You step into Rosenberg’s gallery as if entering a temple: the deep leather armchairs, the walls lined with red silk, would lead you to think you were in a fine museum … He knew how to cast an extraordinary light on the painters he took under his wing. His knowledge of painting was deeper than that of his colleagues, and he had a very sure sense of his own taste.”2

Paul, who had taken over his father’s gallery with his brother, Léonce, in 1905, decided to set up on his own in 1910 and moved alone to 21 rue La Boétie, in the Eighth Arrondissement of Paris. Nineteenth-century works were shown on the mezzanine; contemporary art, on the ground floor. If visitors were unsure about Braque or Léger, Paul invited them upstairs to see softer-contoured works by Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, or Auguste Rodin. He hoped they might buy some of these, which would allow him to support his unknown friends, such as Picasso or Marie Laurencin, the muse of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1913 she became the first artist to sign an exclusive deal with Paul, an arrangement that stood until 1940. She was joined by Picasso in 1918, Braque in 1923, Léger in 1926, and Matisse in 1936.

*   *   *

In 1912, almost as soon as he had moved in, Paul sent out an announcement just as anyone opening a shop might do, describing his new venture: “I will shortly be opening new modern art galleries at 21 rue La Boétie, where I plan to hold periodic exhibitions by the masters of the nineteenth century and painters of our own times. In my view, however, the shortcoming of contemporary exhibitions is that they show an artist’s work in isolation. So I intend to hold group exhibitions of decorative art … Not only do I plan to offer my spaces for free, I shall not take a percentage in the event of a sale. For each exhibition I shall publish at my own expense a catalog of the paintings, sculptures, furniture, etc.”

The critic Pierre Nahon stresses Paul’s desire to establish a connection between French painting of the past and the modernist trends of the twentieth century, noting that in the late 1930s Paul had on his walls and in his inventory a collection of Géricault, Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet, Cézanne, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, ToulouseLautrec, Picasso, Braque, Léger, Le Douanier Rousseau, Bonnard, Laurencin, Modigliani, and Matisse. “The gallery,” Nahon writes, “is becoming an essential meeting place for everyone who wants to follow the development and the work of the innovative painters.”

My own research is centered on an attempt to conjure the grandfather I barely knew. And to summon up the riches heures of the thirties and the grim ones of the forties that are integral to his story.

*   *   *

My grandfather had great difficulty regaining possession of his gallery after the war. The state had confiscated the building from the collaborators in August 1944 and made it the headquarters of the Saint-Gobain construction company, before finally returning the building to my grandfather. By then it had endured the sinister events that I am about to relate, events with which my grandfather could never make peace. Paul finally sold 21 rue La Boetie in January 1953. He was determined never again to live in that place, its basement filled with propaganda from the darkest years, its rooms still haunted by the ghosts of the occupation.

For a long time the building was home to the French General Information Service, Renseignements Généraux, the French police intelligence service, and the secrets of the Republic were buried with the secrets of the collaborators.

Copyright © 2012 by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle

Translation copyright © 2014 by Shaun Whiteside

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