And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (30 page)

No less striking was how many wealthy French people jumped at the chance to sell family treasures. Some went out of their way to invite German dealers or buyers to inspect their homes for paintings or objects of interest. Early in the occupation, the Galerie Charpentier presented a show of medieval and Renaissance objects from private
collections; Göring bought everything on display. In 1942, one Paris newspaper estimated that there were seventy galleries in operation and most were doing better than at any time since the 1920s. These included several businesses formerly owned by Jews, some of which had deftly managed their own Aryanization, such as the Kahnweiler
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—now Leiris—gallery and the Wildenstein and André Weil galleries. For these and other galleries, the Germans were valued clients. And since few galleries showed any concern for the provenance of the art they were selling, it was not long before paintings looted from Jewish collections were on the market.

In theory, Jewish-owned art of no interest to the Germans was to be sold to benefit French war widows and orphans; in practice, these works simply fed the booming art market. In 1943, Picasso bought a landscape by Le Douanier Rousseau from Martin Fabiani’s gallery. After the war, he was visited by Germaine Wertheimer, who had just returned from exile in New York with her husband, Pierre, one of the owners of Chanel. “I was there when she came in and said, ‘This is a painting of mine,’ ” recalled Françoise Gilot, the young artist who became Picasso’s mistress in early 1944. “Picasso immediately said, ‘Okay, I’ll give it back to you and I’ll ask Fabiani for my money.’ ”
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There was also a good market for art that had not been stolen from Jews. That included works by many living artists, among them Bonnard, Raoul Dufy, Georges Rouault, Matisse, Braque and the Fauvists Derain, de Vlaminck and Van Dongen. Drouot even occasionally auctioned paintings by Picasso, that most “degenerate” of artists, as well as by Chagall and Modigliani, both Jews, and Léger, now exiled in New York. But Germans would also monitor and censor shows in galleries. “You couldn’t have an exhibition of paintings without Germans coming in to check, not in uniforms, but in civilian clothes,” Gilot said. “I happened to be in one gallery, which had big exhibitions, when they came in and said, ‘Picasso no, Matisse no, Van Dongen yes.’ They would remove from the walls everything they didn’t want.” That same art, however, simply went into drawers or cupboards and could be seen or bought privately. “I liked Max Ernst’s work a lot,” she went on, “so I’d go to Jeanne Bucher’s gallery before six p.m. and then, after it closed, she would show me her Ernst paintings.”

Bucher was particularly daring. Already in her late sixties when Paris fell, she had been known as the high priestess of avant-garde art since establishing her first gallery, in 1926. In April 1941, she reopened for business in a house at 9 ter boulevard du Montparnasse and, during the occupation, she organized no fewer than twenty exhibitions. Although she preferred to seek out emerging painters like Nicolas de Staël, Jean Bazaine, Édouard Pignon and Charles Lapicque, she was no less admired by established artists. On July 21, 1942, Bucher even presented paintings and gouaches by Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian abstract art pioneer and Bauhaus teacher who had moved to Paris from Berlin in 1933 and was now living quietly in Neuilly. The show, however, was closed a day later by the Germans. One group show, in 1943, included paintings by Braque, Gris, Léger and Picasso; another, in 1944, had drawings and engravings by Bonnard, Braque, Dalí, Dufy, Picasso and others. Never one to be intimidated, on January 6, 1944, Bucher organized a group show with works by Kandinsky, César Domela and de Staël. Artists who crowded into her gallery for the opening included Braque, Picasso, Dora Maar, Pignon and Bazaine. Then, in June 1944, to highlight women artists, she showed paintings by Maar and Vera Pagava.

German officers also visited the Jeanne Bucher gallery, often to buy, sometimes to laugh at modern art. On one occasion, the story is told, Bucher indignantly asked some Germans why they bothered to look at a painting they thought was “bad.” Furious, she found a photograph of one of Arno Breker’s sculptures, threw it on the floor and stamped on it, shouting, “That’s German art. So, look what I do to it!” When one of the Germans asked if he could keep it, she replied, “No, it will come in useful next time.”
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She also encouraged other mavericks, such as Maurice Panier and Noëlle Lecoutour, the owners of the small L’Esquisse gallery, who had parallel lives in the resistance. After Bucher exhibited Kandinsky in January 1944, she offered her show to L’Esquisse, with the addition of works by Alberto Magnelli. And, suprisingly, after Panier and Lecoutour sent out printed invitations, Abstract Painters opened on February 15 without a hitch. But the following day, German officers arrived, looked around and announced ominously that they would shortly return. Alarmed, the gallery owners suspended the show. They called de Staël to pick up his paintings, while Domela grabbed the Kandinskys and spent the next few hours on a bicycle delivering them back to the artist in Neuilly.

Many other shows went ahead unperturbed by the Propaganda Staffel, whose director for visual arts, a certain Dr. Lange, was considered a Francophile and, it was said, ensured that artists were supplied with coal in winter. Even Braque, who steered clear of the Germans, exhibited twenty-six paintings and nine sculptures in the 1943 Salon d’Automne. Louis Carré sold Matisse and several Fauvists, while René Drouin threw the spotlight on the
art brut
innovator Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier, whose later
Hostages
series were among the few wartime paintings to address the political situation.

Because they were unknown to the Germans, many younger artists were also free to exhibit their work. Some were featured in Vingt Jeunes Peintres de Tradition Française, the Galerie Braun show in 1941. Organized by Bazaine as part of Vichy’s Jeune France initiative, it brought together twenty painters who were anything but traditional and who would develop French abstract art after the war. Among them were Lapicque, Jean Le Moal, François Desnoyer and Alfred Manessier. Some of these and others also showed their latest work in Étapes du Nouvel Art Contemporain in the Berri-Raspail Gallery in 1942 and in Douze Peintres d’Aujourd’hui at the Galerie de France in 1943. And despite the shortage of most necessities of life, with some ingenuity they were able to find painting supplies. “I’d go to the flea market and buy a worthless oil painting for just the price of the canvas,” Gilot remembered. “I’d then turn it around and paint on the other side. We could still find good paper. Paint colors were more difficult, but you’d get an address and find them there. And brushes you could find.”

A key promoter of younger artists was Gaston Diehl, an art critic who in October 1943 founded the Salon de Mai in a café in the Palais-Royal. At that point, it was more of a club than an event, but it enabled artists to share their distaste for the Nazis and their support for “degenerate” and other modern art. Finally, in May 1945, the first Salon de Mai was held, starting a tradition that continues to this day. A few artists went further. André Fougeron, a former anarchist who joined the Communist Party in 1939, was a painter of Socialist Realism and, as such, was naturally drawn to politics. In 1941, soon after escaping from German captivity, he set up a clandestine printing shop in his studio to publish
L’Art Français
, the art world’s principal underground journal, as well as to design other clandestine newspapers, such as
L’Université Libre
and, later,
Les Lettres Françaises
. Fougeron also played a key role in founding the Front National des
Peintres et des Sculpteurs, which near the end of the occupation became the Front National des Arts.

Pignon, in turn, provided a safe house for resistance meetings that was also available as a hideout for Aragon on his secret visits to Paris. The American painter Harry Bernard Goetz helped found the semiclandestine Surrealist review
La Main à Plume
, which published poetry and art and was tolerated by the Propaganda Staffel.
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As a
résistant
, however, Goetz not only had a gift for making false identity papers but also printed resistance posters, which he and his Dutch wife, Christine, would paste on walls. The painter and illustrator Jean Lurçat, who was involved in the resistance in the Lot region from early in the occupation, became best known for his design of Aubusson tapestries with resistance themes, among them one using Éluard’s poem “Liberté.” Paul Goyard, an artist in his late fifties, was arrested in 1944 for running a clandestine printing operation and sent to Buchenwald; he survived. Boris Taslitzky, a Communist artist, also survived deportation, leaving a powerful testimony in 111 drawings made in Buchenwald. And as a cover for his resistance activities, the Gaullist representative Jean Moulin opened the Romain Gallery in Nice in February 1943 and filled it with borrowed art, including loans from Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Rouault.

While most artists enjoyed the freedom to work, at least in the privacy of their studios, the line dividing acceptable and unacceptable art remained clear. This was apparent when the long-planned Musée d’Art Moderne finally opened in 1942. With 650 works on display, the artists represented included Matisse, Bonnard, Rouault, Picabia, Édouard Vuillard, Braque, Maillol and even Léger and Tanguy, who were in exile in New York. On the other hand, Picasso, Modigliani, Miró, Ernst, Klee, Duchamp and Chagall were excluded. And Jean Cassou, the man originally named to be the museum’s director, was also absent; by then, he was in jail in Toulouse for his resistance activities.

For the Germans, of course, the enemy camp also included foreign Jewish artists, a handful of whom had been unable to find a country willing to receive them and were living in constant fear of arrest. Of
these, Victor Brauner, Jacques Hérold and Wols spent the occupation in hiding in the south of France, while the Romanian Chaïm Soutine died of natural causes in a Paris hospital in August 1943. But others perished at the hands of the Nazis. Five Jewish artists long resident in France—the Ukrainian Vladimir Baranov-Rossiné, the Pole Henri Epstein, the Belarusan Jacques Gotko and the Germans Adolphe Feder and Otto Freundlich—were deported and died in Nazi camps. Freundlich, who had moved to France in 1925, long before Hitler took office, nonetheless represented everything the Nazis disliked: one of his sculptures was even featured on the cover of the program for the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937. In 1939, he was interned as an “undesirable foreigner,” but after France fell he found a safe haven in Saint-Paul-de-Fenouillet, a mountain village near Perpignan. On February 23, 1943, however, supposedly after a tip-off by an informer, French police arrested him and delivered him to the Germans. He was immediately deported to the Lublin-Majdanek camp in Poland, where he was killed on March 9.

At the other extreme, there were artists who willingly identified with the Germans, specifically by accepting an invitation by Goebbels to visit the Third Reich in the fall of 1941. Later, some of the eleven who made the trip said they accepted in exchange for the release of some French prisoners of war, although no such gesture followed. Others said they were encouraged by Vichy to make the journey. But, like Braque, they could have refused. Instead, two days before their departure, they attended a splashy reception given at the Propaganda Staffel’s office on the Champs-Élysées. Then, on the evening of October 30, after being photographed at the Gare de l’Est alongside uniformed German officers, they took an overnight train to Germany.

Although the Nazis had condemned Fauvism as “degenerate,” they were evidently impressed by the high level of the French delegation, which included the leading Fauvist painters Derain, Vlaminck, Van Dongen and Othon Friesz; the graphic artist André Dunoyer de Segonzac; and the sculptors Charles Despiau, Henri Bouchard, Paul Belmondo (father of the actor Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Paul Landowski, the director of the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts. The two-week junket took them to Munich, Vienna, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Nuremberg and Berlin, where they visited museums, met German artists and attended formal dinners. In Berlin, they were shown models and designs for Albert Speer’s new Berlin—
“Germania,” as it was to be called—and they visited the studio of Hitler’s pet sculptor, Arno Breker. And, as per the new practice, upon their return to Paris they were welcomed by the collaborationist press. Galtier-Boissière noted, “Vlaminck, Van Dongen and Despiau, back from Berlin, expound enthusiastically in interviews. Derain and Segonzac try to be forgotten.”
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In his memoirs, Derain said he deeply regretted making the trip, but Dunoyer de Segonzac and Bouchard told reporters they were impressed by Nazi support for artists, while Despiau confided to a friend that the voyage had done him good.

Breker’s involvement in the Berlin program was hardly accidental. Not only was he Germany’s most prestigious contemporary artist, but he had lived in Paris between 1927 and 1934 and already knew several of the artists in the French delegation. The French artist to whom Breker was most closely tied, though, was the sculptor Aristide Maillol. Breker was twenty-seven and Maillol sixty-six when they first met in Maillol’s hometown of Banyuls-sur-Mer in 1927, and a close friendship was immediately born. Both men were figurative artists, but while Maillol favored round, sensual female forms, Breker preferred large neoclassical male statues. Happy to learn from Maillol, Breker immediately began making his new friend’s work known in Germany.

By the mid-1930s, Breker’s own reputation was also growing in Germany and, while he opposed repression of modern art, the neo-Fascist monumentalism of his work came to the attention of Goebbels and Hitler. Soon he was commissioned to create sculptures and reliefs for new Nazi ministries and, by 1939, he was close to being an official artist. When Hitler visited the newly conquered Paris in June 1940, he summoned Breker—and Speer—to join him. For this historic visit, Breker later recalled, the Führer said, “I want to be surrounded by artists.”
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