Confessions of an Art Addict (9 page)

During my stay in Grenoble, I received a cable from Tanguy's new wife, Kay Sage. She had taken him to America and was now trying to help other European artists to get there. She wanted me to pay the passage of five ‘distinguished' artists. When I cabled to inquire who they might be, I received the reply:
André Breton, his wife and child, Max Ernst and Dr Mabille, the Surrealist doctor.
I protested, saying that neither Breton's wife nor his child, nor Dr Mabille were distinguished artists, but I did accept the charge of the Breton family and Max Ernst. I was also trying to get Victor Brauner, who was a Jew, to
America. He was in hiding as a shepherd in the mountains near Marseilles, and since Breton was in Marseilles, I went there to visit the Emergency Rescue Committee, which was doing a splendid job. It was run by Varian Fry, who raised a lot of money which he distributed among stranded refugees who were in hiding from the Gestapo. He worked underground to get them into Spain and Portugal or Africa, and from there to America or Cuba. He also helped to repatriate British soldiers who were still in France after Dunkirk and wanted to join De Gaulle.

Fry lived in an enormous dilapidated château called ‘Belle Air', outside Marseilles. For assistants he had a former secretary of the prefect of police of Paris and his British wife. The Breton family were his guests. They had all been arrested and held incommunicado on a boat for several days during Pétain's visit to Marseilles.

Fry asked me to work with the committee. He wanted me to take his place while he was absent in the United States for a brief period. After consulting the American consul, I decided not to. The committee were doing a very dangerous job, of which I had absolutely no knowledge or experience, but I gave them a lot of money and went back to Grenoble.

After I had promised to pay Max Ernst's passage to America, Laurence Vail suggested that I ask Max to give me a painting in exchange. He wrote to say he would be delighted to do so, and sent me a photograph of one which I did not feel very enthusiastic about. I wrote back to say I
might prefer another one In the meantime he had written me asking me to send him six thousand francs and a letter for a lawyer, testifying that I had seen his own sculptures in his house in the Ardèche and that they were worth at least seventy-five thousand francs. It seems Leonora Carrington had gone mad and made over their house to a Frenchman to save it from the Germans, but he turned out to be a crook and stole everything. Max hoped at least to recover his sculptures. I had seen them reproduced in
Cahiers d'Art
and could render him this service. His paintings he sneaked out at night. I had suggested going to see him in the Ardèche to choose a picture, but under the circumstances he could not receive me and told me to come instead to Marseilles.

Myself With Grace Hartigan's painting

The view from my roof

When I arrived in Marseilles for the second time, the whole atmosphere of the château had changed. Breton no
longer held court there, with his Surrealist followers playing games and making collective drawings. He had left for America. The Surrealist court also had disappeared, but Max was living there. He had been in many concentration camps and looked much older. He had never taken up French citizenship and was first imprisoned by the French for being German, and later by the Germans for being their avowed enemy. Finally, Leonora Carrington had managed to get him free; the Museum of Modern Art was now trying to get him to America. However, nothing came through in the way of documents and money, and his passport was about to expire.

I chose a great many of his pictures from every period, which he sold me for two thousand dollars, and then we celebrated his fiftieth birthday at the
vieux port
, drinking wine he had brought from the Ardèche, and eating oysters.

I felt extremely attracted to Ernst, and soon discovered that I was madly in love with him; from then on my only thought was to save him from Europe and get him to New York. After great difficulties, I managed to get him off to Lisbon. He left with all his paintings, which were greatly admired at the frontier by soldiers at the customs, and even by priests.

When I finally got to Lisbon, he had found Leonora, whom he had lost during the war. After two months of dreadful complications and miseries on all sides, Leonora
married a Mexican friend and went to New York with him, and Max left with me and my family.

When we arrived in New York on July 14, 1941, it was fourteen years since I had set foot in America. We were met by many friends, including Putzel and Max's son Jimmy. He had enormous blue eyes and was so tiny and fragile he looked like a miniature. Just as Max was about to greet Jimmy, he was seized by officials and not allowed to talk to him. It seemed that Pan-American Airways could not accept the responsibility of admitting a German into the United States without an investigation. I offered bail, but to no avail. Poor Max was whisked away. I gathered from the officials that the last boat had left for Ellis Island so, guarded by a detective, Max would have to spend the night in a hotel as the guest of Pan-American Airways. He was not supposed to talk to anyone, but they said they would let me know where he was being taken, and the rest would be up to me.

I followed Max to the Belmont-Plaza and took a room there. Then I phoned him every half hour. After the third call, he told me the detective had given him permission to meet me in the hotel bar called the Glass Hat. I went there with Putzel, and the three of us had a drink. Then the detective, who called me Max's ‘sister', suggested we all have dinner in Max's room. We said we preferred to go out, and the detective gave his consent. He followed us through the streets at a respectful distance and refused to join us at dinner, but remained alone at the bar of our little
restaurant. After dinner, he wished to take us to Chinatown, but we said we preferred Pierre's Bar. He told us not to waste our money. Suddenly he chucked me under the chin and said, ‘Peggy is a wonderful girl.'

When we went back to the Belmont-Plaza he asked Max if he did not want to sleep with ‘his sister', saying it was perfectly safe, as he would be sitting outside Max's door all night with a gun in his pocket, guarding not only him but a
G
-man in the room opposite. I declined his offer.

The next morning, he turned Max over to an official of Pan-American Airways. The minute we landed at Ellis Island, Max was taken away and imprisoned. I was quite frantic for three days, waiting on the Island, where I went every day, expecting to be called as a witness. Max enjoyed himself immensely on the island and was not in the least worried, but I never saw him again until he was released. Jimmy, his son, came to the hearing with a letter from the Museum of Modern Art, and Max was released at once. When I told Max that he was a baby deposited on my doorstep, he said, ‘You are a lost girl.' I knew he was right, but was surprised that he realized it.

I had no idea how famous Max was, and it was great fun going around with someone so well known. He was also perpetually encountering people whom he had known in concentration camps. To me these people seemed like ghosts, but to Max they were very real, and he always mentioned the dreadful camps where they had been together as though he were talking about Deauville,
Kitzbuhl or St Moritz.

Max loved to wear fantastic clothes. In Europe he wore a black cape, which was very romantic and suited him perfectly. In Marseilles once, when I was buying a little sheepskin jacket, Max was so jealous that I had to order one for him as well. The furrier was very surprised, but he made it, and when Max wore it he looked like a Slav prince. I also gave him my mother's lorgnon, which made him look very aristocratic.

While Max was on Ellis Island I went to see Breton. He was installed in an apartment in Greenwich Village which Kay Sage Tanguy had rented for him for six months. It was very comfortable, but looked unlike his usual surroundings. There were no modern paintings and none of his collection of primitive art, which he must have missed terribly. He seemed worried about the future, yet in spite of this he was determined not to learn a word of English. Breton was anxious to get Max back into his group again, as Max was his biggest star and he had lost him during the Eluard crisis, when the Surrealists had split into two camps, Breton leading one and Paul Eluard the other. The Surrealists were always playing cat and mouse, and it was quite easy for Max to be seduced again. The person Breton objected to most was Dali, because of his commercial and vulgar attitude towards publicity. So Max would not allow me to see him. I promised Breton two hundred dollars a month for a year to put his mind at rest until he knew what he would do in New York. Later,
he got a job broadcasting on the Free French radio.

In New York Breton continued to lead his usual life as much as he could. It was, however, in the home of Mr and Mrs Bernard Reis that he had the freest hand. They were art patrons, and she was a marvellous cook. They gave many parties and invited all the Surrealists, whose art reviews they sponsored, especially
Triple V.
Mrs Reis loved to fill her home with Surrealists and let them do what they liked. Breton took advantage of this to make us all play his favourite game,
Le Jeu de la Verité.
We sat around in a circle while Breton lorded it over us in a true schoolmasterly spirit. The game was rather Freudian. It was a sort of psycho-analysis done in public. The worse things we exposed, the happier everybody was. One was asked what one would do about sex if one's husband went to war, and how long one could go without it, or what one's favourite occupation was. I once asked Max if he preferred to make love at the age of twenty, thirty, forty or fifty. He said, ‘At fifty.' It was all ridiculous and childish, but the funniest part of all was the seriousness with which Breton took all this. He was mortally offended if anyone spoke out of turn. Part of the game was to inflict punishment on those who did so. Then he made you pay a forfeit. He ruled us with an iron hand, screaming,
‘Gage'
at every moment. You were punished by being brought in blindfolded and forced on all fours, then you had to guess who had kissed you, or something equally foolish.

After we had been in New York for a while, my sister
Hazel invited us to California. Max was delighted to go, and we took his son Jimmy and my daughter Pegeen. I particularly wished to go to see the Arensberg collection, which was then in California, and it was well worth the trip. The Victorian house was filled with Duchamp's paintings, Brancusi's sculptures and much pre-Columbian art, besides a lot of very fine Cubist and other paintings. They all looked funny in this setting. Even the bathrooms contained works of art. Arensberg was a sad man, who seemed to be more interested in the Bacon-Shakespeare theory than in his collection. Today it looks magnificent in the Philadelphia Museum, beautifully installed by Henry Clifford, and poor Mr Arensberg is dead.

We went to Arizona and New Mexico and New Orleans, perpetually in search of a house wherein to install my museum. Max fell in love with kachina dolls and Indian masks. He wanted to buy everything he saw.

The place I came nearest to buying was a fifty-room unfinished castle built on a high hill at Malibu in Southern California. In its unfinished state it looked like a Surrealist dream. In Marseilles I had inadvertently invited Beton to live in my museum in America and hold his court there. This would have been the perfect place for such activities, but it was too far away from any city, so we gave it up.

Then we tried New Orleans, a most fascinating town, but it seemed too remote from the world and too hot and provincial. San Francisco was a lovely city, but did not
need me or my museum, as Dr Grace McCann Morley was already doing a wonderful job there as director of the San Francisco Museum.

When we got back to New York we continued looking for a house. We finally found a dream of a house on Beekman Place which we couldn't resist. Unfortunately, we were not permitted to make a museum there. It was a remodelled brownstone mansion called Hale House, on the East River and 51st Street. It had a big living-room which looked like a chapel, with an old fireplace that might well have come out of some baronial hall in Hungary. The chapel was two stories high and the whole front of the room gave on to the River, where we had a terrace. There was a balcony above, with five little windows overlooking the chapel. Here five choir boys might well have sung chants. Above we had a bedroom, and Max had a studio with another terrace. There were other rooms for my daughter and for guests. When we were alone we ate in the kitchen, where Max and I both loved to cook.