The exhibitions follow one another at a frenetic pace. In the first half of 1936 alone, the gallery presented works by Braque, Seurat, Picasso, Monet, and Matisse. Hitherto fiercely independent, Matisse finally joined 21, rue La Boétie in order to take advantage of the solid network that Paul Rosenberg has built in Europe and across the Atlantic. Because the merchant understood the importance of the American market very early on, traveling the United States to advise museum curators or business people. In his address book, Dr. Barnes, the Claribel & Etta Cone sisters, the banker Chester Dale…, the greatest collectors. In 1934, he organized the legendary “Braque, Matisse and Picasso” exhibition in New York and in 1936 opened a branch in London with his brother-in-law, the Parisian antique dealer Jacques Helft.
The assassin lives at 21
The Second World War put a brutal brake on its activities. In March 1939, he had to close his Parisian gallery; and takes refuge in the fall with his family in Floirac, not far from Bordeaux. He manages to shelter some of his paintings, some in Tours in a depot in the name of his driver Louis Le Gall, and a set of 162 paintings (fifteen Matisse and Van Gogh, Cézanne, Monet, Gauguin , Picasso in chaos) in a safe at the Libourne bank.
Pablo Picasso, Still Life with the Jug , April 19, 1937
With the help of his friend Alfred Barr , director of MOMA in New York, Paul and his family managed to reach the United States in September 1940; all except his son Alexandre and his two cousins who left to join General de Gaulle in London. He opened a new gallery in New York in 1941, at 79 East 57th Street, where he organized exhibitions for the benefit of the Free French Forces. He is homesick, worries about his son, but has no idea of the ongoing tragedy.
“I know that in Paris my goods are sold and that they will probably find asylum in Switzerland so that they can better disappear. All this will be resolved at the end of the war and I hope to find them. "
Paul Rosenberg
However, on February 23, 1942, a decree pronounced his deprivation of nationality, a procedure which precedes the deportation. The (bad) news came to him little by little: after disembarking in July 1940 at 21, rue La Boétie, the Nazis, who embarked on a vast plan to loot art collections belonging to the Jews, requisitioned his gallery to accommodate the ignominious Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions in May 1941. Four months later, they will get their hands on the canvases kept in Libourne while the house of Floirac will be ransacked on denunciation of two Parisian merchants - Yves Perdoux and the Comte de Lestang - hoping to obtain a share of the booty. After the victory of the Allies, the restitution of its property will be a long struggle, won (in large part at least) thanks to his pugnacity - the meticulous inventory he had made of his works was of great help to him -, to the testimonies of his artist friends and to the Commission for artistic recovery created by the resistant Rose Valland. Without forgetting the bewildering combination of circumstances. Like that day in August 1944 when his son Alexander discovered inside a German convoy that he had just stopped with his comrades from the 2e DB dozens of cases of works of art containing… the paintings from 21, rue La Boétie!
Fernand Léger, Still Life with Two Keys , 1930
After the death of Paul Rosenberg, renditions continued. The story will even inspire a film : The Train , with Burt Lancaster and Jeanne Moreau. Rosenberg did not hesitate to go and see the merchants who were complicit in the looting himself: he visited Theodor Fischer in 1945, a key figure in the Lucerne auction organized in 1939 by the Nazis to sell so-called “degenerate” works of art. ". Rosenberg was robbed of nearly 400 paintings. About sixty have never been found, the others were collected and sold from the New York gallery, or donated to museums. The family keeps some of them, including those of Anne Sinclair, exhibited at the Maillol museum. Even very recently, in 2012, his heirs spotted in an exhibition at the Center Pompidou a Blue Profile in Front of the Fireplace (1937) by Matisse, rendered two years later by the Norwegian Museum Henie Onstad.
Beaux Arts Magazine
Comentarios