Confessions of an Art Addict Read online

  The day Hitler walked into Norway, I walked into Léger’s studio and bought a wonderful 1919 painting from him for one thousand dollars. He never got over the fact that I should be buying paintings on such a day. Léger was a terrifically vital man, who looked like a butcher. During his stay in New York, where he finally got after the German occupation of France, he became a sort of guide and took us all to foreign restaurants in every quarter of the city. He seemed to know every inch of New York, which he had discovered on foot.

  The phony war continued all winter, and I personally was convinced that the Germans would never get to Paris. Therefore I tried to find a suitable place to house my fast-growing collection. I was living in a pent-house on the Ile de St Louis and could not hang any pictures there as it was all windows. I found a beautiful apartment on the Place Vendôme, where Chopin had died, as well as the shop of the famous tailor O’Rossin. I found it on the same day that I went to see Léger, but the owner of the apartment did everything in his power to discourage me from taking it. He thought I was mad. He said, ‘Think it over and come back tomorrow.’ I went back the next day and told him I had not changed my mind, so he let me have it. I then got the architect, van Togerloo, to draw up plans to remodel this spacious place, where I intended to live as well as make a museum. It was over-decorated in the jin de siècle style. I insisted on having all the angels removed from the ceiling and scraped off the wedding-cake stucci from the walls. At this point, it obviously became impossible to continue with the scheme, as the Germans were nearing Paris. I asked the landlord to give me the cellars instead, to make a museum, but they had to be kept for air-raid shelters.

  The only thing to do with the paintings was to pack them and get them out of Paris before it was too late or store them in an underground vault. Léger told me he thought the Louvre would give me one cubic metre of space somewhere in the country, where they were hiding their own treasures. So I had my pictures taken off their stretchers and packed into one cubic metre. To my dismay, the Louvre decided that my pictures were not worth saving and refused me the space. What they considered not worth saving were a Kandinsky, several Klees and Picabias, a Cubist Braque, a Gris, a Léger, a Gleizes, a Marcoussis, a Delaunay, two Futurists, a Severini, and a Balla, a Doesburg, and a ‘de Stijl’ Mondrian. Among the Surrealist paintings were those of Miró, Max Ernst, de Chirico, Tanguy, Dali, Magritte and Brauner. The sculpture they had not even considered, though it comprised works by Brancusi, Lipchitz, Laurens, Pevsner, Giacometti, Moore, and Arp. Finally my friend, Maria Jolas, who had rented a château near Vichy to evacuate her bilingual school of children, said she would keep my collection in her barn. So I sent them there.

  Nellie and I fled from Paris three days before the Germans entered. Two million people left the same day in cars, driving at one or two miles an hour, four abreast. It was a general exodus performed in a cloud of black smoke. Most of the cars went to Bordeaux, but we went south, where my children, Sinbad and Pegeen, were with their father. We were warned not to go in this direction, as Italy had just declared war on France, and we might meet the Italian army. On the way, we learned the dreadful news of the fall of Paris, and a few days later came the tragic armistice terms.

  Finally I took a house for my children at Le Veyrier, on the lake of Annecy. For company I had Nellie and Jean Arp and his wife, who came to stay with us. They were worried about the future, as they could not go back to Meudon, in occupied France, where they all lived. They were Hitler’s avowed enemies, besides which they had left all their possessions in Meudon. Arp wanted to go to the United States and start a new Bauhaus. He was very nervous about the war. All his predictions had come true and he saw the future in very gloomy terms. He was madly anti-German and would turn off the radio if Mozart or Beethoven came over the air. He had been born in Alsace, but was now a Frenchman with the name of Jean instead of Hans, which he had dropped.

  By the end of the summer, I received my cases of pictures. The Germans had come and gone from Vichy without even noticing them in Maria Jolas’ barn; Giorgio Joyce, James’s son, shipped them to Annecy, where they remained on the quai de petite vitesse for weeks. We did not know that they had arrived, and when we found out, we covered them with tarpaulins, but did not know what to do with them.

  Being Jewish, I could not go back to Paris, but I wanted to exhibit the pictures somewhere. Nellie was a friend of Monsieur Farcy, the director of the Musée de Grenoble. He liked modern art, so I sent her to see him and asked for his help. She came back with no definite promise, but with an invitation to me to send the pictures to the museum at Grenoble, where he would at least shelter them. We immediately dispatched them, and Nellie and I followed and settled in Grenoble.

  M. Farcy was in a very bad jam himself at this time. Because of the Vichy government he nearly lost his museum directorship and finally ended up in prison. He could not do much for me. Though he did want to exhibit my collection, he was too frightened. As he was expecting Pétain to visit Grenoble, he had hidden all the museum’s modern pictures in the cellar. He gave me perfect freedom in the museum to do anything with my pictures except to hang them. I had a beautiful room where I placed them along the wall and could show them to my friends, photograph them and catalogue them. But he would never fix a date for a show, claiming that he must pave the way with the Vichy government first, so much were they under Hitler’s control. He did not want me to remove the pictures either, and after six months in Grenoble, I lost my patience and told him that I was going to America. He begged me to leave the collection with him, but I had no such intention. I had no idea how to send it to America, but I knew I would never leave without it.

  M. Farcy was a very funny fat little man in his fifties. In his youth he had been a cyclist and had done the tour de France. One could hardly believe it from his present appearance. He liked to get away from home and from his adoring wife, and whenever we invited them for dinner he came alone, with an excuse from her about being unable to accompany him. Later we discovered that he had never conveyed our invitation to her. He loved modern art, but he couldn’t distinguish one thing from another. He often asked me who had painted my paintings, and invariably when he came round to Marcoussis he said, ‘What, Brancusi?’ I had one painting by Vieira da Silva that he liked, because he thought it was a Klee. When I finally left Grenoble, I offered him either this painting or a Tanguy for a present. But when he asked me for the hundredth time if it were a Klee and I said, ‘No,’ he chose the Tanguy. In spite of all this, he loved modern art and managed to collect quite a few paintings for his museum without any funds. It was because of his taste, which the Germans hated, that he nearly lost his job with the Vichy government.

  Laurence Vail now decided that it would be safer for me to go to America in the spring and take our children. We were perpetually threatened with German occupation of all of France, and we knew that the United States would sooner or later enter the war and then we would be cut off from all financial resources. The American consuls, too, were urging us to go home. Worse still was the fear that I, as a Jewess, would be put in a concentration camp. I wanted to go to Vichy to ask our Ambassador to help me get my collection to America, but it was a very cold winter and we were snowbound. So my hands were tied.

  Just at this time, René le Fevre Foinet arrived in Grenoble. He was one of the partners of the firm who had done all my shipping and packing from Paris to London when I had the gallery there. I told him my troubles, and to my great surprise he said nothing could be easier than to ship my collection to New York as household objects, provided I could send some personal belongings with it. He suggested my little Talbot car, which I had left in a garage for six months, as there was no more petrol in France for civilians. The only trouble was that I had forgotten which garage. We went to every garage in Grenoble before we found it, and then we went to work and packed up the whole collection, and René sent it off with some sheets and pots and pans.

  During my stay in Grenoble, I received a cabl
e 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

  CHAPTER FIVE

  LIFE WITH MAX ERNST

  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 ot
her. 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.