Vollard Renoir in Tokyo

https://www.pubhist.com

by Marc Masurovsky

The Portrait of Ambroise Vollard dressed as a toreador was produced in 1917 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). Online research produced a fragmentary but tantalizing history of this iconic, but little known, portrait of Vollard painted in the last years of the First World War, as the Russian Tsarist Empire was on its last legs and the United States sent troops to the Western Front to accelerate the defeat of the German Empire.

Ambroise Vollard (3 July 1866-22 July 1939), a legendary 20th century French art dealer and collector, amassed a gargantuan collection of paintings and works on paper devoted mostly to artistic movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Western Europe. He befriended the biggest artistic talents, became their patron and is considered as one of the most important forces that shaped the modern art world. This portrait painting remained in his private collection until his untimely death on 22 July 1939.

Two months after Vollard was killed in a car crash, Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 which marked the beginning of the Second World War. A year later in June 1940, Nazi Germany occupied the northern half of France. Shortly thereafter a collaborationist government led by Marshal Philippe Pétain governed the unoccupied portion of France as an antisemitic, nationalistic and authoritarian vassal State to Nazi Germany.

The fate of Jews living in France was sealed on 3 October 1940 when the Vichy government enacted its infamous definition of “Who is a Jew?”, the French version of the notorious September 1935 Nuremberg Laws enacted in Nazi Germany to systematize the marginalization, persecution and expropriation of Jews in Germany. The Vichy government launched a perverse competition with its Nazi overlords over who would absorb through Aryanization and plunder the economic, financial and cultural assets of Jews in France. With so much chaos serving as a backdrop, it became difficult to settle the Vollard estate in a tidy fashion owing to the cast of characters who became enmeshed in the fate of his thousands of works, many of which carried high values. Some of the personalities involved in this process were Lucien Vollard, Ambroise’s younger brother, Jeanne Vollard, Léontine Vollard, Etienne Bignou, Martin Fabiani, Robert de Galea, Edouard Jonas, Paul Cézanne, Jr.

What happened to Portrait of Ambroise Vollard as a toreador? It was mentioned in a document attesting to a co-ownership agreement dated 6 March 1940 between Lucien Vollard (1874-1952) and Martin Fabiani (1899-1989), a race track maven and erstwhile businessman cum art broker who made a fortune during WWII by collaborating with the German occupiers, buying and selling property looted from Jewish collectors, some of whom he had known before the war. He and another art dealer, Etienne Bignou (1891-1950), with a foothold in New York, became co-executors of one part of Vollard’s estate through their close association with Lucien Vollard, since Fabiani had served as a business advisor to Lucien.

While the public record is quiet on the wartime fate of this portrait painting, the archival world has elucidated its path in broad strokes. The painting never left Paris. It remained under the care of Lucien Vollard in agreement with Fabiani. After the Vichy government was overthrown in the summer of 1944 and the Nazis were defeated in 1945, Fabiani’s destiny lay in the hands of the postwar French authorities. Charged with collaboration with the enemy and illegal enrichment and illicit profiteering, Fabiani paid a very hefty fine to the French government and eventually resumed his business activities.

It took approximately seven years to resolve some of the knottier questions surrounding the distribution of the contents of the Vollard Estate to the various protagonists. On 22 April 1952, Lucien Vollard and Martin Fabiani were forced to abandon their co-ownership of works listed on 6 March 1940 to the benefit of Ambroise's sisters, Jeanne Vollard and Léontine Vollard. Edouard Jonas was their representative while they lived on the island of La Réunion, the Vollard family birthplace. This transfer of ownership included Portrait of Ambroise Vollard as a toreador.

Years later, Vollard’s portrait by Renoir showed up at an auction held by Sotheby’s in London on 7 July 1959. The American automobile tycoon Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.’s (1909-1988) had consigned the Renoir portrait of Vollard. It went under the hammer for 61,000 dollars (1959 value). When did Chrysler acquire the painting and from whom and for how much remains a mystery for now. It is safe to assume that Chrysler came into possession of the work after the 1952 transfer of ownership to Jeanne and Léontine. Logic would dictate that the painting remained in Paris and Jonas acted as their go-between with potential buyers like Chrysler.

After the 1959 sale, the painting disappeared again before resurfacing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of an exhibition devoted to Ambroise Vollard which was held in 2006. There, it was on loan from the Nippon Television Network Corporation in Tokyo, Japan, where it still resides. At what point did it enter that Japanese corporate collection? More importantly, from whom did Nippon acquire the Vollard portrait and for how much? All we know is that the painting was exhibited as part of the Nippon collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2006-7. Now that we have most of the pieces of the painting’s provenance, we can summarize its brief history which includes a pronounced gap after 1959:

Portrait of Ambroise Vollard dressed as a toreador (1917), by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Oil on canvas. 83.6 cm x 102.6 cm.

Provenance

Artist’s studio;
Ambroise Vollard, acquired from the artist;
July 1939-June 1940, Estate of Ambroise Vollard;
6 June 1940-22 April 1952, co-owned by Lucien Vollard and Martin Fabiani;
22-April 1952-?, co-ownership by Jeanne Vollard and Léontine Vollard, negotiated by Edouard Jonas.
?-7 July 1959, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. collection;
7 July 1959, Sotheby’s London, sold for $61,000 to an unidentified buyer.
Private collection.
, ?-present, Nippon Television Network Corporation, Tokyo, Japan

Exhibitions

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, September 14, 2006-January 7, 2007. Loaned by Nippon Television Network Corporation, Tokyo, Japan.

Sources:

Wildenstein-Plattner Institute, NY. Ambroise Vollard Records,

Private archives, Washington, DC/Paris, France

Sunflower oil for paintings

by Marc Masurovsky

Art is a commodity which can be traded like widgets. On January 17, 1944, a French company called “Compensex” [Compagnie commerciale d’exportation et de compensation] had the bright idea of proposing to the Vichy government an exchange of commodities to benefit Vichy France and the French export economy. Compensex was a subsidiary of the Banque Worms whose intricate intertwining financial and commercial interests with the French wartime economy and outlying investments in Axis-occupied Europe have been well-documented. [See in particular "Industriels et banquiers francais sous l'Occupation, by Annie Lacroix-Riz, Armand-Colin]

The exchange involved 200 tons of Hungarian sunflower oil worth about 12 million francs (1944 value) for an equivalent amount of paintings allegedly owned by the Galerie Charpentier in Paris, known for its intensive commercial activity during the German occupation of France. The works would be exported to Switzerland. They included paintings by Albert Lebourg, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro and other well-known modernists. The French ministry responsible for supplies and agriculture [ravitaillement et agriculture] notified the Ministry of Finance of its support for the proposed importation of the sunflower oil. The question remained whether the 50 or so paintings would be allowed to leave France.

On January 28, 1944, the French Fine Arts Administration gave its conditional support to the project as long as it could review the list of paintings offered for export.

It is not known, pending further research, whether the exchange actually took place. But it is worth noting that Switzerland was the favored destination for the paintings, thus guaranteeing their absorption in the Swiss market.

At the exact same time, Bruno Lohse, deputy director of the ERR in France and Martin Fabiani, leading collaborationist art dealer in wartime Paris, had hatched an elaborate plot to sell 54 paintings, mostly executed by 19th and 20th century artists officially reviled by Nazi doctrine, which had been confiscated from Jewish collections in and around Paris. Those paintings allegedly were removed from the Jeu de Paume where they had been stored for further disposition.  The plot fell apart in February 1944 when Robert Scholz, administrative overseer of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) operations in occupied countries, personally intervened by traveling from Berlin to Paris to put a stop to what he perceived to be a barely disguised attempt by local officials to profit from confiscated Jewish cultural assets with the help of a notorious art dealer already implicated in the recycling of such property in France and abroad.

The moral of this story is that, once high-value cultural items are available for disposal following their misappropriation by State agents, their dispersal might be facilitated by the commercial and economic interests of the occupation forces and their local vassals, in this instance the German military administration as an extension of the Third Reich in France and the Vichy government and its complex relationship with financial institutions like the Banque Worms.

It is not clear whether Galerie Charpentier’s owners were aware of the Fabiani-Lohse arrangement, but their capacity to participate in complex commercial transactions with Vichy, the Germans and the so-called neutral countries is duly noted.

Part Two--Some of Hildebrand Gurlitt’s pals in German-occupied Paris

Dr. Erhard Göpel, representative of the Linz Museum project, accessory to acts of cultural plunder both in German-occupied Holland and France, had a “special” relationship with the Expressionist artist, Max Beckmann, while he was living in Holland during the period of German occupation.

Gopel by Max Beckmann
Source: Google

Karl Epting, anti-Semitic head of the German Historical Institute, and participant in the earliest acts of plunder conducted in Paris against leading art collectors by the German Embassy in the summer of 1940

Epting, right, with Celine
Source: Google

Otto Abetz, German Ambassador to the Reich in German-occupied Paris

Otto Abetz
Source: Google

Martin Fabiani, one of the most important collaborationist art dealers in wartime Paris and friend of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

Fabiani, by Henri Matisse
Source: Google

Walther Andreas Hofer, the official art expert on all acquisitions of works and objects of art in Axis-occupied territories, who reportedly directly to Hermann Goering.

Walther Andreas Hofer
Source: Google

Joachim von Ribbentrop, Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs, one of Hildebrand Gurlitt’s main clients.

Von Ribbentrop
Source: Google

The recycling of Chaim Soutine’s works under Vichy and beyond

by Marc Masurovsky

[Editor's note: this article was updated on 31 July 2025].

In  the fall of 1940, in the early months of the German occupation of France, the irreverent, Byelorussian Jewish artist Chaim Soutine, best friend of Modigliani and countless other Jewish and non-Jewish artists, was introduced by his benefactor, Madeleine Castaing, to  Marie-Berthe Aurenche, Max Ernst's ex-wife,   Owing to the increasing repression against foreign-born Jews, Soutine and Aurenche were forced to hide in the French countryside. In 1942, Soutine offered Castaing one of his paintings which she then refused to purchase. Offended by her behavior, Soutine issued a pronunciamento whereby she could never again purchase any future works of his under any circumstance whatsoever. Caprice? Or did he really mean it? Regardless, Madeleine Castaing continued to have access to his paintings, albeit through third-parties, including through his new girl-friend. The Castaing family were and continue to be the largest collectors of Soutine's works, including his small graphic production.

Like all Jews in Vichy France, Chaim Soutine was forced to wear the Yellow Star as of mid-1942, something that he had never dreamed would happen to him in his adopted country, France. His status as a foreign-born Jew had also earned him something close to house arrest in Champigny-sur-Veude, a small town of the Indre-et-Loire in central France where he had sought refuge.

Suffering for years from an ulcer condition, Soutine’s health worsened to the point where he had to seek medical attention at the risk of being arrested and deported. It did not help matters that he worked ten to twelve hour days. Unable to drive directly to Paris, he and Aurenche took several days to reach the capital where, on August 7, 1943, Soutine’s ulcer burst open. The bad boy of inter-war Expressionism in France, Chaim Soutine, died on August 9, 1943, of a perforated ulcer on an operating table in Paris. His friends buried him at the Cimetière Montparnasse. Aurenche paid for the grave with the proceeds from some of Soutine's paintings.

According to the catalogue raisonné of Soutine's works, which came out in 1993 under the collaborative pen of Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, an examination of the wartime ownership trail of Soutine's paintings—landscapes, portraits, and still lifes—reveals the following: 

-Of the 17 landscapes that he executed under severe stress as a hounded Jew, 8 ended up in “private collections”, one was acquired by Gérard Magistry, one by the Castaing family, two by the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris, one by Alain de Lesché, and one by Marie-Berthe Aurenche.

-Of the two Still Lifes in Soutine’s catalogue raisonné which were dated after 1940, Martin Fabiani bought one and the Galerie Louis Carré the other.

-Of 6 portraits, 4 went to the Castaing family, one to the Galerie Louis Carré, and another into the vortex of a “private collection.”

Gérard Magistry is a lawyer, an art collector and the brother of Madeleine Castaing.

Alain de Lesché [Leché], a viscount and early fan of Soutine’s works, was also a first-class opportunist who dallied with the German occupiers and ended up with a rather tidy number of illegally-acquired works.  His name can be found on numerous Allied lists of art dealers and collectors friendly to the German occupiers. He also was one of the principals of the Galerie de France.

Martin Fabiani, a legendary merchant in his own right, earned most of his fabulous wealth during the Vichy years.

Marie-Berthe Aurenche was Soutine's last official girlfriend until his untimely demise. She allegedly mad off with an unknown number of Soutine's paintings that she felt should be hers regardless of inheritance and estate laws.

The Galerie Louis Carré remained open throughout the entire Vichy era, exhibited numerous  non-representational artists (Jewish and not Jewish), despite the occasional visits to the gallery by German cultural hawks and Vichy watchdogs and censors.

The key to Soutine's legacy may lie in part with Marie-Berthe Aurenche. Down on her luck, emotionally unstable (ask Max Ernst what he had to go through with her, but we should also listen to how Aurenche described her relationship with Ernst), one could easily argue that she had hit the jackpot with Soutine. Moreover, a powerful and extremely resourceful business woman like Madeleine Castaing used Aurenche  to maintain a commercial access to Soutine’s works. She is the other part of the Soutine problem.

One might wonder:

Was Soutine a glamorous "Jewish" project for the deeply Catholic Castaings (Marcellin and Madeleine)? After all, it is the chic thing to do for a patroness of the arts to "adopt" an exotic, avant-garde artist like Soutine and treat him like a race horse. He's good for the money as long as he plays by the Castaings' rules. Or else.... 

Aurenche, on the other hand, believed that Soutine, the product of a quintessentially Eastern European Jewish shtetl life, secretly harbored desires to convert to Christianity. That discussion deserves its own special treatment in another forum. But it's sufficiently outlandish and offensive to warrant at least a mention so that our readers can give this idea some thought.

Shortly after Soutine's death, Aurenche packed up his belongings.  Since she was ‘Aryan,’ no one gave her a hard time. She lived the rest of her life using the proceeds of the sales of Soutine's paintings to maintain her standard of living until she committed suicide in the early 1960s. Her grave at Cimetière Montparnasse is adorned with a gigantic Christian cross, while Soutine's name is on a small plaque affixed on one part of her funereal slab as if she "baptized" her favorite Jew posthumously. A bit sordid when you think of it.

Did Soutine leave a will?  If not, he died intestate.

Can the non-Jewish girlfriend of a deceased foreign-born Jewish artist inherits his works automatically upon his death in 1943 under prevailing antisemitic laws? if so, are such dispositions still valid after the fall of the Vichy regime and the defeat of Nazi Germany?

According to filial law which is the golden Napoleonic rule of inheritance, girlfriends have no rights to the decedent's property if he died intestate.

How did the remainder of the creative output of Chaim Soutine end up in the clutches of a highly unstable but well-connected non-Jewish companion? More work is needed here. 

Case closed...for now.

Postscript: When next you go to Paris, do visit the Cimetière Montparnasse.  After you enter through the main gate on Boulevard Edgar Quinet, turn right, go to the end of the alley, turn left.  Count to 10.  Look to your right next to some bushes. You will see a substantial, dark-grey, moss-covered tombstone with Marie-Berthe Aurenche's name on it.  On top of it, on a tiny square piece of white marble are etched the name of Chaim Soutine, his year of birth and year of death.  Fitting tribute for one of France's greatest artist of the 20th century?  I don't think so.

Tombstone of Chaim Soutine in Cimetière Montparnasse
Source: Find A Grave

Henri Matisse in Vichy France

by Marc Masurovsky

As in the case of Pablo Picasso and many other eminent artists plying their creative streak in France, Henri Matisse chose to remain rather than leave his native country in the face of the German onslaught of spring 1940 against Western Europe.

Let's engage in a perfunctory review of Matisse's journey in wartime France:

October 1939: Matisse goes to Paris after a stay near Rambouillet. While in Paris, he places for safekeeping all of his works of art and those of other artists which he owns, in a vault at the Banque de France. His son, Pierre, has already left for the United States, while his other son, Jacques, is in the French Army. His grandson, Claude, is in a boarding school near Vichy. His daughter, Marguerite, is with his wife in the town of Beauzelle. Apparently, Mr. and Mrs. Matisse have not been living together since March 1939.

Mid-October 1939: Henri Matisse heads back to Nice where he has an apartment at the Hotel Regina from which he works. While Henri goes to Nice, his wife and daughter return to Paris to an apartment on rue de Miromesnil.

November 1939: Henri Matisse renews a contract with the dealer, Paul Rosenberg, who is one of his most regular buyers.

January 1940: Pierre Matisse, now settled in New York, announces to a variety of family friends that his parents are splitting up.

May 1940: While the German armies are running roughshod over French troops in eastern France and heading towards Paris, Henri Matisse returns to the beleaguered capital, dodging refugee traffic, in order to finalize his legal separation from his wife.

June 1940: Matisse and everyone else who can manage it hightails it out of Paris and heads south-southwest. He ends up in late June 1940 at Ciboure near Saint-Jean-de-Luz in the Basque country. He remains in that part of the world, not too far from where German troops are stationed, but far enough, until he finds a train to take him back to Nice in August.

August 1940: Matisse reaches Carcassonne then Marseilles. In Marseilles, he draws a series of portraits of his grandson, Claude Duthuit. On August 29, Matisse finally makes it back to the Hotel Regina in Nice, shortly after Picasso returns to his studio in Paris on the rue des Grands Augustins.

Fall 1940: Varian Fry, of the Emergency Rescue Committee, funded in part by Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, tries in vain to convince Matisse to escape to the United States. Matisse refuses. Matisse is Fry's idol.

Winter 1940-1941: Matisse is plagued by intestinal problems and has difficulty working.

January 1941: A cancerous growth is removed from Matisse's abdomen.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to him, while he is holed up in Nice, dozens of his paintings and works on paper are being forcibly removed from Jewish collections and brought to the Jeu de Paume or recycled on the local art market. His works fetch upwards of 300,000 Francs in Paris auctions which is a significant amount for those rationed days.

August 1941: Matisse is among many "French" artists who exhibit their works on paper at the "Salon du Dessin" in Paris, one of the first major artistic events in the German-occupied capital that excludes Jews from its walls. That same month, Matisse allows Varian Fry to take a series of photographic portraits of him at the Hotel Regina in Nice. How surreal!

November 1941: Matisse has an exhibit at the Galerie Louis Carré in Paris.

January-February 1942: Matisse grants several interviews to the Vichy government's official radio station.

Matisse spends the rest of the year in Nice, convalescing from additional gastro-intestinal troubles but continuing to work as best as he can for one of his dealers, Martin Fabiani, who makes a fortune collaborating with the Germans during the war. Ironically, Fabiani sells on the side stolen paintings by leading artists such as .... Henri Matisse, which the Germans have exchanged with him against more classical works.

January 1943: Vichy's leading cultural rag, Comoedia, publishes an interview with Henri Matisse, predicated on his creation of 50 drawings illustrating Pierre Ronsard's poems. The article by Marguerite Bouvier is an ode to Matisse, who is now 72 years old.

June 1943: Finally, Matisse is forced to flee Nice and seeks refuge in Vence, due to a constant threat of aerial bombardments.

September-October 1943: Matisse and Braque are prominently displayed at the Salon de l'Automne, an annual fixture of the French (read Paris) art scene. Strangely, while their works are shown to everyone's delight including that of the German occupier, the ERR is busy figuring what to do with Matisse and Braque works under their jurisdiction not too far away at the Jeu de Paume.

Spring 1944: the estranged Mrs. Matisse and her daughter are arrested for engaging in acts of resistance against the Vichy government and the German occupation. Mrs. Matisse gets six months of prison while her daughter is jailed until the Liberation.