Review: Alas Another Tale of French Antisemitism and Cultural Property

 By Ori Z Soltes

Among the myriad angles from which one finds an expanding literature that considers the Nazi plunder of cultural property is that which places emphasis on some of the specifics of how a given Jewish family, or series of Jewish families, had hoped and believed that they were solidly embedded within the culture and community that ultimately discarded them as eternal foreigners when the SS knocked at the national door. The Austrians famously demonstrated this ugly truth in the immediate aftermath of the March 1938 Nazi Anschluss. So, too the Vichy government: “Free France”—except to the Jewish children and adults that the government and much (not all) of its population so easily (a better word would be “eagerly”) helped deport to Auschwitz and similar destinations. Such ease and eagerness can only have resonated from a history of gut-level Jew-hatred of long duration.

James McAuley’s deeply researched and elegantly written The House of Fragile Things plunges into the expansive efforts on the part of a key group of successful Jewish families in nineteenth-century France to shape their place within French cultural identity. These efforts played out against a backdrop of relentless antisemitism and the inability of key mouthpieces for France’s sense of self to accept Jews—any Jews, regardless of what they contributed to the national ethos—as truly French, in the century since the French Revolution and its declarations of acceptance.

McAuley explores families—the Rothschilds, Ephrussis, Reinachs, Camondos, Cahen d’Anvers, et al—and the extraordinary art and artefact collections that they amassed, the opulent homes that they created as settings for those collections, and their eventual deeding of such structures and their contents to their beloved France. On the other, he recounts the commentaries by renowned and vicious critics like the Goncourt brothers and above all Edouard Drumont—the “Pope of antisemitism”—capable only of expressing contempt for these individuals whose lavish and expansive dinner parties they frequently enjoyed.

McAuley’s text is not simply focused on dueling sensibilities. He provides an astute and perceptive analysis of each Jewish family and its key figures, and reflects on how we ultimately know so little about them beyond their possessions. His account resonates with an appreciation of the paradoxes defining their interweave into a multi-colored if flawed tapestry—and the psychological issues that motivated them, whether escapism (e.g., Moïse de Camondo), profound loss (the Reinach and Camondo deaths in military service during World War I), or gender (e.g., Béatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild); whether rooted in the collapse of relational certainties (the sense, for Moïse de Camondo, of losing control of familial, communal, and national situations around him); or in self-inflicted disasters that provided critics with fuel for their antisemitic screeds (the Reinachs and the Panama Canal scandal or the Ephrussis and the Alfassa Affair). 

Above all, he delineates their struggle to present themselves as champions of France and the 1789 Revolution’s assertions regarding universalism—and thus of the unequivocal compatibility of being French and being Jewish—against the diverse failures of their beloved patrie to live up to those assertions. The narrative threads its way through the tapestry of fragile things to the culminating catastrophe for these and virtually every Jewish family within France and across Europe: the Holocaust.

There is double irony in the fact that in 1935, two of the major cultural donations to France—18^th-century-styled villas filled with 18^th-century objects, one left in his will by Moïse de Camondo and the other donated by his brother-in-law, Charles Cahen d’Anvers. First, because these gifts were immediately subject to ecstatic reviews, 

Charles Cahen d'Anvers

completely devoid of the antisemitic invective of the previous two generations regarding these very collections. Second, because in that very year, the Nuremberg Race Laws drafted by the Nazi authorities tightened the noose around the necks of Jews in Germany, and Nazism was not far from imposing itself on a largely cooperative France.

Among the many quotable lines in McAuley’s volume, one (p. 227) stands out as a concise summary of one of the story’s endings: “By March 1944…. [t]he mansion that had once hosted glittering banquets in the fin-de-siècle, with guests like Marcel Proust and the King of Serbia, now imprisoned sixty Jews”—who would shortly be sent to Drancy and thence to Auschwitz. Nor is this the only terminus: the epilogue focuses on the moving portrait painted by Renoir in 1880, of Irène Cahen d’Anvers as a beautiful little girl with exuberant light-brown hair and a wistful look in her eye—stolen by the Nazis in 1941. (Renoir, by the way, had nothing but excoriating comments to make regarding the Jewish patrons who kept him afloat—including references to their cheapness, although he received far more for this and several other Jewish family portraits than for any works before or after from any other clients).

Irène Cahen d'Anvers

The painting had belonged to Irène’s daughter, Béatrice, whom Irène had abandoned when she divorced her husband, Charles, in 1902, (it was largely a mismatch, from the bride’s and groom’s ages to their personalities, but Charles never really recovered from the shock of the separation and its concomitants). Irène also abandoned her Judaism for Catholicism. The painting of Irène as a little girl was, sadly, the only tangible connection that Béatrice had to her mother as the years moved forward after the divorce. Béatrice perished at Auschwitz and Irène—who managed to survive the war hiding in Paris—was able to assert a claim and gain possession of the painting in 1946—but in 1949 sold it to Emil G. Bührle, the notorious Swiss collector whose wealth derived largely from selling armaments to the Nazis. One might suppose that Béatrice rolled in her grave.

A dust-up emerged at the founding of HARP during an international conference held on September 4, 1997 in which the issue of how the National Gallery of Art (NGA) had allowed Bührle to be misrepresented as a virtual anti-Nazi crusader when the museum hosted his collection in a traveling exhibition in 1990. Bührle most notoriously acquired (during the war) four works plundered from another French Jewish collector, Paul Rosenberg, through Nazi connections. Rosenberg, who survived WWII, showed up at Buehrle’s doorstep to claim them—but that is another story for another day. 

McAuley’s nuanced narrative leaves the reader with a range of villains from whom to choose in the century that encompasses the Holocaust and its aftermath, the handful of heroes mostly turned to ashes, like the unique world that they shaped—except for the lush array of objects and museums left to be enjoyed by the patrie. The Western world has suffered from remarkable bouts of amnesia—both willful and simply out of ignorance—(see the previous review by this writer in HARP’s “plundered art” blog), as the decades since the Holocaust spread out and we continue to repeat the sorts of actions that brought such grief to so many in so many different ways over 80 years ago. This book adds an important chapter to the Holocaust narrative and its culture-centered subset. It plays a noteworthy part in the effort to restitute memory—that most significant feature that makes humans human. 

Photos courtesy of wikimedia.

Fun and games in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Buenos Aires
Source: Flickr via © Gustavo Brazalle

If you love art and food and drink and ‘joie de vivre,’ Buenos Aires is for you.

What a city!

What art!

It overflows with art!

So much so, that one wonders…

Who’s buying?

Who’s selling?

Does anyone care?

And you might even really wonder if some of it is real?

Take the collection put together by María Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat which is housed in a swanky, gleaming white rectangular structure at Puerto Madero, in the toniest section of Buenos Aires, nestled next to soaring skyscrapers.

"The Tower of Babel", Maarten van Heemskerck
Source: De Jonckheere Gallery

Therein hangs a painting by Piotr Brueghel, “El Censo en Belen.” Totally fooled just looking at it. How does a painting by Brueghel end up in this space largely devoted to Argentine artists? A bit out of place, no? Its framing tells the visitor that this piece is a showcase. However, further inquiry confirms that the painting is an elaborate copy and that the original remains in Brussels at the Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts. But there is no indication at Fortabat that the painting is not genuine. The other painting which is stunning and invites greater interest is by Maarten van Heemskerck, “The Tower of Babel.” Although Fortabat is mum on its lineage, a bit of poking around leads to a Paris gallery, de Jonckheere, where the painting is labeled as “vendu” or sold. We know since it’s now in Buenos Aires. Its provenance gets us as far as back as 1955, acquired then by an architect named Jacques Carlu. From whom? No one knows. As one says in French, ‘mystère et boule de gomme.’

On to San Telmo which probably has the highest concentration of antique shops in all of Argentina. Block after block, richly adorned stores sell all sorts of objets d’art, paintings, works on paper, odd accessories.
One of the main dealers is a Mr. L., a nice old man who hails from Moldova. His family settled in Argentina over 80 years ago. He learned the trade, hands-on, no prior interest in the arts, but he’s now one of the best in the business in Argentina. His choice pieces go straight to Miami, New York, and Los Angeles and local American auction houses are regular visitors to his corner store. So, how does he do it?

I asked him: “How about the Aubusson wall hanging?”

“10,000 dollars.”

“Where does it come from?”

“It belonged to my neighbor.”

“Where’d he get it?”

“At a local auction.”

Case closed.

Business is conducted on a handshake. You bring in the item. Mr. L. sells it. Done deal.

Mr. L. was the place to come to for artisanal glass from France and particularly those items signed by legendary craftsmen like Roger Gallet.

“I must have sold over 1000 pieces easily.” The number was in and of itself astounding. How could there be so many Gallet pieces in Argentina? “Foreigners bring them in from Europe.”

Again, no questions asked. No receipts, no inventories. Too bad if you want to produce a catalogue raisonné of works by Gallet. Argentina might not show up in the provenances. Frustrating but this is the reality of the trade: a black hole through which countless possessions can circulate anonymously, no strings attached before they reach the top-tier centers of the international art trade.

The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA)

An outstanding assemblage of works of art covering all periods of history, many of which entered the MNBA after 1945. The date is important because, in the decade following the end of WWII, the Museum received twice as many works as it had in the previous four decades of its existence. An unusual expansion, an explosive growth coming on the heels of world war. I’ll leave it at that.

The Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo (MNAD)

A Museum of donors with no internal cohesiveness built by a French architect for an extraordinarily wealthy businessman, Matías Errázuriz Ortúzar, so that he and his wife, Josefina de Alvear, could entertain properly.

Objects cover all periods and come from Tsarist Russia, England, France, Germany and Central Europe, Spain, and only a handful from Argentina.

Some notables: the death mask of the Duke of Reichstadt, or Napoleon II. Brought into the collection in 1944 by a local parliamentarian. The original is in Paris.

In a glass case on the ground floor of the museum, there are several black-bordered porcelain saucers labeled as having once belonged to Moïse de Camondo. The problem here is that this particular member of the illustrious Parisian banking family of Camondo died in 1935. All of his belongings including his estate and outstanding fine and decorative arts collection were donated to the French government. The question, therefore, remains: how did these items cross the Atlantic and end up in this fine Argentine museum? The only link between Camondo and the Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo is the architect who built it. René Sergent was Camondo’s architect. But does that explain the presence of saucers belonging to a man who was a collector, not a dealer? 5 years after Moïse de Camondo’s death, the Vichy government came to power in France and collaborated with the Nazi occupation forces. Many members of the Camondo family perished at Auschwitz.

Buenos Aires, city of intrigue, brimming with life, culture, haunted by a loaded history, where Holocaust survivors, refugees of all sorts and European mass murderers co-existed for decades.

To be continued.

Buenos Aires
Source: Flickr via © Gustavo Brazalle