The Rape of Europa Page 12
In all the apparent normalcy of the drôle de guerre, the empty, echoing galleries of Paris’ great museums had been a sobering reminder of what might come. The French museum people had not slackened their efforts to perfect the protection of their treasures. After the major works had reached Chambord they had begun to redistribute the collections among eleven other châteaux to the west of Paris, all within a convenient radius around Chambord, and as far from the advertised battle zone around the Maginot line as possible. Six of the eleven were located north of the Loire. In November the Mona Lisa, resting on an ambulance stretcher in a sealed van escorted by two other vehicles, was transferred to Louvigny, near Le Mans. The curator who stayed by her side for the trip emerged semiconscious from the van and had to be revived, but Leonardo’s inscrutable lady was fine. With her went Fra Bartolommeo’s Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine and other principal works of the Italian school. The Rubens of the Medici gallery went to the Château of Sourches, where they were later guarded by the curator Germain Bazin. Courtalain, near Châteaudun, received the Egyptian collection. Just south of the Loire thirty truckloads went from Chambord to Brissac, near Angers, where they were joined by the Apocalypse tapestries from that city. Cheverny sheltered works from the Cluny Museum, and the great Talleyrand domain at Valençay took in the major sculptures: the Venus de Milo, Winged Victory, and Michelangelo’s Slaves, as well as the crown jewels.13
At Chambord itself, curators had unpacked needed archives and generally tried to make themselves at home in the huge château, unoccupied for centuries, in which the plumbing was as historic as anything else. Life at this repository was somewhat more relaxed for the art professionals than it was at the châteaux still occupied by their owners, where the country life continued full tilt. At Cheverny there was an active hunt with its pack of hounds whipped in by huntsmen in red and gold. Valençay’s ducal owner had a magnificent if noisy collection of parrots in cages scattered about the premises. The curators, regarding adaptation to these new experiences as part of their professional duty, soon learned that “thirty or forty technical words well placed in conversation were enough to make us worthy conversationalists, and cure us of any inferiority complexes.”14
All through the winter more was brought out from Paris in whatever transportation could be begged or borrowed by Musées director Jacques Jaujard from donors, employees, and friends. Other convoys took the contents of the museums of the Ville de Paris, separately administered, to additional châteaux in the same region. In Paris proper the cellars of the Pantheon and Saint-Sulpice gradually filled with sculpture and stained glass from nearby churches and such institutions as the Comédie-Française. One curator was highly amused to find Houdon’s statue of arch anticleric Voltaire surrounded by saints and angels pointing heavenward.15 Similar scenes took place all over France. In Bayeux, just in case, the mayor ordered the famous tapestry rolled, sealed in its special lead box, and stored in a concrete vault.
Despite all the preparations, the reality of the invasion of Holland and Belgium was a shock. Henri Matisse, caught in Paris, rushed to a travel agent and booked passage to Rio on a ship leaving Genoa on June 8. As he walked out of the agency he met Picasso by chance, and expressed his dismay at the dismal performance of the French armies. Picasso explained, “C’est l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts,” to him a perfect description of the Maginot mentality.16
On June 4 a great wheeling maneuver of the main body of the German invasion forces placed them directly north of the clustered French repositories and only 160 miles away with no Maginot line in between. They advanced relentlessly. Before this juggernaut millions from Belgium, the north of France, and soon Paris, fled in a tidal wave. Exhausted, filthy people and their children, cats, and dogs jammed into cars swathed in mattresses, pushing grotesquely loaded bicycles or simply walking, streamed into the parks of Chambord and Valençay, reminding one art historian of Callot’s Misères de la Guerre. Every train and station was jammed. And into this river of despair were launched, once again, the greatest treasures of France. The Mona Lisa was the first to depart with a few other hastily packed works from Louvigny, the northernmost depot. By June 5 she was safely in the ancient Abbey of Loc-Dieu in the Midi near Villefranche-de-Rouergue. More than three thousand pictures would join her there as a result of the extraordinary efforts of the French curators. The last convoy crossed the Loire on June 17, only hours before the bridges were blown.
Saint-Sulpice, Paris: Voltaire among the saints
South of the river, conditions on the roads were terrible. The biggest convoy inched painfully toward Valençay. One of the truck drivers, Lucie Mazauric, terrified because she had only managed to pass her driver’s test the day before, later wrote:
The hardest was the beginning, from Chambord to Valençay. Cars were going in every direction. The jammed roads slowed our progress, and I had the misfortune, driving up toward Valençay, to hook my bumper over that of Mme. Delaroche-Vernet. We would never have gotten it loose, and would have been crushed by the flood of cars being driven by dazed drivers who seemed not to see any obstacles, had a strong youth not unhooked us…. This act of kindness helped us bear the rest, and the rest was difficult…. German aircraft constantly flew up and down the roads. If they had wanted to attack … the exodus would have been a carnage.17
At Valençay, which was already jammed with curators and refugees, they stopped for the night and slept badly, listening to the sounds of artillery barrages, for most their first experience of this. At dawn the convoy left again in the terribly beautiful weather which had blessed this whole invasion, spending a second night in a village schoolhouse on mattresses. The next day, passing through countryside where no one seemed to be in charge, they were pleased to note that mentioning the Louvre was enough to get them the gasoline they needed. They arrived at Loc-Dieu, trucks in dire need of maintenance, on the day of the Armistice.
On June 10 the French government had also fled Paris to join its masterpieces in châteaux beyond the barrier provided by the Loire. Its departure was not unexpected. So encumbered were the roads that the ministers took more than twelve hours to drive the 160 miles to their assigned domains around Tours. Now it was their turn to discover the traditional discomforts of country life. No one had remembered the minimal telephonic equipment cherished by château dwellers to this day. The equal dearth of bathing facilities led to surprising encounters of famous personages in the halls: both Churchill and the omnipresent mistress of the French Premier, the Countess de Portes, were seen wandering about swathed in voluminous red silk dressing gowns in search of bathrooms.18 It was not until June 13 that French Commander in Chief Weygand, with the encouragement and assistance of the neutral American and Swiss embassies, declared Paris an open city.19 This was as much a military decision as an aesthetic one: Weygand wanted to prevent the total encirclement of the Army defending the city. Churchill disapproved; he had urged that Paris be defended, as the “house to house defense of a great city” would have “enormous absorbing power.”20 German troops entered Paris the next day. Retreating again, the government, as helpless as the 8 million other refugees, moved on to Bordeaux.
Thousands of privately owned works of art were also on the move in the chaotic invasion days. The French museum administration had taken in a large number of private holdings, including many works belonging to the major Jewish collectors and dealers. At Moyre and Sourches were items belonging to the Wildensteins, various Rothschilds, M. David David-Weill (chairman of the Conseil des Musées), and Alphonse Kann. Brissac sheltered more. But these collections, which represented only a fraction of the privately held works in Paris, were not among those which were transported south by the Musées. The rest were dealt with in all sorts of ways. Peggy Guggenheim, who had been refused space in the Louvre sanctuaries because, she later claimed, “the Louvre decided the pictures were too modern and not worth saving,” frantically began removing her pictures from their stretchers on June 5. They were packed in three large crates which
she managed to send to Vichy, where they were hidden in a friend’s barn.21 Before fleeing to New York via Lisbon, the dealer Paul Rosenberg left 162 major works in a bank in Libourne, just outside Bordeaux. This deposit contained no less than 5 Degas, 5 Monets, 7 Bonnards, 21 Matisses, 14 Braques, 33 Picassos, plus a good selection of items by Corot, Ingres, van Gogh, Cézanne, Renoir, and Gauguin. One hundred more Rosenberg pictures went to a rented château at nearby Floirac.22 Matisse, who had been staying with Rosenberg in Bordeaux, was so horrified by the maelstrom of refugees fighting to board anything that would take them away that he changed his mind about leaving France. It took him two months, moving slowly from town to town across the south of France, to reach his favorite Hotel Regina in Nice. Once there, he wrote to his son in New York that “it seemed to me I would be deserting. If everyone who has any values leaves France, what remains?”23 Georges Braque too was on the road, with his wife, studio assistant, and as many paintings as he could fit in his car. When he arrived in Bordeaux, Braque used the same bank as Rosenberg, entrusting to it part of his modern collection and, unfortunately as it would turn out, one Cranach portrait.
Paul Rosenberg
Georges Wildenstein put 329 objects into the Banque de France in Paris and had some 82 taken in by the Louvre, but plenty were left in his showrooms at 57, rue la Boétie, and in his house outside Paris when he and his family fled to Aix-en-Provence. The Rothschild items sheltered by the Louvre represented only a fraction of the family’s enormous holdings, which remained scattered all over France. Miriam de Rothschild, known for her vagueness, lost forever much of her collection which she buried in an unmarked sand dune near Dieppe.24 More cautious, the Bernheim-Jeune family sent 28 paintings, 7 of them by Cézanne, to friends at the Château de Rastignac in the Dordogne, to be carefully hidden in trunks, closets, and cabinets. Other pictures went with the family to Nice, but the apartment in Paris remained full of sculpture, drawings, and paintings of great quality.25 And the jeweler Henri Vever put his Rembrandt etchings in his Paris bank, but took his beloved and incomparable collection of Islamic miniatures and books with him to his château in Normandy.
Georges Wildenstein, London, 1938 (Photo by Cecil Beaton)
If the quantities involved in all these arrangements seem impressive, they pale by comparison to the shipment successfully moved through France and Spain to Lisbon during May and June by the dealer Martin Fabiani. After the death of the legendary Ambroise Vollard in July 1939, his brother Lucien had sold much of his share of the collection to Fabiani, who had worked with Vollard for years. The pictures, which had been delivered only weeks before the invasion,26 were a staggering group: 429 paintings, drawings, and watercolors by Renoir; 68 Cézannes, 57 Rouaults, 13 Gauguins, and so forth, to a grand total of 635. British export papers having been granted, they left Lisbon on September 25, 1940, on the SS Excalibur, the same ship which had just transported the Duke and Duchess of Windsor to semi-exile in Bermuda.
Fabiani believed that works of this nature would be considerably more salable in the United States or perhaps Britain than to the new rulers of France; to this end he had entered into a profit-sharing agreement with Etienne Bignou, New York, and Reid and Lefèvre, London.27 But alas, by the time the Excalibur neared Bermuda, continental France was regarded by the British not as an ally, but as an enemy economy whose foreign exchange could be used to sustain Nazi aggression, now aimed squarely at England. All British consuls, working with the Ministry of Economic Warfare, had been alerted to the export of “enemy” assets, and all shipments were carefully checked when they arrived at British-controlled ports. In Bermuda, “on account of their enemy origin, and of doubts about the sympathies of Fabiani,” the pictures were removed, placed in prise, and later stored in Canada in the charge of the Registrar of the Exchequer Court. There they would remain until the end of the war.28
Even those most versed in the little subterfuges of international trade would find that their careful plans were not only of no avail but had suddenly become quite illegal. A few weeks after the Fabiani affair, David David-Weill, head of the famed Lazard Frères international bank, sent twenty-six cases of paintings and antiquities off to Lisbon, where they too eventually embarked on the busy SS Excalibur. Their destination was New York, where they were to be sold by the Wildenstein branch incorporated there. There was nothing new about this arrangement. In 1931 M. David-Weill had transferred part of his collection to a British holding company called Anglo-Continental Art, Inc., which in turn was owned by a Canadian corporation also entirely owned by David-Weill. Parts of the collection had also been consigned to Wildenstein, London, for sale. Wildenstein, searching for a wider market, sent six shipments of these works to its New York branch in 1937 and 1938. There were some 291 items, valued at more than $2 million. The works on the Excalibur would join those in New York as property of Anglo-Continental.
But the cases, once in Lisbon, were at first refused an export certification by the British. Cables flew back and forth between Lazard branches in London and New York, referring to David-Weill only as “our common friend” in case of German intercepts, and imploring London to “use their best efforts to clear the shipment.” The London office revealed that the British had heard that the works were to be exhibited and sold in New York in order to raise funds for the French “Secours National,” which had suddenly become an enemy organization. This was denied, and appeals were made to the British embassy in Washington, which helpfully pointed out that the principal motivation was to keep the collection from the Germans. The shipment was finally allowed to leave Lisbon in October 1941, and arrived safely in New York, where it was supposed to be held in a blocked account.
The reluctance of the British to allow the David-Weill collection to be sold had resulted from the fact that all the proceeds of sales of the objects previously sent to New York from London had not been sent back to foreign-currency-starved Britain, nominal base of Anglo-Continental Art. The Bank of England, in its efforts to keep dollars flowing to England, now threatened to force immediate liquidation of the entire collection at one time, which would have the effect of lowering prices. This was made clear to Wildenstein in several anxious letters from Anglo-Continental in London imploring them to remit the disputed amounts immediately. Things were made worse by the entry of the Canadians on the scene, who also claimed the credits.
All these machinations inevitably came to the notice of United States Treasury authorities monitoring the flow of foreign funds into and out of the country. Under American law, all remittances to nations under German control had to be reported and licensed, and the David-Weill shipment had unquestionably originated in France. T-men soon descended on the elegant premises of Wildenstein, New York, where the partners were found to have violated these American regulations by having sent off the very proceeds for which London clamored.
Matters were not improved by Wildenstein’s transparently false claim that they were not sure who exactly owned the collection, admitting only that “there is a possibility of a French interest being involved.” The T-men thought it was all an “attempt to confuse the English, Canadian, and United States authorities as to the true ownership of the collection, and in the meantime enjoy absolute freedom in the manner in which the collection was to be managed.” The entire assets of Anglo-Continental were immediately frozen by the American authorities, proper licenses were obtained by Wildenstein, and proceeds from all further sales ordered to be held in a blocked account in a New York bank. This was fine with Anglo-Continental’s lawyer, who all along had wanted to keep everything in the safety of the USA. For many in the art trade, who preferred to operate just as the T-men described, this unwanted scrutiny was, particularly in the circumstances, a serious blow.29
The fall of France caused upheavals beyond that country’s borders. The British collections which had been evacuated to Wales, as far as one could get from aircraft coming from Germany proper, now lay directly in the path of German raiders flying from their new bases in
France to attack the industrial cities of the Midlands. Although Bangor and its surroundings were not targets, even the remote possibility that a random bomb might wipe out the National Gallery’s holdings was worrisome. At first it was decided to distribute the works over a larger area. Some two hundred pictures of “supreme importance” were divided among a house in Bontnewydd, Lord Lisburne’s estate near Aberystwyth, and Caernarvon Castle. In the first two the landlords were treated to unheard-of electric heating, far better than the ancient hot-water system at Caernarvon, where the humidity was controlled by dipping old blankets and felt in a nearby stream and hanging them among the paintings. Such logistical problems made these arrangements far from ideal, and in July, as the fear of a German invasion mounted and the air war intensified, the Gallery trustees decided to look for underground accommodations. Technical experts Martin Davies and Ian Rawlins set off across the wild landscapes of Wales, exploring “quarries, deep defiles capable of being roofed with reinforced concrete, railway tunnels, disused caves and so forth.” It was not, at first, an encouraging tour. Most of the sites were immediately rejected. “Access to … quarries we had seen, although perfect for the transport of slates … filled Mr. Rawlins and myself with despair when we thought of the National Gallery pictures,” wrote Davies. But in mid-September they finally discovered Manod Quarry, near Festinogg, which did have a rough road of sorts—four miles long with a gradient of 1 in 6—and a cooperative owner, who agreed not only to give them the space they needed but to double the size of the entrance, which would allow the cases of pictures to be unloaded inside.
London’s National Gallery pictures go underground in the wilds of Wales.
Fixing up the interior was no small job. Five thousand tons of slate rock had to be blasted from the floors in order to level them, and six whole buildings in which humidity and light could be controlled had to be constructed over an area of half a square mile inside the cavern. The first pictures could not be moved in until August 1941. What had been so carefully spread out now had to be brought together. Six or seven hundred pictures a week crawled up to the quarry in howling winds on a road so narrow that two trucks could not pass. Once there, cases weighing thousands of pounds had to be inched down, without cranes, onto little motorized trolleys which moved them into the buildings. Inside, there was enough wall space to hang most of the collection, “not in a pleasing way, but well enough to inspect how they behaved underground”—which, due to the excellent temperature control and absence of the public, “who are enough to disturb the most careful air conditioning,” was better than at home.30