Picasso's War, page 42
It was during this uneasy calm, a few weeks after the Picasso opening in New York, that Rosenberg received an important request from Barr. In the face of the overwhelming response to the show, requests had been pouring in from other museums hoping to take it after Chicago. Already he was in talks with museums in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. According to Barr’s astute “war loan” arrangements, Rosenberg and Picasso—as well as Thannhauser, Callery, Penrose, and the other major European lenders—had agreed to allow their Picassos to stay in New York for the duration of the war. Now Barr was asking Rosenberg and the other lenders if they would agree to let the Modern circulate their paintings to these other cities.
For Barr, it was an extraordinary opportunity. The Van Gogh show had already demonstrated the potential of a touring exhibition, and for once, it seemed, the country might be ready. With the start of the war, museums were cut off from the usual sources of loans in Europe and particularly eager for material. And with all the Picassos from Paris already in New York, Barr could count on sending, along with its own masterpieces, Les Demoiselles and Girl before a Mirror, nearly all of the primary works in the original show, including Guernica and its accompanying studies. In a rare alignment of institutional demand and geopolitical circumstance, the Picasso show could turn into a truly national event.
Reading Barr’s letter, Rosenberg was enthusiastic. An extended tour would bring his paintings to a potentially huge American audience; and since many of his loans were also for sale, it also could lead to new collector interest. As long as he was in France and the paintings were in the United States, it made sense for them to be exhibited. In mid-December, he wrote to Barr that he was glad that “during war time my pictures are lent to various museums in the United States.”[10] What Rosenberg couldn’t know at the time was that his participation in the Picasso tour would soon become a matter of existential importance to his own future.
For the time being, however, Rosenberg had other distractions. Throughout the fall, he had been dealing with another divorce crisis—this time Matisse’s. Once again there were messy questions about the division of artworks and assets, and the dealer was centrally involved. At the same time, with the prospect of an invasion less imminent, Rosenberg began to develop new plans in France. In January 1940, he visited Picasso in Royan and came back with five new paintings. Margot hated them, but his son, Alexandre, found them entrancing. “He’s hung it in his bedroom,” he wrote Picasso, of one portrait of a woman’s head with a spiral-shaped nose. “Howls from his mother and the housekeeper.”[11] Then, a few weeks later, Rosenberg visited Matisse in Nice and acquired a group of new works from him too.
Meanwhile, by early spring, as the Picasso show in the United States left Chicago and moved on to St. Louis, life in Paris was picking up again. There were ambitious productions at the Comédie Française and the Opéra; Left Bank bistros were full. “For the first time since October,” the art connoisseur and French army medic Douglas Cooper wrote, “children were playing in the Tuileries and the Luxembourg Gardens.”[12] Amid the thaw, Picasso came back to the city for a longer sojourn, and Rosenberg began to plan a return to rue La Boétie. “I’m going to reopen the gallery with a show of 5 new Matisses, 5 Braques, 5 Picassos,” the dealer wrote Matisse, in early April.[13]
But the show never happened. On April 9, Hitler began his assault on Scandinavia, and Rosenberg stayed in Floirac. At first it seemed unclear how quickly the war in the West would progress. Beginning in mid-May, though, the Nazis’ rapid conquest of the Netherlands and Belgium made clear that Paris was now under threat. Over the previous two years, Rosenberg had organized exhibitions in several of these countries. He had sent nearly a hundred of his Braques, Picassos, and Matisses, along with Guernica, to museums in Oslo and Copenhagen in 1938; and in the spring of 1939, he had organized Picasso shows in Amsterdam and Belgium. Now, while many of those same Picassos were touring the American Midwest, Northern Europe had fallen to a regime that hated modern art.
Still, Rosenberg’s artists were not going anywhere, and he did not see any immediate need to act. In late May, Braque and his wife had visited Rosenberg, and the dealer helped him store some of his paintings in a bank vault next to his own in Libourne, a nearby town. Braque told Rosenberg he intended to stay put in Normandy. Then Matisse also visited the dealer, together with his secretary and longtime model, Lydia Delectorskaya, the woman who had pushed his wife to divorce. Rosenberg bought a few more paintings from him. But Matisse too, despite having his son Pierre in New York and various invitations to come to the United States, was determined to remain in Nice. “Whatever happens, I’m not leaving,” he wrote Pierre a few months later. “If everything of any worth runs away, what will remain in France?”[14] Meanwhile, Picasso and Dora had left Paris and returned to Royan. Even if his paintings had to be locked up or sent overseas, Picasso was no more prepared to go into exile than Braque or Matisse.
By the second week of June, however, the Nazis were rapidly closing in on Paris. Faced with the imminent arrival of the German Wehrmacht, the city and surrounding areas experienced one of the largest human upheavals in France’s thousand-year history. The government made clear that it was no longer prepared or able to defend the capital, and on June 14, it fled to Bordeaux, just as it had at the beginning of the previous war. It was soon followed by some two million Parisians—by some estimates as much as two-thirds of the city’s population. For hundreds of miles on the roads leading south and west out of the city, an endless stream of cars inched along, many with furniture and mattresses strapped to the roof; crowding among them were people on bicycles, or pushing heavily laden baby carriages and makeshift carts, or simply trudging along on foot. With gasoline supplies requisitioned by the army, the roads were littered with abandoned cars. During the flight, an estimated ninety thousand children became separated from their parents.
Watching a desperate situation unfold across the river from Floirac, Rosenberg was unsure what to do. Over the first two weeks of June, the population of Bordeaux swelled from less than three hundred thousand to more than a million. Thousands of people were camped out in parks and public squares while others slept in their cars. Not only Frenchmen but refugees from all over Europe were trying to reach this haven on the Atlantic coast. And with the arrival of the French government in exile, which quickly commandeered the major hotel and offices, it was even more difficult for Bordeaux to cope with the influx. Still, Rosenberg knew that flight, at this point, would be very difficult. He also had still not come around to the idea of abandoning his country and his artists. It was Rosenberg’s brother-in-law Jacques Helft who finally persuaded him otherwise.
In Floirac, the Rosenbergs had spent much of the year with the two Helft brothers, Yvon and Jacques, who were also involved in the Paris art trade and were also Jewish. In early June, Jacques was staying near Paris, arranging his affairs, and when the Germans approached the capital, he somehow managed to get back to Bordeaux. As soon as he returned, the family gathered at the house in Floirac. Rosenberg and Yvon wanted to stay put, but Jacques, who had witnessed the exodus from Paris himself, was adamant that they flee immediately. “My father was a very quiet person. It was the first time I saw him in a fit,” Jacques’s son, Jorge, who was then six years old, recalled in a 2016 interview. “He started shouting that he had read Mein Kampf twice, and that he could vouch that all Jews would be exterminated.”[15]
By the summer of 1940, options for getting out of Europe were extremely limited. The United States had severely restricted the number of Jewish refugees it was bringing in. Cuba and South America were possibilities, but that required paperwork as well, and the economic prospects in these places seemed far more doubtful. Even if one could get visas, moreover, there were by now very few boats crossing the Atlantic. Still, staying in Nazi-occupied France seemed untenable, and Rosenberg and Yvon gave in: They would all leave together, bringing whatever financial assets they could get out with them.
From Bordeaux, the most plausible escape route was overland to Portugal, where there were still boats plying the Atlantic. Together, the three families were a large clan—fifteen people—and they would need Portuguese visas. They would also have to move quickly. The same day they decided to leave, the French war cabinet resigned and Marshall Petain was appointed prime minister, virtually assuring an imminent capitulation to Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, they had heard that the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux was besieged with refugees. Jacques’s wife, however, had a friend who worked high up in the French government, now in Bordeaux, and, armed with a special referral, went to the consulate with the stack of passports. “My mother was getting ready to line up at the Portuguese consulate for maybe a couple of days,” Rosenberg’s nephew recalled.[16]
The rumors turned out to be true. Since the first week of June, there had been thousands of people camped out in front of the Portuguese mission, which was on the Quai Louis XVIII in central Bordeaux. Faced with an onslaught of refugees, António Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, had passed harsh new border controls, and the foreign ministry in Lisbon had ordered its foreign consuls not to grant visas to Jews, or anyone else, under any circumstances, unless the applicant had a personal sponsor in Portugal. Unknown to Rosenberg or his Helft in-laws, however, the consulate was in the midst of a full-scale revolt.
The Portuguese consul general was a man named Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a portly, white-haired man in his midfifties from an old Catholic landowning family. An able if undistinguished diplomat, he was chronically in debt, a result, in part, of maintaining a household that had come to include eight sons, four daughters, and several servants. In the twenties, while he was serving in San Francisco, the family had lived in a big, rambling house in Berkeley. By the time he was sent to Antwerp, in 1929, there were so many children that he commissioned a local Ford factory to build a minibus designed by one of his teenage sons. Then, in 1938, he was accused of financial irregularities by Salazar’s Foreign Ministry and transferred to Bordeaux, at the time a backwater.[17]
With the German invasion, however, Bordeaux had become one of the chief gateways out of Europe. Sousa Mendes knew that many of the refugees streaming into the city faced dire consequences if they remained, but with his government’s orders, his hands were tied. As the crowd outside the consulate became increasingly unruly, he became violently ill. “Here the situation is terrible, and I am in bed with severe mental exhaustion,” he wrote to his brother-in-law on the day Paris fell to the Germans.[18]
Three days later, Sousa Mendes finally emerged from his room. His nephew, who was staying with him at the time, remembered the consul marching into the offices and going out to address the crowd. He would be issuing everyone visas, he said, regardless of religion or political belief. Over the next few days, just blocks away from where the French government was preparing to surrender to the Third Reich, Sousa Mendes signed visas from morning till night. He began abbreviating his signature to save time.
When Mrs. Helft arrived at the consulate with her large stack of passports, there was a huge throng outside the building. But she showed her letter from the government and was quickly whisked inside. Within ten minutes, the consul had stamped and signed the visas. For decades, neither Rosenberg nor his in-laws would know that the man who had approved their entry to Portugal had been acting on his own, against the orders of his government, in a heroic effort to save as many people as he could. In the end, Sousa Mendes would issue thousands of visas in the space of a few days. When the Portuguese government discovered what he was doing, they sent agents after him and finally shut him down. Recalled to Lisbon, he was expelled from the diplomatic service and consigned to financial ruin. He would die in obscurity in the early fifties, a broken man. Today he is regarded in Israel as a hero of the Holocaust era, a Portuguese Wallenberg.
After receiving their visas on June 18, the Rosenbergs and Helfts packed into their family cars as quickly as they could and drove south to the border town of Hendaye. There was already a huge column of refugees waiting to cross; after spending two nights in their cars, inching along, they finally reached the Spanish frontier on the afternoon of June 20. At the time, the Franco regime permitted Portuguese visa holders to cross through the country, provided they didn’t stop along the way. Rosenberg and his brothers-in-law, already exhausted from their journey to the border, negotiated permission for two overnight stopovers along the way. At the border, however, French police called out Rosenberg’s son, Alexandre, and two of his Helft cousins, who had all reached military age: They would not be permitted to leave and would have to stay behind and enlist. It was a wrenching separation, and Margot was distraught.[19]
The day they received their visas in Bordeaux, however, Charles de Gaulle, who had secretly escaped to London, had given a fiery speech calling on French soldiers to form a resistance army in Britain. Alexandre and his cousins were determined to fight, and soon after, they managed to sneak onto a Polish troop ship headed for England, where they joined de Gaulle’s forces. Alexandre would go on to train French resistance forces in Africa and fight in the Allied offensives in Europe later in the war. It was the last time Rosenberg and Margot would see him until Germany was defeated more than five years later.[20]
Crossing Franco’s Spain proved to be a hair-raising experience. After nearly three years of brutal civil war, the country was deeply scarred. In some places, Rosenberg’s nephew said, the roads had been so severely bombed that they had to drive in the fields alongside. The first night passed without incident, but on the second night, when they checked in to their hotel, they discovered, to their horror, that it was filled with Gestapo agents. Miraculously, the owner, a Republican who hated Franco, immediately recognized them as Jewish refugees and warned them to stay in their rooms. They left early the following morning without eating breakfast.[21]
Rosenberg and his relatives finally reached the Portuguese border on June 22, the day France formally surrendered to Nazi Germany. Senior Portuguese officials had alerted Salazar to Sousa Mendes’s rogue operation, and had sent agents to France to shut it down.[22] Had word reached the Spanish-Portuguese border, Rosenberg and his relatives might have been turned away. But the visas were accepted, though they were told they couldn’t stay in Lisbon, which was already overflowing with refugees. They were required to go to Sintra, about fifteen miles west of the city, where they found lodgings in a hotel.
Rosenberg made it out just in time. On July 4, 1940, less than two weeks after his arrival in Portugal, the Vichy government turned over the names and addresses of the city’s fifteen leading Jewish art dealers to the German embassy in Paris, including, along with Rosenberg, the galleries of Seligmann, Bernheim-Jeune, Wildenstein, and others. German officials immediately issued instructions to remove any art found on their premises; the French police provided vans to transport it. At gallery after gallery, the Nazis seized any artworks that had not been secured and “aryanized” businesses that had had Jewish owners.[23]
A couple of galleries, however, managed to escape largely unscathed. One was the gallery of Rosenberg’s old neighbor and nemesis on rue La Boétie, Georges Wildenstein, who managed to make favorable arrangements with German officials by which he was able to immigrate to the United States, leaving his gallery in charge of a non-Jewish associate. The gallery continued to do a flourishing business during the war—with the French and with the Nazis. It would add one more element to Rosenberg’s lifelong loathing of Wildenstein.[24]
Another Jewish-owned gallery managed to escape in a different way. Kahnweiler, opting to stay in France, had fled with his wife to the unoccupied zone, but since his French business partner was also Jewish, he, too, was vulnerable to seizure. Unlike in 1914, however, this time Kahnweiler was ready. In the spring of 1941, he managed to arrange for his daughter-in-law, who was French and Catholic, to take over ownership of the gallery. It was left untouched. As momentous as was Rosenberg’s decision to leave, Kahnweiler’s decision to stay was equally so. If he could survive the war, he would now have new opportunities with the artist he had lost to Rosenberg more than two decades earlier. Overall, though, the great era of modern art that had flourished in Paris since the end of the last war had inexorably come to an end.
Stuck in Sintra, Rosenberg tried to figure out what to do. By the summer of 1940, Lisbon was an unsettling, chaotic city, filled with Allied and Nazi spies and increasingly overrun with exiled Europeans, from royalty and prominent businessmen to anti-Nazi resistance fighters and ordinary civilians. Everyone in the city, it seemed, was trying to escape from Europe, and even for those who could get visas to a foreign destination, boats were extremely scarce. Cut off from his paintings and his artists, there was little Rosenberg could do, and, like other refugees, he was fearful of his status. Still, he imagined that he would be able to travel on to the United States. After all, he had done business there for many years and had visited there multiple times without difficulty. With so many of his paintings already in the country, and numerous contacts with American dealers and collectors, he assumed it would be a formality to gain visas for his family. Entry would be easy, provided they could find a ship.
At the U.S. consulate in Lisbon, Rosenberg discovered how wrong he was. “I am trying hard to come to the States, but the consulates are invaded [sic] by demands,” he wrote to his American friend, the art dealer Edward Fowles. No demonstration of his long record as a prominent international businessman seemed to make much difference. “I have shown affidavits of support by very rich friends of mine in America, shown that I possess still a large amount of cash,” he wrote. “It is not enough and they have asked for an order of Washington!”[25] By now, Rosenberg was increasingly desperate. In Portugal, he had no paintings and knew no one; they would have to go somewhere else. He explored going to Argentina.
