Pictures at an Exhibition (30 page)

“So you have not been in Paris for many years?” he asked. “You are forgetting de Gaulle's currency adjustment. Everything, divided by ten!” We laughed. It was a delight to be there. A moment later he said, “Make way for the woman in the chair.” Somehow, this made me shiver.

I turned to look and gazed quickly into the face of the plump blonde who pushed the wheelchair. She gripped the auction catalog before her.

“The next lot is from the collection of Madame de Chambrun,” the auctioneer announced, loosening the knot of his tie. There were whispers in the audience. The gentleman beside me hissed and pushed his way out of the room. I eased into the space he left behind.

A portrait, attributed to the Cranach workshop, sparked heated bidding. Next in the lot was a series of Paul Klee sketches from the 1930s. Unusual, I thought, that Madame Le Chambrun, whoever she was, should collect paintings both from the German Renaissance and the prewar period. I shrugged my shoulders. Both artists were German. Stranger things have happened.

“Lot Fifty-one: Matisse's
Intérieur vert et bleu
,“ the auctioneer announced, smiling at the commotion this incited in the crowd. I felt it too. A row of assistants were poised with telephones at their ears.

“Bidding will begin at forty thousand francs,” he announced. “Do I hear forty thousand five?” And on we flew. The lemons seemed to float on the surface of the canvas. It was one of Matisse's color experiments, where a table and a wall and a chair were all the same block of green.

I felt my heart race and my leg quiver. It was a beautiful Matisse indeed, with rich colors that vibrated against each other.

“Fifty-five thousand,” I called out. Ellie turned around, eyes wide with warning.

I ignored her and entered the fray again at seventy thousand. Ellie rose from her seat and made her way through the crowd. “Why are you doing this?” she said. “Please don't do it just because I asked you not to. This has all been very difficult, darling, I know. Remember—your father loved art, but he loved your mother more. Now let's just enjoy the auction.” She hung on my arm, so I would not raise it.

One by one, the auctioneer's assistants hung up their telephones until there was only a single telephone bidder, a Dutchman, I gathered from the assistant's responses, and the invisible woman in the wheelchair. At the last moment, an ill-shaven fellow in a motorcycle jacket began shouting out bids before the auctioneer could ask for them and had to be reprimanded. Then the last telephone bidder hung up the line. The motorcyclist, growing red in the face, kept gesturing
Up, up
with his paddle. The plump blonde looked ready to faint, as if she were holding on to the handles of the wheelchair for dear life. Several moments later, her companion won the Matisse and a smattering of applause broke out in the room. I joined the clapping. The blonde reached down and touched the invalid's shoulder. Then she wheeled the chair toward the door.

“Wasn't that exciting?” I asked Ellie. She said it was. There was a Cézanne next.

“The more expensive the painting, the hotter the room gets,” Ellie said. “God forbid we see a Monet.” I looked at my wristwatch—we had been at Drouot's for less than an hour.

I tried to hide my disappointment. It was our last full day in France. I had hoped, against hope,
that Almonds
might be for sale, or even the
Woman in White.

We pushed our way through the wall of people into the muggy air of the hallway and stood on the moving staircase, letting it lower us into the vestibule. The desire to turn back gripped me; it made my head spin, past the image of the great Ferris wheel that was erected at the foot of the Tuileries Gardens each summer of my childhood, past the memory of Bertrand clicking a bullet into the chamber of a gun, saying, “We won't play Russian roulette, but imagine if we did, and I go first,” and shooting the gun into the woods and startling our horses, spinning until I could hear my mother humming
Orphée et Eurydice
, when Orpheus calls out to the Eurydice he has lost forever.

At that moment, a young Drouot's employee blocked our path. He held a painting crate in his hands.

“Mr. Berenzon,” he said, “you can't leave without your painting.”

“You didn't—” Ellie protested.

I looked up, into the quiet cashier's booth. The gnome was inside, twirling a pen in his ear. “Max Berenzon,” he said to me, though I hardly knew my own name, “we've been waiting. For all these years.”

“I did not buy a painting,” I said.

“I know,” the young man said, wiping his brow. “A woman pointed you out and told me to give it to you,” he said. “The one in the wheelchair, with the Legion of Honor pin. I almost thought you had left. That would have been a disaster.”

IN THE TAXICAB, ELLIE AND I PRIED OPEN THE CRATE'S latches. Inside was the Matisse
Intérieur vert et bleu.

“Monsieur,” I asked the taxi driver, “who is Madame de Cham-brun?”

“Has she died?” he asked. I looked at his fat fingers on the steering wheel and the jumping dials on the dashboard.

“I don't know,” I replied. The Matisse had come from her collection.

“Everyone knows,” he said, “but no one will admit it.”

“Who is she?” I asked again.

“What are you saying?” Ellie begged for a translation.

“She's the daughter of Laval,” he said, and spit out the window.

“Who's Laval?” Ellie asked, now following the exchange. “The prime minister of France under Vichy,” I said, and turned over the painting. It was stamped:

Daniel Berenzon
21, rue de La Boétie
Paris 8ème

Did this mean that a son's love and grief for his father triumphed over all? Or that, in a moment of reckoning, I had seen and remembered nothing? I understood then that Rose had begun to bid only once I had stopped. She had been sent to Drouot's, or went of her own accord, in case I had forgotten what I would see there.

“Let's go back to the hotel,” Ellie said, her hair whipping in the open window. “Your mother will need us now.”

“Yes,” I said. “I need her more than ever.” Ellie put her hand to my forehead. I took it and kissed the knuckle of the finger that bore the ring my mother had brought with her from Poland in 1917.

We passed a protest and a blockade of policemen in riot suits, as black-shelled as beetles. I examined the painting as the taxi raced through the hot street's mirage. There were fumes in the air, of asphalt and gasoline. The shimmering of the city was also a part of the canvas: Matisse's lemons seemed to float above the table and the white plate on which they might have rested, if they had been given rest. It was a still life that had not been granted stillness. I thought of the dimensions of the painting, of its flat and hovering planes, and that somewhere, in between the two, lingered those whom I had lost.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The tragedy of France's looted artwork is but a shadow of its Jews, who numbered three hundred thousand at the outbreak of World War II. Seventy-six thousand were deported. Eight thousand of those deported were children under the age of thirteen. Three percent of all of those “sent East” returned.

While Max Berenzon is entirely imaginary, many other historical figures appear in this work of fiction. To the best of my ability, all the references to the wartime activities of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, Colonel von Behr, and Ambassador Otto Abetz are true. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the Bernheim-Jeune brothers, and Paul and Léonce Rosenberg were all art dealers in Paris before the war, as were the Wildensteins, Cailleux, Lefranc and Fabiani. The latter quartet remains under suspicion to this day for collaboration or shady dealings (Maria Dietrich, Hitler's art broker, was one of Cailleux's clients); the former left their brilliant, indelible print on the course of Modern art by fostering the twentieth century's most visionary painters. Drouot is still one of Paris's busiest auction houses, and the Lutetia one of its most glamorous hotels, with little trace other than a plaque on boulevard Raspail of the painful scenes that took place there in the spring of 1945.

Rose Clément takes her name and story from Rose Valland (1898-1980), the former curator of the Jeu de Paume. The Nazis mistook Rose Valland's unassuming manner for timidity and allowed her to stay on in the Modern art museum as a supervisor to its maintenance men. Their mistake is history's triumph, as her meticulous documentation of looters, the looted, and the destination of the spoils saved thousands of paintings for their eventual repatriation. Valland's communication with the Free French and Allied forces guaranteed that the thousands of railcars of looted artwork were neither bombed (at the outset of the war) nor allowed out of France (in the war's final hours).

I have relied heavily on Rose Valland's 1961 autobiography,
Le front de l'art: défense des collections françaises 1939-1945
, for her account of her work at the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume, and have incorporated some of her descriptions of the looted artworks’ arrival, sorting, selection, and dispersal into my text. All of the lists that my Rose shows Max in this novel are actual ones that the real Rose surreptitiously obtained during the war. Rose Valland received the Legion of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and yet,
Le front de l'art
has gone out of print. Her country, it seemed, was eager to brush her aside. Lynn Nicholas, in the definitive
Rape of Europa
, describes Rose's increasing isolation:

After a time [Rose Valland's] persistence and her knowledge of collaboration and shady deals began to make her unpopular among those not wishing to be reminded of the events of the war. She was particularly reluctant to set a final date for claims on the unidentified and not very high-grade leftovers which remained after the better objects had been distributed among the museums. These had become an administrative headache for everyone, and many felt they should be sold. By 1965 Mlle Valland's stubbornness had driven the director of the Musées de France to suggest to her that it might be time to look forward to peace and fraternity, forget the past, and leave the disposition of the works to the living, which “would take nothing away from the respect for the dead.” But Resistance heroine Valland never would compromise, and in her last years retreated entirely into her world of secret documents, which at her death were relegated, unsorted and chaotic, to a Musées storeroom in Malmaison.

Bertrand Reinach, too, once lived in Paris, though I have been able to find almost nothing about his person and character. There is a photograph, a picture of an impish boy with big ears, wearing his school uniform, slouched in a giant armchair. There is an almost identical photo of his older sister, Fanny, in which she wears the same uniform and sits in the same chair. His deportation file tells us that he indicated his profession as
Schreiner
, or carpenter.

The Musée Nissim de Camondo, Bertrand's grandfather's private residence and collection, remains to this day one of the most beautiful and haunting museums in Paris. Located alongside the parc de Mon-ceau, it is the ornate collection of the Count Moïses de Camondo, a Turkish Jew who loved French culture so wholly that he modeled his home on the Petit Trianon in Versailles. Camondo collected Catherine II's silver service and Marie Antoinette's tiny inlaid reading tables and vases of gold and petrified wood, amassing the country's finest collection of late-eighteenth-century furniture, silver, and china. When the count's son, an airman in World War I, was killed in action over the Atlantic, the count bequeathed his collection to the French state in Nissim's name. One can imagine, then, how this family, with a war hero and a national French museum—in the same union of museums as the Louvre—thought that they were safe.

The scenes of the Louvre's evacuation are also drawn from firsthand accounts. Jacques Jaujard, director of the national museums, and René Huyghe, the Louvre's curator of painting, oversaw that astounding maneuver. The
Mona Lisa
, for example, alongside many of the Louvre's other treasures, went first to the château in Cham-bord. After the invasion of France, she was brought by ambulance stretcher to the Abbey of Loc-Dieu in the Midi.
The Rape of Europa
retells the painting's odyssey:

The museum people, like everyone else, listened late into the night to the BBC, whose programs were laced with cryptic messages to underground activists all over Europe. Thus they knew that information on the relocation of the collections to Loc-Dieu and later to other refuges had been received in London when the message “La Joconde
a le sourire
[The
Mona Lisa
is smiling]” came crackling through the night.

A meeting of the Association of Art Dealers did take place after the war. There, these dealers, who had profited from the looting, agreed not to report to the French government or the Direction Générale des Etudes et Recherches on their members’ wartime activities because, in fact, so many would have been implicated.

All of the paintings reproduced here, and many of those mentioned, with few exceptions (the
Ham
, for example, which hangs safely in Glasgow), are still missing.
Almonds, Woman in White
, and others all appear courtesy of the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery's heirs. Unlike the photographic plates belonging to many other Jewish art dealers, the Bernheims’ plates endure because a blackmailer swindled the family into keeping his collaboration a secret in exchange for the photographs, which documented the family's stunning, lost collection.