Confessions of an Art Addict (8 page)

For years I had wanted to buy a Brancusi bronze, but had not been able to afford one. Now the moment seemed to have arrived for this great acquisition. I spent months
becoming more and more involved with Brancusi before this sale was actually accomplished. I had known him for sixteen years, but never dreamed I was to get into such complications with him. It was very difficult to talk price to Brancusi, and if you ever had the courage to do so, you had to expect him to ask you some monstrous sum. I was aware of this, and hoped my excessive friendship with him would make things easier. But in spite of all this, we ended up in a terrible row when he asked me for four thousand dollars for the ‘Bird in Space'.

Brancusi's studio was in a cul-de-sac. It was a huge workshop, filled with his enormous sculptures, and looked like a cemetery, except that the sculptures were much too big to be on graves. Next to this big room was a little one where he actually worked. The walls were covered with every conceivable instrument necessary for his work. In the centre was a furnace in which he heated his instruments and melted bronze. In this furnace he also cooked delicious meals, burning them on purpose, only to pretend that it had been an error. He ate at a counter and served lovely drinks, made very carefully. Between this little room and the big one, which was so cold that in winter it was quite unusable, there was a little recess where Brancusi played oriental music on a gramophone he had made himself. Upstairs was his bedroom, a very modest affair. The whole place, including the bedroom, was covered in white dust from the sculptures.

Brancusi was a marvellous little man with a beard and
piercing dark eyes. He was half an astute peasant and half a real god. It made you very happy to be with him, but unfortunately he got too possessive about me and wanted all of my time. He called me Pegitza and told me he liked going on long trips and formerly had taken beautiful girls with him. He now wanted to take me, but I would not go. He also liked to go to very elegant hotels in France and arrive dressed like a peasant, and then order the most expensive things possible. He had been to India to visit the Maharajah of Indore, in whose garden he had placed three ‘Birds in Space', one in white marble, one in black and the third in bronze. He had also been back to Roumania, his own country, where the government had asked him to build public monuments. He was very proud of this. Most of his life had been very austerely led and devoted entirely to his work. He had sacrificed everything to this and had given up women for the most part, to the point of anguish. In his old age he was very lonely. He had a persecution complex and always thought people were spying on him. When he did not cook for me, he used to dress up and take me out to dinner. He loved me very much, but I never could get anything out of him. Laurence Vail suggested jokingly that I should marry Brancusi in order to inherit all his sculptures. I investigated the possibility, but soon discovered that he had other ideas and did not desire to have me as an heir. He would have preferred to sell me everything and then hide all the money in his wooden shoes.

After the row, I vanished from Brancusi's life for several months, during which time I bought a much earlier bird of his, called ‘Maestro', for one thousand dollars, from Paul Poiret's sister. It was his first bird, dating from 1912. It was a beautiful bird with an enormous stomach, but I still hankered after the ‘Bird in Space' which was so different. I asked Nellie, whom he called ‘Nellitska', to go and try to patch up the row for me. I then went back to his studio and we began to discuss the sale all over again. This time we fixed the price in francs, and by buying them in New York I saved a thousand dollars on the exchange. Brancusi felt cheated, but accepted the money.

Brancusi polished all his sculptures by hand. I think that is why they are so beautiful. This ‘Bird in Space' was to give him several week's work. By the time he had finished it the Germans were near Paris, and I went and fetched it in my little car to have it packed and shipped away in time. Tears were streaming down Brancusi's face. I was genuinely touched. I never knew why he was so upset, but assumed it was because he was parting with his favourite bird.

I wanted also to buy a sculpture of Giacometti's. One day I found a badly damaged plaster cast of his in an art gallery on the
rive gauche.
I went to see him and asked him if he would mend it for me, if I bought it, as I wanted it cast in bronze. He told me that he had a much better one in his studio. As it proved to be just as good, I bought this one. His studio was in a tiny street off the Avenue du
Maine and was so small I don't see how he could have worked in it. He looked like an imprisoned lion, with his lionesque head and an enormous shock of hair. His conversation and behaviour were extremely Surrealist and whimsical, like a divertimento of Mozart.

After he had the bronze cast, he appeared one morning on my terrace with what resembled a strange medieval animal. Together they looked exactly like the Carpaccio painting of St George leading in the captive dragon from whom he has delivered the princess, which is in the Scuola San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, in Venice. Giacometti was extremely excited, which surprised me very much because I thought he had lost all interest in his earlier work, having long since renounced abstractions in order to carve little Greek heads, which he carried in his pocket. He had refused to exhibit in my sculpture show in London because I would not show one of these. He said all art was alike. I much preferred my bronze, which was called ‘Woman with a Cut Throat'. It was the first of Giacometti's work ever to be cast, and when, years later, I returned to Europe after the war, to my great horror I seemed to see it everywhere, though I suppose the number of casts must have been limited to about six.

The day Hitler walked into Norway, I walked into Léger's studio and bought a wonderful 1919 painting from him for one thousand dollars. He never got over the fact that I should be buying paintings on such a day. Léger was a terrifically vital man, who looked like a butcher. During
his stay in New York, where he finally got after the German occupation of France, he became a sort of guide and took us all to foreign restaurants in every quarter of the city. He seemed to know every inch of New York, which he had discovered on foot.

The phony war continued all winter, and I personally was convinced that the Germans would never get to Paris. Therefore I tried to find a suitable place to house my fast-growing collection. I was living in a pent-house on the Ile de St Louis and could not hang any pictures there as it was all windows. I found a beautiful apartment on the Place Vendôme, where Chopin had died, as well as the shop of the famous tailor O'Rossin. I found it on the same day that I went to see Léger, but the owner of the apartment did everything in his power to discourage me from taking it. He thought I was mad. He said, ‘Think it over and come back tomorrow.' I went back the next day and told him I had not changed my mind, so he let me have it. I then got the architect, van Togerloo, to draw up plans to remodel this spacious place, where I intended to live as well as make a museum. It was over-decorated in
the jin de siècle
style. I insisted on having all the angels removed from the ceiling and scraped off the wedding-cake stucci from the walls. At this point, it obviously became impossible to continue with the scheme, as the Germans were nearing Paris. I asked the landlord to give me the cellars instead, to make a museum, but they had to be kept for air-raid shelters.

The only thing to do with the paintings was to pack them and get them out of Paris before it was too late or store them in an underground vault. Léger told me he thought the Louvre would give me one cubic metre of space somewhere in the country, where they were hiding their own treasures. So I had my pictures taken off their stretchers and packed into one cubic metre. To my dismay, the Louvre decided that my pictures were not worth saving and refused me the space. What they considered not worth saving were a Kandinsky, several Klees and Picabias, a Cubist Braque, a Gris, a Léger, a Gleizes, a Marcoussis, a Delaunay, two Futurists, a Severini, and a Balla, a Doesburg, and a ‘de Stijl' Mondrian. Among the Surrealist paintings were those of Miró, Max Ernst, de Chirico, Tanguy, Dali, Magritte and Brauner. The sculpture they had not even considered, though it comprised works by Brancusi, Lipchitz, Laurens, Pevsner, Giacometti, Moore, and Arp. Finally my friend, Maria Jolas, who had rented a château near Vichy to evacuate her bilingual school of children, said she would keep my collection in her barn. So I sent them there.

Nellie and I fled from Paris three days before the Germans entered. Two million people left the same day in cars, driving at one or two miles an hour, four abreast. It was a general exodus performed in a cloud of black smoke. Most of the cars went to Bordeaux, but we went south, where my children, Sinbad and Pegeen, were with
their father. We were warned not to go in this direction, as Italy had just declared war on France, and we might meet the Italian army. On the way, we learned the dreadful news of the fall of Paris, and a few days later came the tragic armistice terms.

Finally I took a house for my children at Le Veyrier, on the lake of Annecy. For company I had Nellie and Jean Arp and his wife, who came to stay with us. They were worried about the future, as they could not go back to Meudon, in occupied France, where they all lived. They were Hitler's avowed enemies, besides which they had left all their possessions in Meudon. Arp wanted to go to the United States and start a new Bauhaus. He was very nervous about the war. All his predictions had come true and he saw the future in very gloomy terms. He was madly anti-German and would turn off the radio if Mozart or Beethoven came over the air. He had been born in Alsace, but was now a Frenchman with the name of Jean instead of Hans, which he had dropped.

By the end of the summer, I received my cases of pictures. The Germans had come and gone from Vichy without even noticing them in Maria Jolas' barn; Giorgio Joyce, James's son, shipped them to Annecy, where they remained on the
quai de petite vitesse
for weeks. We did not know that they had arrived, and when we found out, we covered them with tarpaulins, but did not know what to do with them.

Being Jewish, I could not go back to Paris, but I wanted to
exhibit the pictures somewhere. Nellie was a friend of Monsieur Farcy, the director of the Musée de Grenoble. He liked modern art, so I sent her to see him and asked for his help. She came back with no definite promise, but with an invitation to me to send the pictures to the museum at Grenoble, where he would at least shelter them. We immediately dispatched them, and Nellie and I followed and settled in Grenoble.

M. Farcy was in a very bad jam himself at this time. Because of the Vichy government he nearly lost his museum directorship and finally ended up in prison. He could not do much for me. Though he did want to exhibit my collection, he was too frightened. As he was expecting Pétain to visit Grenoble, he had hidden all the museum's modern pictures in the cellar. He gave me perfect freedom in the museum to do anything with my pictures except to hang them. I had a beautiful room where I placed them along the wall and could show them to my friends, photograph them and catalogue them. But he would never fix a date for a show, claiming that he must pave the way with the Vichy government first, so much were they under Hitler's control. He did not want me to remove the pictures either, and after six months in Grenoble, I lost my patience and told him that I was going to America. He begged me to leave the collection with him, but I had no such intention. I had no idea how to send it to America, but I knew I would never leave without it.

M. Farcy was a very funny fat little man in his fifties. In
his youth he had been a cyclist and had done the
tour de France.
One could hardly believe it from his present appearance. He liked to get away from home and from his adoring wife, and whenever we invited them for dinner he came alone, with an excuse from her about being unable to accompany him. Later we discovered that he had never conveyed our invitation to her. He loved modern art, but he couldn't distinguish one thing from another. He often asked me who had painted my paintings, and invariably when he came round to Marcoussis he said, ‘What, Brancusi?' I had one painting by Vieira da Silva that he liked, because he thought it was a Klee. When I finally left Grenoble, I offered him either this painting or a Tanguy for a present. But when he asked me for the hundredth time if it were a Klee and I said, ‘No,' he chose the Tanguy. In spite of all this, he loved modern art and managed to collect quite a few paintings for his museum without any funds. It was because of his taste, which the Germans hated, that he nearly lost his job with the Vichy government.

Laurence Vail now decided that it would be safer for me to go to America in the spring and take our children. We were perpetually threatened with German occupation of all of France, and we knew that the United States would sooner or later enter the war and then we would be cut off from all financial resources. The American consuls, too, were urging us to go home. Worse still was the fear that I, as a Jewess, would be put in a concentration camp. I
wanted to go to Vichy to ask our Ambassador to help me get my collection to America, but it was a very cold winter and we were snowbound. So my hands were tied.

Just at this time, René le Fevre Foinet arrived in Grenoble. He was one of the partners of the firm who had done all my shipping and packing from Paris to London when I had the gallery there. I told him my troubles, and to my great surprise he said nothing could be easier than to ship my collection to New York as household objects, provided I could send some personal belongings with it. He suggested my little Talbot car, which I had left in a garage for six months, as there was no more petrol in France for civilians. The only trouble was that I had forgotten which garage. We went to every garage in Grenoble before we found it, and then we went to work and packed up the whole collection, and René sent it off with some sheets and pots and pans.