And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (31 page)

In 1942, Breker enjoyed a different form of consecration when a huge retrospective of his work opened at the Orangerie in Paris. Organized by his old friend Jacques Benoist-Méchin, a pro-Nazi journalist who had joined the Vichy regime, the show was supported by an honor committee that included senior Vichy officials as well as the Fascist writers Brasillach and Drieu La Rochelle. While preparing the show, Ambassador Abetz arranged for Breker to stay in Helena Rubinstein’s Aryanized apartment on the Île Saint-Louis, and Laval offered him a lunch at the Hôtel de Matignon, the prime
minister’s official residence. Soon it was apparent that this was to be
the
cultural event of the year: the turnout for its opening on May 15, 1942, included
le tout Paris
willing to be associated with anything German. Most of the artists who had traveled to Germany were present, as were celebrities like Arletty, Guitry, Lifar, Cocteau and Drieu La Rochelle. So immense were Breker’s statues that Guitry quipped to Cocteau, “If they all have erections, we won’t be able to move around.”
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Opening speeches by Bonnard and Benoist-Méchin were followed by a concert given by Alfred Cortot, Wilhelm Kempff and Germaine Lubin. Breker also received a handwritten note of congratulations from Pétain. For Breker, though, the guest of honor was Maillol. The old man had been reluctant to make the trip, but Gerhard Heller, the German officer in charge of literature at the Propaganda Staffel, took a car and driver to Banyuls-sur-Mer to collect him.

The Breker spectacle was not over. A few days later, another reception in his honor, this one at the Musée Rodin, drew still more cultural luminaries, including the collaborationist writers Paul Morand and Céline, the playwright Giraudoux and others, like Guitry, who had been at the Orangerie. In the cultural weekly
Comoedia
, Cocteau also published a “Salut à Breker,” which began “Hail Breker” and gave seven reasons for his admiration, including “because the great hand of Michelangelo’s
David
has shown you your path.” Cocteau was promptly made to understand that he had gone too far. In a letter expressing his “painful surprise,” the poet Éluard reminded him that “Freud, Kafka, Chaplin have been banned by the very same people who honor Breker.” But if Cocteau was willing to exhibit himself in this way, it was also out of gratitude to Breker. The previous year, his lover, Jean Marais, had punched the pro-Nazi theater critic Alain Laubreaux for his criticism of Cocteau. Fearing a reprisal from the Gestapo, Cocteau had turned to Breker for protection. In his journal on May 6, 1942, a few days before the Orangerie opening, Cocteau recalled the German’s loyalty: “At the time that all the Germanophile press was insulting me, Arno Breker, Hitler’s sculptor, offered me the chance of calling him by a special telephone to Berlin in the event that anything serious happened to me or to Picasso.”
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Breker later also claimed to have obtained the release from the prison in Fresnes of Eugène Rudier, whose foundry had cast Rodin’s bronzes and who subsequently went to Berlin to cast Breker’s
bronzes, and of the poet Patrice de la Tour du Pin, who was a prisoner of war in Germany. What seems certain is that in 1943 he did help to free Dina Vierny, Maillol’s model. In late 1940, Maillol had saved her from jail for leading Jews and other refugees along secret mountain trails into Spain. Now she had again been arrested, this time in Paris, with the risk that she would be unmasked as an anti-Fascist foreign Jew. As Vierny later told the story, during a visit to Paris, Breker found Maillol incapable of working, as he put it, “without Dina,” who by then had spent six months in Fresnes. Breker consulted Belmondo, who assured him that Vierny was innocent of the charges of trafficking in gold and helping refugees. A few days later, a German officer delivered Dina to a restaurant in Montparnasse where Breker and Maillol awaited her.
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That same year, Breker traveled to Banyuls-sur-Mer to do a bronze bust of Maillol.

Noticeably absent from anything resembling the official art world were Dufy, Rouault, Bonnard, Matisse and Picasso. All were men who had first made their names in the early years of the century and, in the cases of Bonnard, Matisse and Rouault, were now over seventy. All felt they still had something to contribute to art, yet they saw no role for themselves in France’s political drama. All but Picasso also chose to live in the south of France. Dufy, whose colorful oils owed much to the early influence of Les Fauves, lived first in Nice, then in Perpignan and finally in the small village of Mont-saunès, west of Carcassonne. He kept busy painting and designing tapestries. He also began working with the Paris dealer Louis Carré, while exhibitions of his work were held during the war years in Lyon, Brussels and New York, as well as Paris. Rouault, a Fauvist-turned-Expressionist, moved to the Riviera, spending the occupation in the tiny resort of Golfe-Juan east of Cannes. He was increasingly consumed by Christianity, a surprisingly common trait among wartime artists, and his work, like that of Bonnard, Matisse and Dufy, seemed to pay no heed to the
années noires
being lived by most French.

Pierre Bonnard, who in his youth was a central figure of Les Nabis, had long since opted for a quiet life of introspection. When war was declared in 1939, he and his wife, Marthe, withdrew to Villa Le Bosquet in Le Cannet, on the Côte d’Azur, where Bonnard continued to paint bucolic landscapes and, above all, nudes. Although mobilized as a war painter in 1917, now in his mid-seventies, he seemed barely touched by the new conflict. His only interest was
painting, and he continued to portray the aged Marthe, naked or in her bath, as if she were still a young beauty. In 1941, Maillol sent Vierny to pose for Bonnard, mainly to keep her out of trouble. Bonnard immediately began work on
Nu sombre
, a Gauguinesque portrait of the naked Dina that he would complete only in 1946. One reason for the delay was that Marthe’s death, in January 1942, plunged him into deep mourning. With Bonnard running out of money, alone and isolated much of the time, a young printer, Aimé Maeght, came to his rescue, bringing him food and painting materials as well as selling some of his oils. At the same time, Maeght, who would become a renowned art dealer after the war, was making false documents for the resistance. When the war ended, Bonnard lived just long enough—until January 1947—to enjoy his new international celebrity.

Matisse, too, preferred to paint joy over sorrow, but during the occupation this meant overcoming his failing health, the turmoil within his family and the discomfort imposed by war. In early 1939, after years of stormy marriage, his wife, Amélie, filed for separation, with the result that Matisse’s unsold art and other valuables were stored in the Banque de France in Paris pending their division into equal parts. The catalyst for Amélie’s action was the arrival in their lives of a strong-minded young Russian woman, Lydia Delectorskaya, whose care and attention Matisse soon found indispensable. After a final meeting at the Gare Saint-Lazare in July 1939, Matisse never again saw Amélie, while Lydia became his secretary, protector and companion (though not mistress), an arrangement that lasted until his death in 1954. During the phony war, Matisse left his Paris studio for Nice, where he occupied an entire floor of the Hôtel Regina, in the neighborhood of Cimiez. In the spring of 1940, he even planned to escape for a few weeks by taking a boat to Brazil. Yet when Germany invaded France, he was in Paris, and it took him and Lydia six weeks to return to Nice, via Bordeaux, Carcassonne and Marseille.

Throughout the journey and during the months that followed, Matisse suffered terrible stomach pains. In late 1940, he turned down a visa for the United States offered by Varian Fry, explaining in a letter to his son Pierre, in New York, “If everything of any worth flees, what will remain of France?” But his health continued to deteriorate and, in January 1941, he was rushed to Lyon for an emergency colostomy. Fearing that he might not survive, he wrote a letter that
he instructed Pierre to give to Amélie should he die. In an accompanying letter, he complained that Amélie “called in question everything about me—my honesty, my affection for my family, and all the rest.” He added, “I shall not of course go into that. I shall simply tell her that I continued to love her.” But he survived the operation, the letter was never delivered and five months later he returned to Cimiez with Lydia. Too weak to paint, he concentrated on drawing.

To cheer him up, Maillol also sent him Vierny, with a note saying, “I lend you the vision of my work, you will reduce her to a line.”
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And, indeed, Matisse did some exquisite nude line drawings of Maillol’s model. At one point, Vierny insisted that she had to return to Bonnard, who was still at work on
Nu sombre
. Later she recounted Matisse’s response: “No question of your returning to Bonnard! You’re going to interrupt my flow. Look, I’m going to draw Bonnard, here he is; I stick him on the drawing, he’s behind you now. Let’s talk no more of this and continue.”
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Matisse had also begun making the paper cutouts that he published in 1947 as
Jazz
and would occupy him during his final years. Yet while consumed by his work, he was not cut off from the world. Through visiting art dealers and collectors, he knew that his paintings were being shown—and bought—in Paris. Rouault called on him, and he traveled to Le Cannet to see Bonnard. He also struck up an unlikely friendship with the resistance poet Aragon, who wrote the preface to Matisse’s collection of drawings
Thèmes et variations
. Further, he was aware of the desperate situation of Jewish painter friends and constantly worried that the French police might arrest Lydia as an enemy alien. After Germany took over the unoccupied zone and Italian troops marched into Nice in late 1942, fearing that the war would soon reach the Côte d’Azur, Matisse, Lydia and their cook moved to a small country house, grandly called Villa Le Rêve, outside Vence, twenty miles to the west. With no telephone and no car, Lydia headed off daily by bicycle to find food for the household.

Matisse’s family was also dispersed. Pierre was in New York, where he organized the 1942 show Artists in Exile for Mondrian, Chagall, Ernst, Léger and other painters who had left France. Matisse’s other son, Jean, was in nearby Antibes but deeply involved with the maquis, training young resisters in the art of sabotage. Matisse knew that Amélie and their strong-minded daughter, Marguerite, were living in the family home at Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris. He did not know that both had joined the Communist resistance group Francs-Tireurs
et Partisans, Marguerite as a courier and Amélie typing intelligence reports to be smuggled to London. Then, on April 13, 1944, both women were arrested by the Gestapo, Marguerite in Rennes and Amélie in Paris. Learning of the arrests one week later, Matisse appealed for help to the dealer Fabiani and Guitry, both on good terms with the Germans, but to no avail. Amélie spent the rest of the occupation in jail in Fresnes and was freed when Paris was liberated. Marguerite had a narrower escape. After undergoing weeks of torture, she was deported—along with hundreds of other women prisoners—just as Allied forces were advancing into Brittany. By good fortune, her train, destined for the Ravensbrück concentration camp, was stopped at the German border on August 4 by Allied bombing. In the confusion, she escaped and made her way to safety. In the final days of the war, even Matisse was in danger: with Allied forces landing on France’s southern coast in mid-August, three bombs exploded near the Villa Le Rêve. Yet it was probably only in January 1945, when Marguerite visited her father and recounted her experiences, that the true horror of war was brought home to him.

Picasso, too, could have sought the tranquillity of the Côte d’Azur or, indeed, exile in the United States or Mexico, but after he drove to Paris from Royan with two carloads of paintings on August 23, 1940, he left the city only once during the occupation. He knew that, as a Spaniard who had supported the defeated Spanish Republic and had been refused French nationality, his situation was precarious. Further, while Spain remained neutral, Franco had good relations with both Hitler and Pétain and was in a position to demand Picasso’s arrest and extradition to Spain. The artist’s only option was to keep a low profile and set about organizing the logistics of his life and his women. When he left for Paris, his mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, stayed in Royan with their daughter, Maya, until the end of the year, but Picasso’s more public partner, Dora Maar, followed him by train the same day. At the time, he had two Paris homes, but fuel shortages during the first winter of the occupation prompted him to close his Right Bank apartment, on the rue La Boétie, and settle into his Left Bank duplex, at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins, a stone’s throw from the Seine. There, he was around the corner from Maar’s home on the rue de Savoie and conveniently close to his old hangouts of the Café de Flore and the Brasserie Lipp in Saint-Germain. Marie-Thérèse and Maya then moved into an apartment on the boulevard Henri IV on the Île Saint-Louis, a fifteen-minute walk away; Picasso would
usually visit them on Thursdays and Sundays. His Paris had shrunk to the size of a village.

But he was not allowed to forget the German presence. In the fall of 1940, as the Germans set about scavenging France, they decided to inspect all bank vaults, including those of the Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l’Industrie on the boulevard Haussmann, where Picasso and Braque rented strong rooms. Picasso was in the bank vaults when his two strong rooms were opened for German officers. The officer in charge seemed so confused by what he saw that Picasso pointed to Braque’s adjacent strong room and said it contained still more of his unsold work. With that, the officer ended the inspection.
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