When Paris Went Dark (9 page)

His closest friends had slipped out of town before the arrival of the Germans, so the well-known Spanish artist Pablo Picasso had also escaped, traveling to Royan, on France’s southwestern coast, far from Paris, ostensibly to ride out the occupation, which did not yet have a capital
O.
The Germans, most thought, would leave Paris soon, after the British had surrendered or had also signed an armistice. Yet even that “soon” was not enough for Picasso, who decided to return to Paris in August of 1940, where he remained for the duration. The question persists: Why did this timorous artist, whose masterpiece,
Guernica,
had blatantly criticized the muscular fascism of the Germans at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in 1937, scurry back? He was world famous, which might provide a
degree of protection, but he was also an outspoken supporter of those who opposed Franco. Rumors continued to persist among many on the right that he was Jewish or Communist—or, maybe worse, both; he was certainly on the left. Yet he refused repeated offers to wait out the war in New York or South America.

Picasso told his friend Brassaï (the pseudonym of the brilliant Hungarian photographer Gyula Halász) that he had returned to Paris because he could only get certain materials for his work there, that he trusted only the printers and foundries of Paris. Whatever the reason, the draw of the city was too strong to resist for the Spanish genius. Still, he was never quite at rest in the changed capital. One can only imagine the vacillations that accompanied his decision to return to Paris only two months after the Germans had arrived. As the art historian Rosalind Krauss has suggested, Picasso’s fine-tuned sensitivity dominated his every waking moment (and most likely his dreams): “[Picasso’s anxiety] is there in what [Françoise] Gilot [his mistress] calls ‘the disease of the will that made it impossible for him to make the slightest domestic decision’, a disease that produces… frequent scenes during which Picasso argues with an irrational persistence that reduces [his] interlocutors to tears.”
⁵
After the war, he would assume a mask of boldness that put to rest many questions regarding his apparent “neutrality” while living in the city during the Occupation: “He explained how he had been able to work in the face of Nazi occupation and [that] party’s antagonism to all forms of modern art, saying: ‘It was not a time for creative man to fail, to shrink, to stop working,’ and ‘there was nothing else to do but work seriously and devotedly, struggle for food, see friends quietly and look forward to freedom’.”
⁶
He was fined once, for eating a steak in a restaurant on a meatless day, but this was as close as he came to confronting the Occupation authorities. In fact, having remained in Paris during the Occupation, then joining the Communist Party immediately after the Liberation, gave Picasso a postwar cachet of courageous resistance that is generally belied by the low profile he kept during the dark years. He had only one, very discreet, gallery show between 1940 and 1944, and though he received many visitors and kept up relations with a wide variety of artists—many of
whom were openly anti-Vichy, if not anti-Nazi—Picasso’s silhouette was gray against a dark background.

Picasso in his Left Bank studio.
(© Pierre Jahan / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works)

Picasso established a studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, in the Left Bank’s 6th arrondissement, right next to the Seine, and he would walk there daily from his much fancier apartment in the Rue La Boétie, across the river. Soon he abandoned the latter and settled in a large, loftlike apartment on the Left Bank, quite near his favorite restaurant, Le Catalan, and the bustle of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés crossroads. And he did work during those four years. On the top floors of this old building (which one may now visit), he put a sign at his door that said simply:
ICI
(“Here”). German officers would stop by (and even, against orders, so would German enlisted men), as would other admirers who were in
Paris during those troubled years. Indeed, the home of the world’s best-known artist became a required tourist stop in the occupied city. He adroitly used his notoriety to protect himself from those who did not wish him well, who could not understand why he was allowed to continue to live a free man given his anti-fascism. He was protected, too, by some of the Reich’s own artists, most notably the sculptor Arno Breker, one of Hitler’s favorites. And he was discreet. There is an anecdote in the diary of the Russian-British journalist Alexander Werth describing how Picasso even stood in line to request French nationality, just as any other foreigner had to do: “He’s fed up with being a Spaniard. But you know what our red tape is like. Not long ago, I found him standing in a long queue at the Préfecture [de police]; and I had to rescue him. Do you know that Picasso is one of the very biggest taxpayers in France? Last year he paid 750,000 francs in income tax.”
⁷

Still, though the reasons why he stayed there were never clear—either to his friends or, perhaps, even to himself—Picasso’s presence in Paris reassured other artists and writers that there could be life and productivity under the Germans. (The Germans might have tolerated his presence as part of their mission to make their Occupation seem relatively benign. Picasso probably intuited this was true.) Henri Matisse, almost as well known as Picasso, had also elected to remain in France during the war, residing in Nice and Vence, in southeastern France. That area was a bit safer, for the Italians controlled it, and they were much less restrictive than the Germans. He, too, ignored pleas from all over the world to emigrate. Matisse, however, was French, not Spanish; he was never considered a Jew or a leftist, as was Picasso. In his conversations with Picasso and his friends, Brassaï quotes an exchange he had with the poet Jacques Prévert. They were discussing Picasso in October of 1943:

Josephine Baker.
(© TopFoto / The Image Works)

For the Germans, even the most ignorant of them, Paris was not just any city; it was an idea, a myth. By serendipity, creative planning, and massive amounts of public funding, the French capital had come to represent tolerance, liberty, and a crucible for the imagination. No one represented this image more than a young African American woman who came to Paris at the age of nineteen in 1925. Josephine Baker arrived fresh, seductive, and very brown to a jazz-obsessed city. Straight
from Saint Louis, Missouri, she became an overnight sensation at the Casino de Paris and the Folies Bergère with her production
La Revue nègre.
Brilliantly playing upon the contradictory European fascination with and abhorrence of black sexuality, she adapted her style and performances to the newfound Parisian love for American popular music, imported by African American soldiers during the First World War. Her sensuous dancing elicited an almost hypnotic response from white male audiences all over Europe. By 1940, after the enormous success of her revue, the provocative Baker had become a transnational celebrity.

Wrote one critic:

The
Revue nègre
offered other black bodies, often half nude (or more), sweating in exotic dances devised by Baker, who exploited the stereotypes that Europeans had about “primitive savages.” The posters that plastered Paris, and that made their way across Europe, reproduced all the stereotypes of Africanness: jutting buttocks, thick lips, wide eyes, shiny teeth, kinky hair. Seeing these joyful ads for the revue at the Music-hall des Champs-Élysées, our smile becomes embarrassed when we realize that the Nazis would use the same stereotypes for their attacks in the 1930s on “degenerate art.”

Soon after their Parisian triumph, Baker’s producers realized that there was more money to be made throughout Europe, so an extensive tour
was planned. In 1926, her troupe was a sensation in Berlin, where the freedom of the Weimar Republic art scene was at its height. Baker and the show had visibly influenced German musicians and artists, who livened up their own productions in efforts to catch her energy and style. But on her return to Berlin in 1928, when she was the featured artist, not just part of a show, Baker found a new, less tolerant city. She had always brushed off hysterical newspaper reviews, but now the audiences were themselves belligerent. The Depression had made Europe tenser, less tolerant, and more ready to look for scapegoats. Eastern Europe welcomed her with an aggressive, almost palpable hatred, where, in Germany especially, blacks were looked on with unmitigated scorn.

When she appeared in Berlin, after having been to Budapest, Basel, Belgrade, Lucerne, Amsterdam, and Oslo, trouble began. In some cities, proper critics expressed their distaste of her performances, but only on “artistic” grounds. In Berlin, Nazi brownshirts in the audience whistled and hooted at the show (this was the period when the Nazis were seen primarily as a nuisance, certainly not a major political party). Baker represented what the Nazis most despised and most feared about the influence of Paris: the “degeneration” of racial and moral standards, the loosening of ethical certainties, and the freedom of expression, both artistic and political. Blackness and Frenchness—racial mixing that caused degeneration—became firmly connected in the German mind, this despite the fact that there were fewer blacks in Europe than there were Romanies or Jews. Hitler had reserved his most heinous comments for the “subhumans” that had slipped into European culture; the fact that black musicians, artists, and performers were immensely popular drove him to inarticulate fury. And it was Paris where this suggestive dancer, who threatened the “white race” with her blatant sexuality, became popular. One of the world’s best-known and most photographed women, she was like a traveling billboard, advertising her lifestyle throughout Europe, performing in a way that threatened to ruin centuries of dogmatic tradition. She may have been American-born, but she was now Parisian, and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s began to become, in the eyes of fascists, a prime site of hedonism and political threat. Just a decade later, when the Germans would arrive
in Paris, they had Baker in mind, for she represented, in many ways, the “other”; she was the forbidden, the dangerous, the diseased, and the profligate. She had even married a Jew.

Nazi ideology sought to destroy the Bakers of Europe, yet the Nazis also wanted some of them to remain in Paris to keep up the image of that city as being just as gay under Nazi control as it had been before. But by June of 1940, the most famous Baker of them all was no longer in Paris. It appears that the advent of the war caught her by surprise. Though still popular, her shows had come to seem somewhat passé.
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Still, she knew that, given her race and her husband’s ethnicity, she would not be able to perform in Paris under German Occupation, despite their program to “keep Paris Paris.” Baker’s last show in Paris was a small revue in the fall of 1939 costarring the popular song-and-dance man Maurice Chevalier (who would stay and perform in the city until 1943, when he became nervous about appearing to support the Vichy regime). Like Picasso, Baker thought the Germans would depart in a few months, but it would be years before she appeared again on a Parisian stage. She would not perform again on French soil until the Germans had left. Volunteering for the Red Cross, and doing a little intelligence work, she was soon moving throughout North Africa and the Middle East, entertaining the Free French and eventually catching the attention of Charles de Gaulle. (After the war, he awarded her France’s highest honor for members of the Resistance.) She had left Paris, but only to serve her beloved France better.