The Rape of Europa (34 page)

Despite all this private social and cultural activity, Paris was not the same. The City of Light had become a dark labyrinth in the evenings where “a population of the blind” groped its way about in the strictly enforced blackout. And in the day another form of blindness prevailed. The French seemed not to see the spiffy German uniforms and parades, or even notice the friendly correctness of their new rulers. The Germans soon had a new name for Paris:
“Die Stadt ohne Blick”
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(the unseeing city). The new masters of France did not like this Paris; they wanted it to be the way it always had been, purified of course, but still the city of culture. To that end they attempted an extraordinarily heavy-handed program of cultural rapprochement; they could never fathom why it did not work.

Immediately after the fall of Paris, German officials had required the Office of the Prefect of the Seine to make a list of museums and principal monuments, and supply a guide to accompany them on an automobile tour. The conquerors were distressed at the extent of evacuation of museum collections. Pressure, particularly from Ambassador Abetz, immediately began for a general revival of the arts and the return of the state collections to Paris. The French demurred, pointing out that there were still machine guns on the roof of the Crillon, and that low-flying planes
passed over the Louvre daily. The lack of transport and Hitler’s freezing decree guaranteed that the national treasures would not be brought forth until the Final Victory, which everyone thought would be soon. To make themselves feel better, the Nazis ordered the sandbags removed from the various monumental sculptures of the capital.

Meanwhile, the empty museums were all too tempting to German agencies searching for suitable offices and storage space. Each one was carefully inspected, and its remaining contents noted. Twelve hundred military vehicles were parked in the Grand Palais. The newly built museum of modern art known as the Tokyo, which had not yet opened, also seemed perfect for a parking garage and offices. The Palace of Fontainebleau was taken over for parties and troop theatricals and the Luxembourg was turned into Luftwaffe headquarters, complete with an apartment for Goering.

The Kunstschutz was able to correct some of these excesses, but they could not prevent their colleagues from using the museums for exhibitions. It soon became clear to the French Beaux-Arts administration that use of the museums for their traditional purpose, even if ideologically unpalatable, was preferable to their transformation into garages. The need to keep the galleries busy at all times led to a most surprising combination of exhibitions in the following years.

One of the first was at the Carnavalet, the museum of the history of Paris, which had been the residence of the famous Mme de Sévigné. It reopened with a few objects brought in from its country repository, plus others from the storage rooms of sister institutions and a few private donations. Representatives of the German embassy and Dr. Bunjes kept a careful eye on the installation in case anything Jewish should creep in. A statue by Dantan entitled
Rachel
, reputed to be of the famous Jewish tragedienne of that name, had to be removed. Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, curator of the show, simply changed the name to
La Tragédie
and put it back, but a portrait of Sarah Bernhardt lent by the Comédie-Française was rejected. The labels were carefully translated and there was a catalogue in German. Nothing could have made the Parisians more aware of their plight than references in this volume to “Gräfin von Sévigné” and “Ludwig XIV.”
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Throughout the summer of 1940 everyone had wondered what the German policy on the exhibition of modern and contemporary art would be. All press and cultural activity was to be monitored by the Propaganda Division of the Military Government, a branch of Goebbels’ Ministry which soon boasted a thousand souls. In the first weeks of the occupation this organization had been so busy with such deeply intellectual activities as pulling down statues of French heroes of the previous World War, and of
anyone British, and changing the names of streets which honored famous Jews, that it had not made any pronouncements on modern art. Nor had there been any guidance from the German Institute, which was founded to promote “European Culture” and Franco-German relations, but which had limited itself to putting on fancy receptions before concerts of German music and exhibitions of Germanic art, and to projects concerning the past such as photographing the Bayeux tapestry.

The first to brave the occupier’s cultural controllers was a new organization called L’Entraide des Artistes, which was pledged to helping needy artists of all stripes. Funded by both government and private money, its headquarters was in a former Rothschild house, and it had miraculously managed to persuade all the competing Salons and groups of artists in Paris to cooperate in order to provide their less fortunate colleagues with everything from free legal advice to cheap lunches.

Since early in 1940, the Entraide had been planning a benefit show which would, for the first time, unite these disparate groups not only in charity but in the same galleries. Needless to say, this had taken considerable diplomacy, and the Entraide was determined to go ahead. They were given the Orangerie, just across the park from the Jeu de Paume, by the French. This plan was approved by the Germans, who reserved to themselves the right of censorship. To everyone’s amazement they rejected only works by Jews and by Marcel Gromaire, whose antiwar paintings had been specifically condemned by Hitler when he noticed them in a show in Germany. The exhibition opened to the culture-starved city on September 6, 1940.

Emboldened by this, and anxious to retain control of the Orangerie, the Entraide, inspired by the Monet
Waterlilies
which already adorned the walls of the gallery, immediately reserved it for a Rodin-Monet show made up of the few works by the two artists which could still be found around town. Incredibly, to promote Franco-German friendship, even the Berlin and Bremen museums loaned important unpurged works by Monet.
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The crowd at the opening did not know that next door, in the heavily guarded Jeu de Paume, workmen were just as busy installing the first exhibition for Goering, and setting aside other recently confiscated Monets, which normally would have been in the Orangerie show, to be used in his exchanges.

It was now clear that the famous Paris Salons would be allowed to continue, but not in their usual spaces in the Grand Palais, which remained full of trucks. The organizers were allowed to have the unfinished Tokyo, which Metternich had managed to save from similar use. The first to open would be the Salon des Indépendants in the winter of 1941. The committee
was deluged with paperwork by the now better-organized Nazis, who demanded a declaration of Aryanism for each artist. Old jealousies reappeared. Some rejected artists were not above denouncing their more successful colleagues for having “anti-German tendencies,” whose accusations the Propaganda staff earnestly and carefully investigated, but were generally unable to substantiate.

At the morning vernissage of the more conservative Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts the German Army brass turned out in force and were led in by the French wife of Ambassador Abetz, surrounded by Vichy notables. The French hosts were puzzled when most of the military contingent abruptly left without having looked at the show, apparently in a snit because Mme Abetz had gotten all the attention. De Brinon, the Vichy commissioner in Paris, persuaded the conquerors to return the next day, and made sure they were suitably attended. Everyone had to learn the new social procedures.
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These Salons were the first in a long series. A new Salon of Watercolor and Drawing was invented to keep the Tokyo galleries occupied and the Germans out in the summer of 1941. The following year the Musée d’Art Moderne, planned for the building before the outbreak of war, was allowed to open. A third of the collection was brought in from the Occupied Zone depots and exhibited while the rest remained in the repository at unoccupied Valençay. (Also missing was the designated director, Jean Cassou, who had been forced to resign on racial grounds the day after his appointment, but who was quite busy putting out a Resistance newspaper in the basements of the Musée de G Homme.) Press reaction was extremely favorable and the German authorities very much in evidence at the opening, despite the presence of works by Rouault, Matisse, Léger, Braque, Tanguy, and Vuillard, all mixed in with the “Beaux-Arts” pictures.
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Down in the basements quite a different sort of collection had been assembled. The lower level with its modern truck ramps had recently been taken over by the ERR as an overflow storage area for the M-Aktion. Great piles of boxes were carefully divided by a grid of numbered and lettered avenues. Each perfectly measured square contained a different category of the goods so carefully classified on the ERR laundry lists: pianos, sheets, pillows, nightgowns, toys, and so forth. Twice a month a shipment went to the Reich, but the basements would still be completely full on the day Paris was liberated.
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German efforts to win over the minds of the French by organizing cooperative artistic happenings were doomed to failure from the very beginning by their inability to conceal the totally cynical objectives behind such undertakings. Typical was the affair of the Salon des Prisonniers, held at
the Musée Galliéra. Posters were put up in the French POW camps in Germany urging the prisoners to create works of art which would be sold to help their comrades. The Germans, anxious to show how well they treated their prisoners, arranged for the collection and transportation to Paris of all the paintings, carvings, and sad little objects made of tin cans and other camp debris. The possibility that a totally opposite propaganda effect could be created seems never to have occurred to them.

The show, which opened in December 1940, included a small wooden altar carved by a prisoner. Before this little shrine the French Chaplain of the Camps said Mass early on Christmas Eve in the shadowy blacked-out spaces of the museum. The service was to be rebroadcast to the camps. Emotions ran high: the Nazis had not eased the curfew in Paris in order to allow the traditional midnight Mass. Yves Bizardel, curator of the Musée Galliéra, watching the kneeling crowd, noted that “hope, tenacious and fragile as a candle flame, was only a tiny stubborn glowing dot.” It would not be extinguished.
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Side by side with these official manifestations the lives of the commercial Paris galleries and the artists who supplied them also managed to go on. “Degenerates” Braque and Picasso had returned to Paris in the autumn of 1940 after only brief absences. Braque found his studio intact and worked unmolested in the city all during the occupation, despite the presence directly across the street of a residence for German officers. Picasso, who had spent most of 1939 in a villa in Royan, north of Bordeaux, came back to his studio in the rue des Grands-Augustins, where he resumed his life of work and received the usual stream of visitors, now including Germans both admiring and suspicious. The latter came on the pretext of searching for “Jewish” works of art. Picasso and his entourage were vigilant during these visits, fearing that their interlocutors might plant an incriminating object somewhere in the vast reaches of the studio.

For the more touristy types Picasso provocatively had postcards of his anti-Fascist masterpiece
Guernica
printed up, which he handed out as souvenirs. With the more sophisticated, such as Ernst Jünger, he discussed painting techniques and the war, which, they all agreed, “should end immediately so that people could turn on their lights again.”
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Throughout the occupation Picasso’s officially censored works were sold publicly at the Drouot and in discreet corners of such galleries as that of Louise Leiris, formerly Kahnweiler. Even Kandinsky, whose canvases were regularly ordered removed from dealers’ exhibitions, was not prevented from painting more; his works were shown in back-room gatherings along with those of the still relatively unknown Nicolas de Staël. Matisse sold drawings
brought back from the Unoccupied Zone by Louis Carré, and illustrated an edition of Montherlant’s
Pasiphaé
, which was published by Fabiani. Not only did the Germans not persecute these icons of “degeneracy,” but in late 1941 they even courted a few of the French alumni of the Lucerne auction, who had, to be sure, toned down their unacceptable styles in the meantime, and sent them on a tour of the Reich.