By Anne Sinclair
Profile, £15.99
My Grandfather's Gallery opens with a telling anecdote. Applying for a new identity card at a local police station Anne Sinclair finds herself, having been born abroad, being quizzed on the nationality of all four of her grandparents. Enraged, she retorts: "The last time people of their generation were asked this kind of question was before they were put on a train to Pithiviers or Beaune-la-Rolande" (two notorious French concentration camps from which thousands of Jews were deported).
This incident sets off a wave of memories about her own early life in New York, where she was born after her grandfather, the art dealer Paul Rosenberg whose own nationality was revoked by the Vichy government, settled there.
The original French title of the book was 21, rue de la Boétie, the address of both Rosenberg's gallery and his family home until he escaped in 1940, is the fulcrum of the narrative. It was here that Rosenberg built his reputation as a canny dealer of late 19th-century art and the work of modern artists whose paintings would later be denigrated as "degenerate art". Picasso moved in next door and it was at this address that the Nazis ran the Institut d'Etude des Questions Juives.
Sinclair's story, shuttling back and forth between her grandfather's past and her own present, is breezily told, if a little haphazard. The Rosenbergs - like many Jewish French families, criss-crossed Europe, and sought temporary refuge in neutral Portugal. It was thanks to the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Alfred Barr, that they succeeded in procuring US visas.
The most fascinating part of the book is that which tells of the relationship between Rosenberg and his coterie of artists, including Matisse and of course Picasso. Sinclair throws light on an interwar period of extraordinary artistic wealth (in all senses of the term). Picasso, for all his artistic genius, was not averse to producing art to order, in quantity. "I need a large number of canvases for this winter," Rosenberg wrote to him in 1921; "I'm ordering 100 from you, to be delivered at the end of the summer." She suggests that the two men shared "an intense collaboration and an aesthetic alliance," though she fails to show any real evidence of this, just as she avoids delving her grandfather's emotional life, apart from a lengthy aside in which we learn of the rather sad story of the affair between his wife Margot and George Wildenstein, another important Parisian art collector.
Long before she became known for being the wife of the disgraced former head of the IMF and French presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss Kahn, Sinclair was a television journalist - a household name in France who was once a model for the figure of Marianne, the national symbol of France.
In a curious postscript, she alludes to the time she spent with her husband under house arrest in New York: "I never expected these pages, which opened with an identity denied in France, to finish on a forced, turbulent stay in America. But that of course is another story. If I were a journalist I might one day write a book about it." Of course she is a journalist and certainly knows that this memoir probably benefited not inconsiderably from that notoriety.
