Did Georges Maratier Save Gertrude Stein’s Art Collection?

Gertrude Stein’s collection of major artworks by the most famous modernists of her time (hence degenerate in the eyes of the Nazi occupiers), coupled with its owner being a Jew made it a leading candidate for “aryanization,” meaning theft, the destiny of art collections in all the countries where the Nazis operated during World War II, as Hector Feliciano details in The Lost Museum.[1] Small wonder that Katherine Dudley, Stein’s neighbor and friend, would call it a miracle that Stein’s collection, left behind in Paris when its owner moved to Bilignin in the Free Zone, survived.[2] There, Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas were not in danger of arrest thanks to their American passports—not, at least, until the Nazis had occupied the Free Zone and sacked the American Embassy in Vichy—and they were probably saved from internment after that event thanks to their friend Bernard Faÿ, one of Stein’s French translators, who headed the Bibliothèque Nationale during the Occupation years.

Scholars have assumed that Faÿ saved Stein’s collection as well. “Faÿ,” writes Barbara Will, “was also a crucial mediator and protector when the Nazis showed up at Stein’s apartment in Paris to seize her art collection.”[3] Nadine Satiat, Gertrude Stein’s French biographer, names Faÿ as the individual who contacted Count Wolf Metternich, the representative of the German army in charge of protecting works of art in conquered countries. (Metternich was no longer in Paris in July 1944 when the request was made).[4] Yet it is not Faÿ’s name that is called out in a postwar letter to Stein marveling at the survival of the art collection but someone whose first name was Georges. “I understand from Georges that your pictures are all right, which is an incredible piece of luck”—so Stein, still living at her country place, heard from her American friend Bravig Imbs, back in Paris as a soldier, in a letter dated November 2, 1944.[5] I propose that the “piece of luck” was Georges Maratier, the director of the Paris gallery René Drouin during much of World War II.

Indeed, the Drouin gallery of decorative arts did not permanently disappear after its co-owner, Leo Castelli, left France for the United States in December 1940. Georges Maratier was chosen by Castelli’s partner René Drouin to reopen the beautiful space on Place Vendome as an art and furniture gallery in November 1941. Maratier did not last through the Occupation years (he left in the fall of 1943) because he proved to be too cozy with the occupying Germans, at least with one of them. Maratier, though not a well-known name, turns out to have been a Stein confidant, whose many roles in the 1930s included supplying Stein with excellent wines and selling art from her collection. It is quite likely that Maratier and a German officer in the office of art censorship in Paris named Hans Walter Lange—both of whom were involved in unsavory art transactions, and appear in the reports of the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) Art Looting Intelligence Unit (ALIU)—helped save Stein’s art collection.[6] The amount and quality of art that passed through the Drouin gallery during the Occupation helps support a new hypothesis as to how Stein’s art collection, or at least a good part of it, may have been saved by way of the Maratier/Lange connection.

A cache of letters in the archives of the University of Maryland, written in French from Gertrude Stein to Maratier, divulges a closeness to Maratier that rivals the relationship Stein had with Faÿ.[7] And Maratier’s short memoir, “A French Businessman’s Admiration for Gertrude Stein,” written in English, also in this archive, suggests a reverence for Stein equal to Faÿ’s. A letter from Faÿ to Maratier in the archive points to a friendly though formal relationship between the two, in which Faÿ gives Maratier orders and expects him to produce results.[8]

A provincial young Maratier living a bohemian life in a small hotel on the Paris left bank had met Stein at a quasi-Surrealist event held in the sub-basement of a café on the rue de la Huchette, a strange and dusty space with gothic arches that had apparently been used as a tribunal during the Terror. “There was even an oubliette there. It was in this room that the tea was given where I first met Gertrude Stein,” Maratier writes in his memoir. Stein had apparently showed up in her old Ford named Lady Godiva “with its top up, a khaki-colored Ford perched so high that it seemed to shake back and forth. I saw a large woman at the wheel, and a little thin woman sitting beside her. I was presented first to the driver, who was Gertrude Stein.”[9] Maratier is in fact the subject of one of Stein’s portraits.[10]

The host of the event was Maratier’s new American literary friend Bravig Imbs, and at the tea were Elliot Paul, Eugene Jolas, Mme. Jolas and Virgil Geddes. “The tea was like all teas, made of banalities, of some teasing, like all tea-parties in Paris. And Gertrude very aimiably invited me to pass an evening at her house. This was the beginning of a friendship that [has] lasted seven years for, from that day I have seen her about twice a week between the months of November and April every year, until the time, that is, when she goes to her country-house at Bilignin” (3). The memoir dates from after Stein’s American tour; it is typewritten in English with some hand-written editing here and there. The friendship continued with Toklas after Gertrude’s death in 1946, as attested by a letter where Toklas happily reports that Maratier saved her the expense of a professional expert  (“which he is,” she says), by making an inventory of the pictures in Stein’s collection.[11]

From Stein’s own writings, we sense that George—as she sometimes referred to him—had strange politics. “The only curious thing about him,” she says, “is that he believes in the Napoleonic dynasty.” A few lines later, she returns to this theme, saying “George believes in the Bonapartists.” Since Bonaparte, the general, became the emperor Napoleon I after a coup d’etat, her unstated meaning here is that Maratier was among the French who welcomed the possibility of a coup d’etat, and of an authoritarian head of the French State. She finds it “curious,” “a queer thing,” but then the French themselves are queer about their politics, she decides, and that’s all she has to say.[12] (She herself was against the New Deal, and like many a pensioner, scared to death of Communism.)

It is not known if Maratier had power within the “Bonapartist” group that Stein identifies as her friend’s political milieu, or if he influenced Stein’s decision to remain in France when Pétain took over the country after the Armistice. In an undated letter from Stein to Maratier, the question of civil war does come up, but only in relation to what that might do to her financial situation. And the subject soon blows away. Certainly Thornton Wilder assumed that Maratier knew a lot, or he would not have written to Stein on March 27, 1938, “I worry about you in Europe but I put my trust in Maratier’s knowing when to warn you and telling you what to do.”[13]

Far more important to Stein than her friend’s “queer” politics was his helpfulness. “He is a nice man his name is George [she spells the name without an s], it is not for nothing that anybody calls whomever they want to do anything for them George.” A few lines later, she describes this trait in another way: “Tell me what you want me to do. That is what George always says and sometimes he does something” (Everybody’s Autobiography, 24). The word “merci” is a recurring word in her correspondence with Maratier, who seems to have handled a variety of requests and been treated at first as a private secretary. In one of her letters to Maratier, in imperfect French, Stein tells him: “Monsieur le secrétaire, votre place n’est pas un sinecure, mais nous sommes reconnaissantes.” [Mr. Secretary your role is not a sinecure but we are thankful to you.] Another letter suggests that he became her go-between in art transactions: “Alors, pour récapituler, vous faites voir les deux tableaux a Pierre, et il m’envoye le cheque, en franc, je crois que c’est preferable, alors vous  prendrez tous les Pavlik [Tchelichev] Berman et Kristians Tonny de la [du] couloir en haut et tachait [tachez]de le vendre 50 -50, 50% pour vous et 50% pour moi.”  [So, to sum up, you show the two paintings to Pierre and he sends me a check in francs I think it’s preferable and then you will take all the Pavlik, Berman and Kristians Tonny from high up in the corridor and will try to sell them 50-50, 50% for you and 50% for me.]  (fig.1).

The Maratier memoir reveals its author’s familiarity with Stein’s Paris studio, and offers an entertaining vignette on Stein’s changes of heart vis-à-vis certain artworks in her collection: “There was one place on the wall near the entrance door which was always reserved for the last hope among the young painters; and it was very amusing to see with what anxiety the last de-throned one looked at the canvas of the newly-elected. At this little place, I have seen pass Christian Berard, Eugene Berman, Pavel Tchilichew [sic], Kristians Tonny. Then, brusquely, a canvas of Francis Rose was hung there. The interest of Gertrude for this painter did not leave her for a certain time, so she put a little one of his beside the other, and next a revolution came in the habits which seemed as if they would never change. Between Picasso and the ceiling soon a third, fourth, fifth Francis Rose was hung. So now there is no more room for future talent in the atelier of Gertrude Stein” (“A French Businessman’s, 3).

In order to stay in Stein’s good graces, Maratier sometimes had to play rather devious games, as the story of Roger Toulouse, a young painter first discovered by the French poet Max Jacob, illustrates. In 1936, Toulouse was an 18-year-old painter, “a small painter from Orleans who just revealed himself as the first of his generation.”[14] As was his wont, Jacob spread the word about his discovery. Soon Stein was visiting Toulouse, and Maratier was promising Toulouse a show at his new gallery, the Galerie de Beaune. Stein bought the whole show, then changed her mind: “Certainly nothing to be hoped from rue de Fleurus,” Jacob tells Toulouse in his letter of January 28, 1939 (Lettres à Roger Toulouse, 41). In order to assuage the artist’s personal and financial disappointment and simultaneously save Stein’s pocketbook, Maratier, in the words of Jacob, “[paid] the artist in compliments,” though not in cash (39). Even so, Maratier remained on friendly terms with Toulouse, as attested by Maratier’s letters to him found in the pages of the yearly publication Les Amis de Roger Toulouse.[15]  Stein may have kept two works listed in Toulouse’s catalogue raisonné cited in that publication (fig. 2).[16]

Throughout the 1930s Maratier’s professional activities were not very focused other than on Stein’s behalf. In 1931, Maratier succeeded in persuading Madame Cuttoli, who was then launching a modern tapestry gallery, to show a Stein favorite, Francis Rose, but the relationship with Cuttoli did not last. Around the same time, he coaxed artists in Stein’s collection, including Eugene Berman, Pavel Tchelitchew, Christian Berard and other Surrealist/neoromantics to contribute visual portraits for Stein’s Dix Portraits /Ten Portraits, published by Editions de la Montagne, a bilingual little book with a preface by Pierre de Massot. In 1937, he opened the gallery de Beaune with the American Edwin Livengood; it closed in 1939 when war was declared and Maratier joined the army.[17] He returned to Paris after an Armistice was signed between Marshall Philippe Pétain and Adolf Hitler.

“I am happy to announce to you that as of last week, I have become director of a gallery and that we hope to open around the first of September,” Georges Maratier wrote to Toulouse on August 11, 1941. “The location is magnificent and the space luxuriously decorated.”[18] The location was 17 Place Vendome, the luxuriously decorated space the Galerie Drouin, which the designer René Drouin had opened with the financial help of Leo Castelli in July 1939 and kept open for one month (fig. 3). Why did Drouin turn to Georges Maratier to run his gallery when it reopened during the Occupation? Except for badmouthing Maratier’s behavior and calling him a personage douteux (a dubious character), Maratier’s successor there, Gildo Caputo offered no explanation in our interview. All he was interested in communicating was that the Drouin gallery emerged from the war with a fine reputation, thanks to a turn-around engineered by himself and his friend Jean Paulhan, who introduced the artists Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet to Drouin, after the gallery’s image had been “compromised by complicity with the occupiers” because of Maratier. The Maratier years, he implied, were best forgotten. And in truth, they were forgotten—or had been swept under the rug.[19]

Maratier certainly had art credentials through his closeness to a famous collector and the members of her entourage, Pablo Picasso among them, as attested by a photograph of Stein, Toklas, Picasso, his son, Maratier and his wife, taken by Olga Picasso, probably at Gertrude’s country place (fig. 4). He also was acquainted with some of the painters and stage designers that the Drouin/Castelli gallery had shown at its inaugural exhibition in July 1939. After the Armistice, Stein had settled down at Bilignin, and had left most of her collection behind except for two paintings—her portrait by Picasso, and the portrait of Madame Cézanne (La Femme à l’éventail). Perhaps Drouin saw Maratier as a conduit to that collection? No doubt, during the war, Maratier needed work besides penning reviews for Les Nouveaux Temps, a pro-Vichy periodical.[20]

What art did the galerie Drouin show during the Occupation years, at a time when next door to the gallery was the Ritz, the favorite hotel of top Nazi officials? An unpublished 1981 mémoire de maitrise on the galerie Drouin by Jacqueline Ganem offers some indication, though there are holes in the author’s chronology.[21] A more complete account of Drouin’s exhibitions can be found in the catalogue of the show René Drouin, galeriste et editeur d’art visionnaire held at the Musée de l’Abbaye de St. Croix in 2001. Both texts suggest that the great majority of Drouin shows did not feature contemporary art until late in the war. However, from a letter addressed by Maratier to Toulouse dated October 22, 1941, it looks like the gallery opened with a show entitled Portraits Contemporains that included Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Giovanni Boldini, Kees Van Dongen, Marie Laurencin and Édouard Vuillard, who had died in 1940.[22]

The quantity of art that passed through Drouin in 1942 and 1943 is mind- boggling. A show entitled Maitres et Petits Maitres du XIXème siècle from October 1942 included no less than 111 artists, among them Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Eugene Delacroix, Theodore Gericault, Edouard Manet, Odilon Redon, and Theodore Rousseau. There were 25 artists in the show Rivages de France, which opened 29 April 1942, focused on modern classics, among them Pierre Bonnard, Manet, Henri Matisse, Paul Signac, and Raoul Dufy. Who knows how many pieces of valuable furniture were included in the November 1942 Décors de nos arrières grands-parents—“secretaries, bureaux, sofas, seats, psyches allegedly from the apartment of the Orleans prince in Neuilly and from the residence of Joseph Bonaparte at Mortefontaine. On the walls, pictures by Boilly, Eugene Lami, Bonington, Isabey, Winterhalter,” writes Ganem (L’Histoire de la galerie Drouin, 7).

The most dazzling show of all at Drouin took place in June–July 1943, curated by Louis Hourticq and Louis Réau and entitled Le Portrait Francais du XVeme siècle a nos jours; it included two Corneille de Lyons (fig. 5), one Sebastien Bourdon, one Nicolas de Largilliere, one Jean Honoré Fragonard, two Jean Baptiste Greuze, one Camille Corot, one Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, one Eugène Delacroix, one Edgar Degas, two Auguste Renoirs, two Paul Gauguins, one Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, one Odilon Redon, one Edouard Vuillard.

Where did all this art come from? And how many of the pieces ended up in Goering and Hitler’s collections, or in the collection of passing dignitaries staying at the Ritz Hotel? As someone who has done research on the functioning of art galleries during the Occupation years, I can say that whatever happened at Drouin was hardly unique, and that dealing in art with a questionable provenance was routine. Some of the art on the market was indeed stolen from Jewish collectors and dealers; some rare pieces of art appeared on the market because of acute need of cash, as was the case of Stein when she sold her Cézanne, the Portrait of Madame Cézanne, probably in 1943.[23]

After the departure of Maratier, the Drouin gallery turned to the critic Jean Paulhan, who introduced Jean Fautrier’s expressionist paintings such as The Dead Hare (1943), and his Resistance-inspired Hostage paintings, as well as Jean Dubuffet’s creations detailing daily life in occupied France. Paulhan was the critic who told Drouin to get rid of Maratier, according to Gildo Caputo, the man who succeeded Maratier. From then on, a variety of contemporary names appeared regularly in Drouin’s roster of shows: Le Nu dans la peinture contemporaine (April 21–May 31, 1944) included some 70 artists, among them Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet, but also André Derain, Maurice Vlaminck, Henri Matisse, Kies Van Dongen, and also André Fougeron, Marcel Gromaire, Jacques Villon, Andre Lhote, Friesz; Vingt et un paysages, starting July 7 1944, included Fautrier and Dubuffet, but also Francois Desnoyer, Leon Gischia, Jean Le Moal, André Manessier, Edouard Pignon, Gérard Singier, part of the group that Jean Bazaine had brought together under the patriotic name Bleu Blanc Rouge painting, and which Caputo had introduced to the gallery. Then came summer, and the liberation of Paris.

Hardly six months after the liberation, (Drouin, perhaps feeling a little guilty for not having looked closely enough at the goings on in his gallery), decided to hold an auction of modern art “for the benefit of ex-war prisoners and soviet deportees.” The catalogue includes texts by Pierre Cot, Jean-Richard Bloch, Francis Jourdain, all three of them beyond reproach on collaboration. For Maratier, these were not good times. For the first time his name was associated in writing with that of Lange, a Nazi officer at the censorship bureau in Paris, in relation to the sale of several tapestries wanted for a Berlin personality.[24] Judge Marcel Frapier, in charge of Liberation tribunals in the Seine district, indicted Maratier and another Frenchman named Lucien Adrion for collaboration with the Germans in art transactions.[25]

Meanwhile, much of Stein’s collection had successfully escaped the grasp of the Nazis. Katherine Dudley mentions in a letter that in the very last days of the Occupation Gestapo men did show up (Satiat, Gertrude Stein, 971). How many works in Stein’s collection did in fact disappear between the beginning and the end of the Nazi presence in Paris still needs to be assessed. At the time that MOMA trustees acquired Gertrude Stein’s art collection, after the death of Alice B. Toklas in 1967, it comprised 47 works, 38 by Picasso and nine by Juan Gris, according to Margaret Potter.[26]

So far, Bernard Faÿ has received credit for keeping this collection QUASI intact. But if it is true that Maratier had Lange as a lover, and that from his position at Drouin he could tip off his German friend on desirable art works currently on the market, the credit for saving Stein’s collection might go to the Maratier/ Lange couple, phrased as a quid pro quo: “I’ll give you tips on desirable art, if you don’t touch my friend Gertrude’s art collection.” After the war, Maratier kept a low profile. His successor at Drouin, Caputo, told me that many years after the war he came face to face with Maratier’s German friend Lange in the town of Nîmes, now working under a new name as a chef in a local restaurant. The story goes that the chef not only fondly reminisced about his dead friend Maratier, but also invited Caputo to visit his grave nearby.[27]

After these revelations, what is one to make of Stein’s friendship in the 1930s and 1940s with not one but two right-wing Frenchmen, both of them known to have collaborated during the Occupation years—Faÿ looking after Stein’s literary interests, and Maratier taking care of her art dealings? Should we, like Janet Malcolm, be shocked, or should we, as Antoine Compagnon does for Faÿ—examine the Maratier case as a whole, and mull over what drew Stein to Maratier, before reaching conclusions on Stein, Toklas and their problematic friends?[28]

As ill-advised as Maratier’s relationship with a Nazi official appears to us today, contacts between French and German personalities occasionally had their useful side. Hitler’s official sculptor, Arno Breker, a longtime friend of Jean Cocteau and Aristide Maillol, made frequent visits to Paris and was able to save Maillol’s Jewish model from deportation after her arrest. The German writers Ernst Jünger and Gerhardt Heller (the latter the head of literary censorship in Paris) befriended the Resistance French intellectual, Jean Paulhan, whom they met at the receptions given by the American hostess Florence Gould. It was at such a reception that Paulhan learned of his imminent arrest, and immediately went into hiding. Then there is the story recounted by Charles Glass about Sylvia Beach, whose bookstore Shakespeare and Company was patronized by the French collaborator, Jacques Benoist-Mechin.[29] It was thanks to him that she was freed from internment in the French town of Vittel where many of her compatriots were also interned. If Stein needed someone with a highly placed contact in the German art hierarchy to save her art collection, Maratier had the right profile.

It is far from my desire to sympathize with individuals like Maratier who benefited financially from dealing in art without a clear provenance and probably indulged in sexual collaboration with a German occupier, forgetting that Nazi Germany was still the enemy. Yet the story of Beach, who refused to sell a first edition of Finnegan’s Wake to a Nazi client, and was forced to close her bookstore under threats to her life and possessions, tells us that it was not easy keeping one’s dignity under the Nazi boot if one were to survive.