My Grandfather's Gallery France's Greatest Art Dealer and His Escape from the Nazis Synopsis
On 20 September 1940, Paul Rosenberg disembarked in New York, just one of hundreds of tired Jewish refugees fleeing Vichy France. Leaving behind his celebrated Paris gallery, Paul had managed to save his family; his paintings weren't all so fortunate. Some - the Picassos at MoMA's first retrospective - were already safely abroad. But dozens of works by Cezanne, Monet and Sisley were seized by Nazi forces, destined for Swiss galleries and private collections. Drawing on her grandfather's astonishingly intimate correspondence with Picasso, Matisse, Braque and others, Anne Sinclair takes us on a personal journey through the life of a feted member of the Parisian art scene and a friend to the greatest artists of the century. But Paul's flight from his beloved gallery to exile in New York also tells a darker story, emblematic of the millions of Jews, rich and poor, who lost everything in the Second World War.
'In 1940, the great Paris art dealer Paul Rosenberg-patron of Picasso, Braque, and Matisse-was stripped of his citizenship by Vichy law and forced into exile in New York. Today, his granddaughter, Anne Sinclair, delves deep into family archives to give us an intimate memoir that is also a detective story and a cultural history of war. Sinclair's captivating tale of two cities will change the way we look at modern art.'
Alice Kaplan
Author
About Anne Sinclair
Anne Sinclair is Paul Rosenberg's granddaughter and France's best-known journalist. For thirteen years she was the host of 7 sur 7, a weekly news and politics TV series that had some of the highest viewing figures in France. While there she interviewed all the major global figures of the day, including Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev and Madonna. Director of French Huffington Post, Sinclair has written two bestselling books on politics. She sat as the model for the face of Marianne, the national emblem of France whose bust sits in every town hall in France.