My Grandfather's Gallery (Ebook)
A legendary art dealer’s escape from Vichy France
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Anne Sinclair weaves a captivating story of great art, loss, oppression and triumph from her grandfather's life.
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 Cézanne, 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 fêted 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.
Reviews for My Grandfather's Gallery
Alice Kaplan
L'Éxpress
Deborah Solomon, author of American Mirror
The plunder of Jewish art collections by the Nazis may not rank with their other crimes but it continues to infuriate, and Anne Sinclair brings us inside the events in a particularly intimate way. She makes us relive that outrageous moment in history when thousands of French people suddenly learned they were not French at all, but Jewish, and had no right to their own property. This is an important story.
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Phyllis Rose, author of The Shelf
Publishers' Weekly
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.
My Grandfather's Gallery: France's greatest art dealer and his escape from the Nazis tells the story of Anne Sinclair's grandfather, a fêted member of the Parisian art scene and a friend to the greatest artists of the century, who had to leave France – and his Paris art gallery – during the second world war.