Note: A stash of 60 letters written between January 1940 and June 1946 by my father’s first cousin Fedor Löwenstein to Marcelle Rivier, an accomplished artist and erstwhile girlfriend, was donated to Paris’ Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA). These letters form the basis of a two-part article written by Jérôme Delatour from INHA about the artist’s life during this period and the depressive climate of the Nazi Occupation. I synopsize some of M. Delatour’s discussions which augment what I’ve previously written about Fedor.
Related Posts:
POST 161: FATE OR COINCIDENCE? THE FLEA MARKET FIND OF FEDOR LÖWENSTEIN PHOTOGRAPHS
With so much of today’s interpersonal communications taking place via email, texts, social media, etc., I often consider that future genealogists and historians may not have written correspondence available to them to round out their understanding of people they study, whether they be ancestors or not. Absent contemporary letters, unless diaries are found, it may be difficult for researchers to develop a complete picture of their subjects nor the ordeals they confronted. Similarly, with so many of today’s pictures being stored in the cloud, it is fair to wonder how many of these images will be printed and survive. With this in mind, any time I gain access to a cache of letters and pictures left behind by one of my relatives, particularly when they were renowned, it is cause for celebration.
The contents of this post are drawn primarily from a two-part article written by Jérôme Delatour, Service du Patrimoine, Heritage Service, Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), Library of the National Institute of Art History in Paris. Entitled “Paint, paint, PAINT!,” the articles detail the content of some letters the accomplished family painter Fedor Löwenstein (Figure 1), my father’s first cousin, sent to Marcelle Rivier, his erstwhile girlfriend between 1939 and October-November 1943. The letters run from January 30, 1940, to June 21, 1946. Marcelle Rivier was a very talented painter in her own right. (Figure 2)
Readers are reminded that the previous two posts, Posts 160 and 161, largely dealt with Fedor Löwenstein.
The National Institute for Art History (INHA) was created in 2001 for the purpose of consolidating and promoting research in art history and heritage studies. Its main mission is the advancement of scholarly research and international cooperation in the field. It sets up research and educational programs as well as activities for the dissemination of knowledge that serve both art historians and the general public.
With its library, the INHA also provides a unique collection of resources and documentation in this field. The Institute is run jointly by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and the French Ministry of Culture.
The letters that were the source of the two-part article written by Jérôme Delatour were donated to the INHA in January 2016 by Danièlle and Bernard Sapet, owners of the Sapet Gallery in Valence, France. The collection consists of sixty letters signed by Fedor Löwenstein, 58 of them addressed to Marcelle Rivier and two to unknown recipients. The Sapets came into possession of these letters because of their association with Marcelle Rivier (1906-1986) when they assisted her in the final years of her life when she lived in Mirmande in the Drôme department of southeastern France. (Figure 3) Today the Sapets are the custodians of her house in Mirmande and of the artist’s archives.
Fedor Löwenstein’s letters to Marcelle Rivier provide details on some of the events discussed in earlier posts. Let me briefly review Fedor and Marcelle’s lives, then provide relevant background drawn from the letters.
Fedor Löwenstein was born in Munich in 1901 but was of Czechoslovakian extraction. He was part of the vast movement of Eastern European artists who made their way to Paris attracted by the cultural influence of the city. Before immigrating to France in 1923, Löwenstein had studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Berlin, then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden.
The Eastern European artists contributed to the brilliance of the so-called École de Paris, the “School of Paris”; in reality, this name does not refer to any school that really existed, but rather to the movement which brought together artists who contributed to making Paris the focus of artistic creation between the two world wars. It was in this rich artistic context that Löwenstein painted and drew.
In Paris he mixed with and became a student of the painter André Lhote (1885-1962) from Bordeaux. He exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendants before joining the “Groupe des Surindépendants” in 1936. The Salon and the Artistic Association of the Sur-Independents were founded in the autumn of 1928 by a few artists who no longer wanted an admission jury and questioned the restrictions imposed by the new regulations of the Salon des Indépendants promulgated in 1924.
Löwenstein’s early works were marked by the influence of cubism, whose main representatives worked in Paris, although his subsequent productions evolved towards abstraction (Figure 4), probably under the influence of André Lhote. In 1938, he painted “La Chute” (The Fall) (Figure 5), inspired by the signing of the Munich Agreement that dismantled then-Czechoslovakia that had been created in 1918. The composition and symbolism in the work are reminiscent of the convulsed and screaming silhouettes of Picasso’s Guernica, a lofty comparison.
Marcelle Rivier, Fedor’s future girlfriend, was French though she grew up in Argentina; she was characterized as a woman of “fiery temperament.” She was a saleswoman in an art gallery in Buenos Aires in 1924, a model from 1930 to 1934, a music-hall dancer in 1935, but above all a painter. (Figure 6) In the 1930s, she exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Tuileries. During the Occupation, she was a member of the Resistance, often exhibiting great carelessness and recklessness, according to Jérôme Delatour.
Marcelle Rivier arrived in Paris in 1928 and studied at the Léger and Julian academies. Like Löwenstein, she was a student of André Lhote and enrolled in his course. During the summer, he took his students to Mirmande in the Drôme, where the painter had settled in 1926.
In 1936, Marcelle Rivier married the well-respected journalist Ferdinand Auberjonois (1910-2004), though the marriage was short-lived. After a short stay in New York, she returned to Paris in 1938 and it was then that she met Löwenstein. At the time, Fedor was still involved with Doris Halphen, whom I introduced to readers in Post 161. However, by November 1939, Marcelle and Fedor were romantically involved, a tumultuous affair that lasted until October-November 1943. (Figure 7)
Let me now turn to the contents of some of Fedor Löwenstein’s letters
In a letter addressed to Marcelle Rivier dated the 11th of May 1940, Fedor Löwenstein wrote to her about the 25 paintings that are the subject of my restitution and repatriation claim against the French Ministry of Culture. In the spring of 1940, when he had to flee Paris as quickly as possible in the face of the advancing German army, Fedor nonetheless took the time to package and ship the 25 works of art for an exhibition to be held at the Nierendorf Gallery in New York. He wrote: “It is only on Monday that I will know if my paintings are leaving, or if I should abandon this dream. I had a bad feeling.” Löwenstein was right. As I’ve told readers in previous posts, his crates were seized on December 5, 1940, at the port of Bordeaux, and shipped to the Jeu des Paume in Paris, where most were torn to shreds with knives, then burned during the month of July 1943
Fedor Löwenstein was apparently back in Paris before the Nazis entered the city on the 14th of June 1940 but left the capital at the last minute for Mirmande.
In April 1941, Fedor left Mirmande to go to Nice to see his mother and sister who lived there, and in the vague hope of embarking for Mexico. In a scene that must have been oft repeated across Europe wherever Jews seeking to escape the Nazis waited for travel visas, Löwenstein wrote on the 24th of April 1941, of the gloomy and depressive atmosphere:
“On the Promenade des Anglais, where the spinach-green uniforms of German and Italian officers clash with the monotonous-azure blue, Jews from all over the world await the messiah in the form of an affidavit. The corpses are well dressed, they have only been able to save this and 20 marks and there are not 36 ways to escape the debacle. From time to time I meet an old acquaintance, thrown from the bottom of the sea by the tidal wave, we shake hands, and we are hardly surprised to see each other here – and besides, what is the point – and where? Get the hell out of here! But Lena, who was here for a few days (Lena is my Polish friend who lives in Marseille) wired [sic] to Hollywood so that [I] could go to Mexico. I will let myself be taken away, but I do not ‘feel’ my departure. . .”
In a letter from the 30th of April 1940, he writes:
“It is curious, all the same, this atmosphere of the morning coffee, this idleness in front of a piece of white paper and more umbrellas in front of the window of the café in a minute than all year on the square of the Champs de Mars in Mirmande. It smells of dampness, damp clothes, the smell of cooking, cat pee, and the national coffee. Apart from that, I have never been able to appreciate this ‘pearl of the Mediterranean’”
The above characterizations sounds very Kafkaesque.
Seemingly having been unable to obtain the affidavit necessary to immigrate to Mexico, and having nothing more to do in Nice, Löwenstein resolved to meet Marcelle Rivier in Mirmande in late 1941 and keep a low profile. Hence the interruption in letters between December 23, 1941, and June 4, 1943. However, the Nazi invasion on the 11th of November 1942, of the previously unoccupied zone of France, the southern part of the country where the Vichy regime operated, forced Fedor further into hiding. On a full moon night in February 1943, Marcelle Rivier evacuated him from Mirmande, disguised as a peasant woman. He went to Cliousclat where he was taken in by Mena Loopuyt (1902-1991), a Dutch painter, then hidden in the Abbey of Aiguebelle.
Löwenstein complained bitterly about the soul-sucking (my words) work that was required of him for protection by the monks. He was expected to contribute to the beautification of the monastery. He writes in a letter dated the 30th of September 1943:
“The work that has been stuck with me this time is so disgusting that I wonder how I will do it, having accepted the fruit jellies as an advance. Imagine tile plates on which, in relief, a nymph is picking flowers. All of this is the purest new style, but so disgusting as a ‘spirit’ and as a material that one must, I think, beat the sole throughout South America to find one’s equal. And I must color them. Yesterday I told Father A[bbé] that if I asked them to sing songs from the guardroom at the basilica, it would have the same effect on them as it would on me to ‘paint’ it.”
In what Jérôme Delatour characterizes as a “source of much pain and self-sacrifice,” Löwenstein was commissioned to paint the portrait of the abbot. The abbot was not at all pleased with the result, perhaps upset by the theft of 53 bottles of liquor from the abbey, exclaiming: “this is not my skin, not my eyes, I’m not so fat, what is this bosse (bump) on my head!” (30th of September 1943) Admittedly, the portrait of the abbot is not very flattering. (Figure 8)
Löwenstein’s letters of love and war reflect a self-awareness that as a Jew and a Czechoslovakian he was “doubly undesirable in the new Europe of the early 1940s.” On May 27, 1940, he wrote, “virtually all Czechoslovakia have been in a concentration camp with one foot. But the other, my good leg, is still at large. . .this morning at the consulate we were told we must provide letters written by Frenchmen, vouching for our entire loyalty to France.”
Löwenstein’s legitimate concerns were affirmed with the enactment by the Vichy regime of “The Law of 4 October 1940 regarding foreign nationals of the Jewish race,” which authorized and organized the internment of foreign Jews and marked the beginning of the policy of collaboration of the Vichy regime with Nazi Germany’s plans for the extermination of the Jews of Europe.
All Löwenstein’s letters mention his health problems: “slight itching, general weakness, sweating, without making me feel ‘really ill’’’ (8 January 1944), which spoke to the “enemy within.” Realizing he needed to be seen by a specialist, using the alias “Lauriston,” he traveled to Paris in November 1943. A blood test confirmed he was suffering from Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer that primarily affects the lymphatic system and that was incurable at the time.
His nighttime description of occupied Paris is haunting:
“Going out in Paris at night is a bit tricky, especially when it’s raining like last night. Imagine when you get out of the subway, that you are immersed in black ink, indelible and absolute. Little by little, you can see around you other shadows that have come out of hell and are waiting like you for the moment when they ‘see’. . .Finally, the shadows, in groups, leave, feel the void, pierce the darkness, fall, rise, collide and arrive as if by a miracle, just like ants underground by instinct, in front of the theatre.” (26 November 1943)
Löwenstein spent the whole of 1944 in Paris, miraculously unmolested by the Nazis. His letters to Marcelle Rivier were rare at the time, as the couple had broken up in the autumn of 1943, although it’s possible that any letters from this period have disappeared. According to Jérôme Delatour, apart from a greeting card at the end of the year, there were no letters in 1945, and only two in 1946.
As Jérôme Delatour suggests, in his letters Fedor Löwenstein passionately captured a sense of the period’s depressive climate, the moral dissolution that accompanied the fall of France following the country’s rapid capitulation to Germany, and the time of the Occupation, dominated by material concerns and the price of and access to food. Even though the dangers were very real, Fedor’s letters seem almost to have distilled them to down-to-earth questions: “The valley is just a box full of dirty cotton. . .Everything froze and for the pockets of the people of Mirmande, a cauliflower at 4.50 is too expensive. We live on pasta, noodles and macaroni. . .For a vegetarian of my talent, it’s almost starvation. Already.” (Mirmande, 27 March 1940) Expectedly, rationing also affected the availability of art supplies.
Given his deteriorating condition and the Nazis changing fortunes in 1944-1945, following his departure from Paris, Fedor likely returned to Nice to spend his remaining days with his mother and sister. (Figure 9) The last words in his last letter to Marcelle Rivier were “Do you continue to paint?” (Nice, 21 June 1946) In this letter he also announced that he would be having a major exhibition in Cannes to coincide with the film festival there in September. Löwenstein was hospitalized on August 4, 1946, and died soon thereafter. (Figure 10) The first Cannes Film Festival opened on September 20th. Marcelle Rivier continued to paint until her death in 1986.
REFERENCES
Delatour, Jérôme. (2018 April 3). “Paint, paint, PAINT!” (1/2). Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art. Institut national d’histoire de l’art – INHA
Delatour, Jérôme. (2018 April 5). “Paint, paint, PAINT!” (2/2). Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art.
https://blog.bibliotheque.inha.fr/fr/posts/peindre-peindre-peindre-2-2.html