As a member of the Institute of Jewish Studies (IJS) at the University of Antwerp, I was recently invited to a lecture by Richard Yerachmiel Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who specializes in the history of French Jewry, the Holocaust, and art history. The subject he chose to tackle was Jewish pre- and post war patronage of visual art and its impact on the international art market. Being both art loving and fascinated with the Jewish identity, I decided to attend.
Wandering the labyrinth of academic halls, I recognized some classrooms where I had been breaking my head over exam questions, my ears stuffed with plugs to block out any white noise – I couldn’t and still can’t bear any sound when I need to concentrate. Memories of blackouts, eurekas, adrenaline rushes, disappointments, exhilaration, and relief flooded my mind. The storm of emotions I felt in this building was more overwhelming than the finale of a Rachmaninov concerto.
The room I was searching couldn’t be missed – its front door was guarded by two armed policemen and security personnel who kindly but firmly asked I hand over my coat and handbag. Bearing in mind the Islamist terror attack that killed two Israeli tourists visiting the Jewish Museum in Brussels in 2014, no risk could be taken in the presence of a predominantly Jewish audience, among which the Israeli ambassador.
Anti-Semitism, or anti-Zionism, as it is today labelled by anti-Semites who want to cover up their true conviction, is still a harsh reality in this post-Holocaust era. In the past decades, the hatred of Jews and their homeland has increased significantly in Europe and beyond – a regrettable but unsurprising trend that once again triggers Jewish exodi to other continents.
Before the professor started the lecture, he was introduced with many (well-deserved) superlatives by Vivian Liska, director of the IJS. Sitting hunched over on his chair, he reminded me of Noam Chomsky – you know, this Jewish-American, anti-Zionist, Pol Pot-apologist, self-described anarcho-syndicalist professor who believes Marx is God and America is the devil – frail, vulnerable, and on the verge of collapsing faster than Joe Biden on the stairs of Air Force One.
Great was my surprise when Cohen stood up with a straight back and addressed the attendees with the imposing, captivating voice of a Roman orator, filling no less than two hours with his speech without instigating a single moment of boredom in me, nor the rest of the attendees. Everyone hung on his eloquent lips.
It was a brilliant exposé of how Jewish intelligentsia worldwide influenced the international art market by sponsoring artists, organising exhibitions, and founding numerous art galleries and museums. It is remarkable that no other minority in the world is at the source of that many museums.
At the end of the 19th century, many wealthy Jewish families in France acquired and sold paintings of great masters. One of those families was the Parisian Cahen d’Anvers family, who commissioned portraits of their daughters from Auguste Renoir, an Impressionist who struggled to make a living as a painter. This must have been a great source of frustration for him, as it was to other underappreciated geniuses like Paul Gauguin, Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Claude Monet, the man considered the founder of Impressionism.
Renoir’s talent and avant-gardist artistry were admirable. What was less so, was his anti-Semitism, a sentiment shared by many of his compatriots, that amplified when Napoleon III lost the war against the Prussians in 1870. The French, humiliated by their defeat, looked for a culprit. For those who know history and how easily it repeats itself, it comes as no surprise that the Jews – rich, untrustworthy, unpatriotic, and traitorous as people have always believed them to be – were once again blamed for a collective misfortune.
This time, the blame fell on Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer of Jewish ancestry accused of espionage for the Germans, in what might have been the most shameful judicial affair in the history of France (which was magnificently filmed by Roman Polanski). Dreyfus was publicly degraded before a crowd screaming:
“Death to the Judas! Death to the Jew!”
After having his insignia torn from his uniform and his sword seized and broken, he was deported to solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, a penal colony off the coast of French Guiana in South America.
The Dreyfus affair divided France like the Trump presidency divided America. Everyone was either for or against Dreyfus, and the expression of antagonist opinions drove spouses, families, neighbours, and friends apart. A cartoon image made by the anti-Dreyfusard caricaturist Caran d’Ache, entitled ‘Un diner en famille’, published one month after Emile Zola’s galvanizing letter ‘J’accuse’, shows how a family dinner party turned into a massacre while discussing the Dreyfus affair.
Even though Renoir, along with millions of other Frenchmen, was a staunch defender of the French court that falsely convicted Dreyfus, the veracity of his anti-Semitism is sometimes disputed. A friend of mine argued that, would Renoir have been a true anti-Semite, his brush would have depicted Jewish people in a stereotypical way, with a long, crooked nose, or other stereotypical Jewish features. This seems like a weak argument – if Renoir would’ve done so, he would’ve quickly gained the reputation of being anti-Semitic and stop receiving the commissions he so desperately needed to survive.
Other arguments that could plea in his favour are that he often exhibited with the Bernheims, who were the foremost Jewish dealers. He was also in good terms with his Jewish sister-in-law, Blanche Renoir, and he attended the funeral of the Jewish painter Camille Pissarro, something Degas refused to do. The anti-Semitism of the latter is undeniable: when a model in his atelier dared suggesting Dreyfus might be innocent, he furiously screamed:
“You are Jewish! You are Jewish!”
and told her to leave immediately. Until the Dreyfus affair, Degas had been a great ami de la maison of the Halévy family, attending their shabbat dinners and painting their portraits.
Renoir wasn’t a ‘ferocious anti-Semite’, as Pissarro described Degas. However, when I read certain statements in the letters he wrote to friends, I’m inclined to believe he wasn’t exactly a Judeophile either. His fellow Impressionists Pissarro, Monet, and Signac, who were all pro-Dreyfus certainly did not appreciate his views, that were hard to reconcile with (but maybe easily explained by) his dependency on the financial support of Jewish art collectors.
Renoir had been introduced to those collectors by a certain Charles Ephrussi, a respected art historian, main contributor to the Gazette des Beaux Arts, an important socialite with many useful connections in Jewish and noble Parisian salons, and … a Jew. In one of his columns entitled ‘Jews in Paris’, a British columnist wrote the following about him:
“Through the loophole of art, one of these energetic Israelites penetrated the salon of an ex-imperial highness. He made room for his uncles and aunts and cousins, who gradually introduced their friends and their friends’ friends, until at last the Wednesday receptions of the amiable hostess… have come to be in large degree receptions of the descendants of the tribes.”
Thanks to Ephrussi, Renoir gained popularity as a portraitist and became able to afford painting non-commissioned works. In what can perhaps be perceived as a token of gratitude for his connections, Renoir depicted Ephrussi in one of his most ambitious works, ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’.
Ephrussi never got married in his lifetime, but he did have an affair with Louise, the wife of Louis Cahen d’Anvers. He convinced to commission portraits of her eldest daughter Irène from Renoir.
When art critic Joris-Karl Huysmans saw this painting at the Salon, he was very enthusiastic:
“The portraits that [Renoir] exhibits in the present Salon are charming, particularly one of a little girl in profile, which is painted with a flourish of color that has only ever been approached by the old masters of the English school. Curiously passionate about the reflection of the sun on the velvety skin, the play of the rays over the hair and the fabric, M. Renoir bathed his figure in true light and one sees the adorable nuances, the iridescence that blooms on the canvas! These works figure, absolutely, among the most sumptuous at the Salon.”
Louise, however, wasn’t very pleased with the portrait, nor with the other double portrait of her other daughters Renoir made and banished them all to a servant’s room. Little did she know that it would today be considered one one of Renoir’s greatest masterpieces and be of unfathomable value. Above that, she delayed Renoir’s remuneration for over a year. The latter was furious:
“As for the 1500 francs from the Cahens, I must tell you that I find it hard to swallow. The family is so stingy; I am washing my hands of the Jews.”
Renoir also wrote in an anti-Semitic manner about Ephrussi, which obviously cooled their friendship. Maybe his ambivalent attitude towards the Jews was rooted in the fact he was sometimes underpaid, or not paid at all, by Jewish commissioners who disliked the final result of his work, like the Cahen d’Anvers family. Maybe his status anxiety translated itself into a latent jealousy for the wealth of the Jews, and the Dreyfus affair allowed it to come to the surface.
The journey of Irène’s portrait is, by the way, remarkable. In 1883, it appeared in the first impressionist exhibition in 1883. In 1891, Irene married Count Moïse de Camondo, who purchased to portrait as an addition to his vast collection. The entire collection can be admired today at the Musée Nissim de Camondo in Paris -.
More than half a century later, the Nazis gained power and stole thousands of paintings owned by Jews. The portrait was hidden with thousands of other art works in the Chateau de Chambord. The painting was now in possession of the creator of the Gestapo: Herman Göring!
After the war, the painting resurfaced in a Parisian exhibition of paintings stolen by Nazis. It was then obtained by Emil Georg Bührle, a Swiss industrialist, art collector of German origin and CEO of the armaments company Oerlikon, supplier of the German military. If you want to see the portrait today, you should visit the Bührle Collection in Zürich.
Irene had two children: Nissim and Béatrice. Nissim died as a fighter pilot during World War I, and Beatrice and her children were murdered in Auschwitz. Irene however, survived the Holocaust and lived until the age of 91.
A sad story behind a magnificent painting, made by a man who perhaps harbored the same hateful feelings that catalyzed one of the greatest genocides in history. My research left me full of doubts: Did Renoir make overtly anti-Semitic remarks? Certainly. Can he be labelled an anti-Semite for making these remarks because he wasn’t treated fairly by his Jewish patrons? Perhaps not. However, he was definitely on the wrong side of the Dreyfus affair.