During the occupation, when he became some sort of symbol of silent resistance to the Germans, we saw each other a few times. The most unsettling was the day we ran into each other in front of Le Petit Saint-Benoît, the only restaurant I could afford. I was there celebrating my birthday, all alone. I invited him to join me for lunch and we spent hours talking. About painting, colors, billiards, music. . And about Cranach. Mostly about Cranach. Because he had one too. I think it was a portrait of a girl. I remember he asked me a lot of questions about my parents and that, as the sun set, after telling me a handful of anecdotes about his childhood in Le Havre, his work as an apprentice in his father’s workshop and his flute lessons with the brother of Raoul Dufy, whom he later exhibited with alongside Matisse, he said goodbye with a “See you soon. And don’t lose sight of the orpiment.” I have never seen him so effusive.“Childhood. .” he said,“If only we could hold onto that curiosity and purity.”
The 1943 Salon d’Automne devoted a room to him. Of the twenty-odd paintings exhibited, I found myself standing in front of La Patience. As I observed it, I had the impression that the woman playing cards was my mother. Her curly hair, her long neck, her absent gaze in some photographs, particularly the last ones. .“It was one of her favorite pastimes,” my father had once told me. And it is one of mine as well. Now more than ever. Because playing solitaire helps me pass the time. As does listening to the radio, but only to music. The rest no longer interests me. I don’t need to be current on anything; I have no need to understand events and circumstances that won’t affect what’s left of my life. It’s just not necessary anymore. My father never played solitaire. “It seems stupid to me,” he would say.“Time is too valuable to waste on such trifles.”
Rereading the book that Braque gave me the last time I visited him, I feel my proximity to his thinking. It’s as if an invisible thread linked the essence of our obsessions. I’ve never felt that with anyone else. With Alma, perhaps, but in matters that had nothing to do with painting. Before writing the dedication, he paged through the book for some time and marked one of the aphorisms with an X: “That which is not taken, but remains, is the best of us.” “The rest is just fool’s gold,” he could have added. And it doesn’t take much rumination to realize that he wasn’t wrong. Not in the slightest.
Erika didn’t like Georges Braque. In fact she didn’t like any of what she called the “scribble and blotch” painters. Her taste was quite conservative, and she inconsiderately affirmed that, after the Impressionists, there was barely anything worth the effort. We never understood each other about artistic matters, but she let me do my own thing. Only every once in a while, when she wanted to provoke me, would she come up with some nonsense like “Why don’t you try painting things the way they are?” or “Why, when you can paint so well, do you insist on doing it so badly?” It would have been flattering to have more than just her moral support, maybe even a little understanding, but, given the choice, I preferred her frankness to most people’s hypocritical snobbery. In any case, there were plenty of reasons to live with her. At least in the beginning.
Erika was the Bürckel family’s youngest daughter. Her father was a powerful steel manufacturer, and a lifelong friend of my father. They had gone to school together. Being the baby of five siblings, or the only girl, or both, turned her into the spoiled girl I met shortly after arriving in Berlin. When she was older she was impulsive and reckless enough that her parents, to distance her from a feckless boy she’d fallen for head over heels and threatened to run off with, sent her on a trip to the United States with her grandmother and an unmarried aunt. Even though over the first few weeks, as she liked to tell it, she managed to make their lives impossible, gradually she realized the opportunity she had to see the world and get some good out of it. As fate would have it, a neighbor of the family, to whom her father had read one of her letters, offered her the chance to be the “social and fashion correspondent” for his magazine. At first they had to edit her chronicles quite a bit but, with the energy she put into new projects, she soon began to do an elegant job of it. I remember that, on one occasion, quite embarrassed, she showed me some of those early articles. It wasn’t anything special, but I was surprised by the liveliness of her descriptions and her ability to capture the small details. Her stay in New York, after her grandmother and aunt went home, extended for a couple of years, during which she made something of a name for herself as a society reporter.
Shortly after her return to Berlin, we met up again at my first solo exhibition at Alfred Flechtheim’s gallery and got involved. I had never felt anything so visceral. When I wasn’t with her I found myself in such a tizzy that I couldn’t get anything done. Opposites attract, I suppose. With the distance I now have, though, I can’t understand how we were so deluded that we believed the tentative possibility of vicariously living through each other could compensate for the devastating effects of the vast rift that separated us. Love is blind, they say. And absurdly pretentious.
Göring didn’t like modern art either. Even though he liked to play the Renaissance man, it seems he didn’t have the corresponding curiosity or open-mindedness. So it’s not surprising that one of Hofer’s jobs was to exchange “scribbles and blotches” for works that were more fitting to his supposedly exquisite and exacting taste. It was a great business, since the “scribbles and blotches” came from confiscated collections. And there were few obstacles, because the prospect of ending up in jail for not cooperating wasn’t terribly alluring.
Hofer’s appearance was as repulsive as his job. Not just because of the intimidating, rigid way he talked and moved, but because of the haughtiness that oozed from his features. His pointy chin, his thin lips, his big nose with a marked crease on either side, his small, dissecting eyes, his wide forehead run through with grooves. . It all added to the fear you felt in his presence. In this case, unlike what my father always said, I believe appearances were not deceiving.
“Maybe it’s not what it appears to be, don’t you think?” With that question, father tried to dissuade me from rushing to judgment of people or their behavior. Even though I understand him better now than I did then, as a kid his inclination to relativize everything drove me nuts, especially when I came home with a black eye after a fight with some classmate who’d poked fun at my too-big ears or my too-hairy legs and all he would say was some comment like “Are you sure you didn’t misinterpret it?” instead of rushing out to compensate for the insult. I have no idea how he would have reacted with Hofer. Maybe he would have invited him to have a seat in front of the fireplace to chat and then insisted on finding some reason to forgive him. It’s hard for me to admit, but I found my father exasperating when he got on a conciliatory jag. And, if I complained about it, he silenced me with a “What do you get out of being so evil-minded?” I never knew how to respond to that.
Not even when we went out to “survey nature” as he liked to say, was I free from his reflections about appearances. One day, on a walk, he pointed out a plant with yellowish flowers. “What color do you think the pigment extracted from that plant is?” he asked. I thought about yellow, but it was too obvious, and I was already used to his traps. In moments like that, I knew I just had to wait a little to find out the answer.“Red,” he said after a few moments of silence. “Yes, red. Even though it’s hard to believe.” And he explained that the pigment contained in the madder’s roots is so powerful that it can dye the milk and bones of animals that eat it. “You see? We can’t just dismiss what can’t be seen in a simple glance,” he added. And he kept on walking.