Free Confessions of an Art Addict by Peggy Guggenheim

Paris three days before the Germans entered. Two million people left the same day in cars, driving at one or two miles an hour, four abreast. It was a general exodus performed in a cloud of black smoke. Most of the cars went to Bordeaux, but we went south, where my children, Sinbad and Pegeen, were withtheir father. We were warned not to go in this direction, as Italy had just declared war on France, and we might meet the Italian army. On the way, we learned the dreadful news of the fall of Paris, and a few days later came the tragic armistice terms.
    Finally I took a house for my children at Le Veyrier, on the lake of Annecy. For company I had Nellie and Jean Arp and his wife, who came to stay with us. They were worried about the future, as they could not go back to Meudon, in occupied France, where they all lived. They were Hitler’s avowed enemies, besides which they had left all their possessions in Meudon. Arp wanted to go to the United States and start a new Bauhaus. He was very nervous about the war. All his predictions had come true and he saw the future in very gloomy terms. He was madly anti-German and would turn off the radio if Mozart or Beethoven came over the air. He had been born in Alsace, but was now a Frenchman with the name of Jean instead of Hans, which he had dropped.
    By the end of the summer, I received my cases of pictures. The Germans had come and gone from Vichy without even noticing them in Maria Jolas’ barn; Giorgio Joyce, James’s son, shipped them to Annecy, where they remained on the quai de petite vitesse for weeks. We did not know that they had arrived, and when we found out, we covered them with tarpaulins, but did not know what to do with them.
    Being Jewish, I could not go back to Paris, but I wanted toexhibit the pictures somewhere. Nellie was a friend of Monsieur Farcy, the director of the Musée de Grenoble. He liked modern art, so I sent her to see him and asked for his help. She came back with no definite promise, but with an invitation to me to send the pictures to the museum at Grenoble, where he would at least shelter them. We immediately dispatched them, and Nellie and I followed and settled in Grenoble.
    M. Farcy was in a very bad jam himself at this time. Because of the Vichy government he nearly lost his museum directorship and finally ended up in prison. He could not do much for me. Though he did want to exhibit my collection, he was too frightened. As he was expecting Pétain to visit Grenoble, he had hidden all the museum’s modern pictures in the cellar. He gave me perfect freedom in the museum to do anything with my pictures except to hang them. I had a beautiful room where I placed them along the wall and could show them to my friends, photograph them and catalogue them. But he would never fix a date for a show, claiming that he must pave the way with the Vichy government first, so much were they under Hitler’s control. He did not want me to remove the pictures either, and after six months in Grenoble, I lost my patience and told him that I was going to America. He begged me to leave the collection with him, but I had no such intention. I had no idea how to send it to America, but I knew I would never leave without it.
    M. Farcy was a very funny fat little man in his fifties. Inhis youth he had been a cyclist and had done the tour de France. One could hardly believe it from his present appearance. He liked to get away from home and from his adoring wife, and whenever we invited them for dinner he came alone, with an excuse from her about being unable to accompany him. Later we discovered that he had never conveyed our invitation to her. He loved modern art, but he couldn’t distinguish one thing from another. He often asked me who had painted my paintings, and invariably when he came round to Marcoussis he said, ‘What, Brancusi?’ I had one painting by Vieira da Silva that he liked, because he thought it was a Klee. When I finally left