Mistral's Daughter (12 page)

6

Adrien Avigdor was only
twenty-eight when he first met Julien Mistral, but he might, with truth, have
said that he had spent his life preparing for the day when he would be able to
change a painter's future in a single moment of decision.

He had been brought up in the
antique business.
 
"We," his
father used to say, gesturing grandly toward his flourishing shop on the quai
Voltaire, "were selling them antiques before they built Notre
Dame."
 
"We" were the
Jewish Avigdors, "they" everyone else in France.
 
Adrien, who loved his grandiose father, as
much as he laughed at him, wondered why he had stopped short of saying the
Avigdors had been selling the Pharaoh antiques while
they
built the
Pyramids.

As a child, Adrien traveled
about the countryside with his father on buying trips.
 
So quickly that he seemed to be drinking
rather than learning, young Adrien had grasped the profound difference between
the way antique dealers think and the way antique buyers think.
 
When he was only eight, he could judge
merchandise by imagining himself looking through the window of his father's
shop and
having to have
a certain pair of goblets.
 
Better yet, by the time he was ten, he could
just as easily distinguish the teapot or inlaid box that would never call out
to be bought, that would be admired, even picked up and discussed for a quarter
of an hour, but was destined somehow to never change hands.
 
Presented with two dozen Limoges teacups, his
hand, as if of its own volition, would
pick up and turn over the only
cup with a tiny crack on its base. When his father died, rather than work in
the family business with his two older brothers, Adrien opened his own shop, in
the rue Jacob, only a few steps from the church of St. Germain-des Près. He was
convinced that people bought more freely from a shop
that was built in
the shadow of a church, preferably a cathedral.
 
By the time he was twenty-five, his fortune was made and, unheard of for
an Avigdor, the traffic in antiques had ceased to fascinate him.
 
He realized he had reached a dangerous point
in his life when he sold a chocolate service that might not have
—
perhaps
—
belonged to the Empress Josephine, but should and could
have.
 
He got five
times what he
paid for it, and had trouble keeping awake during the transaction.

"We," he said to
himself, looking as if one of his pigs had died, "have been selling them
the debris of centuries for too long."
 
Within a matter of hours he had determined to make a change of
métier.
 
He would move from the world of
antiques, in which everything that could be sold already existed, to the world
of art, in which profits beckoned on works as yet uncreated.
 
His well-trained assistants could continue to
run his business, with an occasional visit from him.

All threat of boredom
vanished as Avigdor contemplated the challenge of making a place for himself in
a trade that already included such giants as Paul Rosenberg, the Bernheim
brothers, Réné Gimpel, Wildenstein and, richest of them all, Vollard, whose
fortune was based on the two hundred and fifty Cézannes he had once managed to
buy from the artist for an average of fifty francs apiece.
 
It wouldn't be easy, starting from scratch,
in a profession dominated by establishment dealers who handled the work of the
most important modern painters, such as Matisse and Picasso, and who at the same
time were able to attract the custom of the biggest customers, many of them
American millionaires, by the ease with which they could conjure out from their
storerooms a Velásquez, a Goya drawing, or a work by one of the great
Impressionists.

In spite of the dignified
solemnity of these great dealers, with their gray-velvet-covered walls, Avigdor
knew that their tightly knit world was a snakepit of snarling envy and open,
spiteful rivalry which mounted as news grew of the success of the New York
branches of French dealers.
 
What tearing
of hair there had been at the news that the Bernheims had gotten twenty
thousand dollars for a Matisse, that Wildenstein had sold a large Cézanne for
sixty thousand dollars, both prices previously unheard of in France.
 
Clearly, Adrien Avigdor calculated, if there's
that kind of money to be made in men who were absolutely unknown only
twenty-five years ago, there's going to be a similar market for the work of men
who don't yet interest the major dealers.
 
Only a few princely collectors can afford to purchase old masters to
ensure their own immortality.
 
Nor are
there many collectors who will risk thousands on artists with reputations that
have been freshly made.
 
Yet there must
exist many would-be collectors who will risk lesser sums than those needed to
own a Matisse.

Yes, he told himself, as he
walked along the rue de Seine on which busier Left Bank galleries were already
located, buyers come in three sizes:
 
the
Andrew Mellon size who only want artists who have stood the test of time, the
Picasso size, in the medium range, and the Avigdor size, who want to get in on
the coming thing, on the ground floor.

As he scanned the people
sauntering along, he realized that the world had been organized so that men
like him could prosper.
 
After all,
nobody needed to own works of art to survive.
 
And yet, human nature is so constituted that once survival is ensured,
once a level of comfort is established, proprietorship of nonessential objects
becomes an immediate desire.
 
The savage
who adds a second necklace to the first, and John D. Rockefeller buying the
Unicorn tapestries, weren't that different from each other, were they now?
 
And the peasant's wife who waits for a good
harvest and promptly buys a painted jug to adorn the top of a chest
—
how different is she from Henry Clay Frick, that cold-eyed Maecenas, who spent
a million dollars for the eleven Fragonard panels that Madame Du Barry,
thinking them too suggestive, had refused to accept from Louis XV?
 
Yes, falling somewhere between the peasant's
wife and the Rockefellers, there are a lot of potential customers out here,
Adrien Avigdor told himself happily.

For two years he dedicated
himself to learning his new trade.
 
Outwardly he seemed as leisurely as that fixture of the eighteenth
century, the gentleman amateur.
 
He visited
and revisited every one of the best galleries where he was welcomed as a
wealthy, cultivated colleague from the world of antiques.
 
He smiled his honorably intentioned, if
countrified, smile and spoke of thinking about taking up collecting paintings...
 
about which, alas, he had to confess himself
a complete neophyte.

At Gimpel's he said shyly
that he wasn't thinking of anything as rare as a Greuze drawing or even a tiny
Marie Laurencin
—
too rich for his blood
—
but perhaps something
by a younger man?
 
At Rosenberg's he
reflected sadly on Picasso.
 
He admired
Picasso but he didn't think he could afford him
—
not at a hundred
thousand francs a picture.
 
If only he
could afford three hundred thousand francs for the Monet, the one of the red
boat
—
but of course the day to buy Monet was long past, was it
not?
 
Perhaps a younger man?
 
At Zborowski's he admitted that he was sorely
tempted by the Soutines.
 
Was it true
that they couldn't give them away a year ago and now they were fifteen thousand
francs each?
 
Fascinating!
 
That's what he heard.
 
What an unpredictable affair the art market
was, to be sure.

Avigdor sought out the advice
of a number of carefully chosen art critics, those who worked for specialized
publications with readers who bought art regularly.
 
Flatteringly, he asked for their guidance in
forming his projected collection.
 
Some,
as was common practice, undertook to advise him for a fee, others he was able
to lead to exceptionally fine bargains in antiques.
 
What man does not enjoy living with a bit of
fine old silver, an Empire chair, a few Meissen plates? They became his friends
and well-wishers.

Eventually he plunged into
the sordid warrens of the artists' studios in Montparnasse, working his way
through La Ruche and the cité
of Denfert Rochereau and number 3 rue
Joseph-Bara, neither rejecting nor accepting, but looking, always looking.

By 1925 Avigdor, now
twenty-seven, was ready to open the gallery he had rented and handsomely
renovated on the rue de Seine. He picked seven artists who interested him, a
stable of men who still had a long way to go, and in choosing them he was
lucky, he was brilliant, his eyes functioned sublimely
—
and again, he
was lucky.
 
In a year he was considered
an avant-garde dealer of exceptional discernment.
 
Soon the entire art world buzzed with news of
his every move. His good friends among the critics applauded, for had they not
taught him everything he knew? Was he not a good fellow? Those critics who were
not his friends attacked him viciously and that brought even more sales, for
in Paris if new art does not cause a scandal it is hardly worth bothering to
look at it.

With well-concealed relief
Mistral agreed to the one-man show.
 
Somehow, once that had been settled, it seemed relatively unimportant,
as Kate explained it to him, to sign the contract of exclusivity.
 
It stood to reason that you couldn't have one
without the other, she said in a matter-of-fact way that shortened the
discussion, particularly as she had advised him that he had not set high enough
prices on his work.

"Let me bargain with
Avigdor for you," she said.
 
"Everyone knows that nobody asks enough for his own work
—
you need somebody who isn't emotionally involved.
 
And I like doing it
—
that's the sort
of thing we're good at in my family
—
really, Julien, you'd be doing me
a favor." Mistral, who hated even to think about money and didn't relish
the idea of a haggle with Avigdor, put his financial affairs in her hands with
gratitude.
 
Now he was able to supervise
the mounting of his exhibition with growing attention.

For years he'd been careless
with his finished canvases, impatiently leaving them unstretched and
unvarnished, propped against his walls or stuck up on a nail anywhere he could
find a space, but now, his pride in the work he had done in the last few months
was so great that no detail was too unimportant to demand his full
attention.
 
In the three months before
the date of the exhibition, he was almost too busy to paint.
 
Maggy continued to support him by modeling as
he allowed himself to be interrupted at any time by Kate, who came by
frequently and carried him off in her blue Talbot convertible to inspect the
proofs for the catalog, to choose a type style for the cards of invitation to
the opening, or to meet Avigdor for a drink.

Kate established an excellent
working rapport with the framemakers who had to be handled carefully, for
their craftsmen's testiness was notorious.
 
Mistral found himself more and more dependent on her services as a
go-between between himself and these artisans who took no badgering from
impatient painters, but who seemed to enjoy cooperating with the charming
American girl who spoke to them with such proper deference.

Maggy watched and waited,
with an unadmitted premonition of fearful grief daily growing in her
heart.
 
She had no weapons except her
body and her love, but Mistral's attention was focused on the exhibition and he
turned to her less and less often.
 
When
he did make love to her there were shadows between them, the shadows of her
unadmitted jealousy, the shadows of his scarcely surfaced feelings about the
exhibition.

    
He lived in an unsorted jumble of exultation and worry in which
anxiety mixed with hope, excitement was tinged with panic.
 
Underlying it all was a growing, swelling,
terrifyingly strong intimation of victory.
 
This man who had sneered at his fellow artists for so long, who had gone
his own uncivil way, who had railed contemptuously at the commerciality of the
art world, now found himself craving desperately with all the power of his
barbaric, famished character to take his rightful place in that world, to be
recognized at last.

As the date of the opening of
the exhibition, the
vernissage,
grew closer, Mistral grew more and more
agitated.

Somehow Kate, with her utter
conviction of his genius, was able to find just the right words he needed to
hear to feel a momentary reassurance, a solace for which he asked her more and
more frequently although he affected to almost ignore her when she spoke.