ADIR managed to bridge the huge social chasm among its members, a bridge that had already been built in the camps where countesses and factory workers might share a bed and supported each other in myriad ways, and this remarkable organization became the principal means through which most female political deportees re-established their postwar lives.
It was not just in publishing but in the arts generally that there was a conscious effort to move on, a belief in recovery through renewal. Les Enfants du paradis was shot during the German Occupation, mostly in Nice, directed by Marcel Carné, starring Arletty and Jean-Louis Barrault, and involving the talents of many ‘secret’ Jews in hiding, including set designer Alexandre Trauner and composer Joseph Kosma, both Hungarian Jews who worked clandestinely under assumed names. Many of the film’s approximately 1,800 extras were also Jews for whom the work was valuable daytime cover. Set among the Parisian theatrical world of the 1820s and 1830s, this melodrama took months to make and was constantly running into difficulties – practical, bureaucratic and financial – but was finished at the end of 1944 amid enormous expectations. Given the tempestuous times, the premiere was delayed until 9 March 1945, one of the first after the Liberation when, with the end of the war in sight, it helped to restore national pride in the indomitable spirit of French culture. Hailed as France’s own version of Gone with the Wind, it sought to demonstrate the supremacy of French cinema over Hollywood. French audiences found the film deeply symbolic, seeing it not just as a homage to love but specifically as a demonstration of the freedom enjoyed by Garance, the main character played by Arletty, a woman loved by four men, to choose whom to love and on her own terms. Ironically, Arletty was by then incarcerated in her chateau as punishment for her relationship with Soehring, and was forced to miss the premiere. Nonetheless, the film was a spectacular box-office hit, shown at the Madeleine Theatre for fifty-four consecutive weeks, and it has since acquired legendary status.
Jeanne Bucher, who had done so much bravely to support modern French art during the Occupation, began the year crippled with sadness by the news that her beloved grandson, Pierre, had been killed in action. Facing the almost insupportable task of continuing to live, she nonetheless immersed herself in work by continuing to organize exhibitions in her Montparnasse Gallery of artists the Nazis had banned. In April she had a show for Nicolas de Sta?l and another in the spring for Dora Maar, Picasso’s spurned and unhappy mistress.
After the Liberation there had been a major Picasso exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne which formed part of the Salon d’Automne that year. As Fran?oise Gilot, the young woman who had recently become Picasso’s lover, commented, ‘Since Picasso was painter number one on the German index, the first revenge to take on the Germans was to mount a big Picasso retrospective.’ Bucher could not afford to compete in this league so she decided to mount a Dora Maar exhibition instead. Primarily this was an artistic decision but it was commercial too as Bucher knew that Picasso would attend. And in the plan there was also an element of sympathy for Maar. Born Henriette Theodora Markovi?, part Jewish on her father’s side, French Catholic on her mother’s, Dora Maar was an interesting, talented but troubled woman. Picasso had kept her in a state of constant anticipation – she never knew from one meal to the next if he would want to see her for lunch or dinner. When they first met, Maar was part of the surrealist group of Man Ray, Michel Leiris and Paul Eluard and had been working as a photographer. But gradually, as she grew closer to Picasso, she devoted more and more time to painting, gave up photography and became the subject of many of Picasso’s portraits during this period. Some of them were full of torment and anguish but others convey the colourful radiance of her youth and personality and are expressions of optimism, energy and tenderness.
At the time of Maar’s exhibition at the Galerie Jeanne Bucher, Gilot was treating Picasso in the same way that he had behaved towards Maar, refusing to show any commitment to him, not seeing him at all for weeks at a time, a policy that had a marked effect as Picasso struggled to insist he would never allow himself to be permanently attached to Gilot. ‘I could admire him tremendously as an artist but I did not want to become his victim or a martyr. It seemed to me that some of his other friends had: Dora Maar, for example.’ So when Gilot attended the Maar exhibition it was ‘because I was interested to see what she was doing and not at all because I thought Pablo might be there. As it happened he arrived only a few minutes after I did.’