The works on display were mostly still lifes, ‘very severe most of them, showing just one object. They may have reflected in a measure her community of spirit with Picasso,’ wrote Gilot, who was generous in her praise for the work, which she insisted was not derivative. ‘She had taken the most ordinary objects – a lamp or an alarm-clock or a piece of bread – and made you feel she wasn’t so much interested in them as in their solitude, the terrible solitude and void that surrounded everything in that penumbra.’
Shortly after the exhibition, however, Maar suffered a nervous breakdown. Picasso blamed not his own behaviour for this, but rather Maar’s proximity to the surrealists, and she was hospitalized at a Paris clinic where, after lengthy analysis with the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, she regained some equilibrium.
Aged seventy-three when the war ended, Bucher was rescued in September 1945 by an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art to visit New York, where she spent the next seven months giving occasional lectures about French art during the Occupation and generally promoting some of the modern French artists whose work she loved, such as Vieira da Silva who had had her first show in Paris in 1933 at the Jeanne Bucher Gallery.*
Eight months after the Liberation of the city, what had begun with a vanguard now turned into a battalion of British and American journalists, spies, diplomats, soldiers and support personnel in Paris, who did much to elevate the mood, tantalize with their food parcels and fine stockings, and foster the idea of new beginnings being within reach. Suddenly well-brought-up, middle-class Parisiennes were revelling in dinner and dancing dates with men from a different world. When the Sorbonne-educated Elisabeth Meynard, the newly qualified primary school teacher who had taken her class to cheer de Gaulle, met a tall and handsome British sergeant by the name of Ivan du Maurier, she described it ‘as if a strange and mysterious being had just landed on our planet’, as in the film Les Visiteurs du Soir. Mlle Meynard had been hired by the Paris Welcome Committee, one of several organizations set up, as its name implied, to salute the droves of Allied officers now in the city and introduce them into French homes. While working for them, Elisabeth met Sergeant du Maurier and just six months later on 14 March 1945 the couple were married, with her new husband providing the parachute silk out of which she created a wedding dress. By then Elisabeth, or Betuska, as she had become, had learned that her husband, now restyled Captain Robert Maxwell MC, was in fact a Czech-born Jew who, having lost most of his family in the camps had, he assured her, given up all religious faith. She, coming from a long line of Huguenot Protestants on her father’s side as well as having been educated latterly at the free-thinking Collège Sévigné in the Marais, had many Jewish friends which made her open to the idea of marrying someone whose background was so far removed from her own. But above all she fell in love with this charismatic, forceful and unusual man with whom she created a large family and fortune.* By the end of the year they had gone to England.
Elisabeth and Robert Maxwell on their wedding day, 14 March 1945
The need to move on and draw a line under the war was especially strong after the celebrations of VE Day on 8 May when the war in Europe was finally over and General de Gaulle, in sonorous tones, once more reflected on French glory. Buildings may have been heavily pockmarked, wooden barriers still prevented access to some roads and there were even a few plaques with wreaths to mark the spot where partisans had been killed. But an American military policeman now directed traffic around the Place de la Concorde, American bands played in nightclubs, and water flowed once more from the fountains in the Tuileries Gardens. Americans and British were highly visible since, although the Métro worked, there were still no buses or private cars in the city. While Parisiennes used bicycles, mostly the British and Americans walked everywhere, either from the British army staff HQ in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, or to one of the hotels requisitioned for the forces such as the H?tel Bedford in the Rue de l’Arcade (which cost a mere five francs a night), or to the American mess in the Place Saint-Augustin, or to a Red Cross club or restaurant.