In 1940 Bucher published one of the first essays calling for resistance, Non Vouloir, written by Hugnet, in a special edition which included four engravings by Picasso. Thanks to her prestige among artists, the house was frequently visited by German officers, usually not in uniform, who poked fun at the modern art on display but often bought it just the same. She wrote to her granddaughter in America about these visits, saying she did not object to the men’s nationality as long as they appreciated the art. But on one occasion she lost her temper and asked her visitors, in impeccable German, why they bothered to look at a painting if they thought it was ‘bad’. At the same time she took down a photograph of one of Arno Breker’s sculptures and stamped on it, shouting, ‘That’s German art, so look what I do to it.’
People were being arrested for much less. But Bucher was daring in everything she did. She had been exhibiting the paintings and gouaches of the Russian émigré and abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky since 1936 and saw no reason to stop now. But the Germans closed an exhibition of his work at her gallery after just one day. Sometimes, if the Germans removed from the walls art of which they did not approve, she simply put it away in drawers. Fran?oise Gilot, the young artist who was to become Picasso’s mistress, recalled that she liked Max Ernst’s work a lot. ‘So I’d go to Jeanne Bucher’s gallery before 6 p.m. and then, after it closed, she would show me her Ernst paintings.’ In addition, Bucher used the attic rooms of her premises as a safe house in which to hide resisters from time to time. A young medical student, on the run from the Gestapo, was both amused and scared to find he was sleeping in a bed with Braques and Picassos underneath his mattress. But one of her bravest activities was trying to protect the empty properties of those who had been forced to flee, such as Lipchitz and his wife Berthe, who in 1941 thanks to the efforts of the American journalist Varian Fry managed to escape via Marseilles to New York.* The home of the Lisbon-born artist Maria Elena Vieira da Silva, married to the Hungarian Jewish abstract painter árpád Szenes, who managed to flee in 1940 to Portugal and eventually Rio de Janeiro, was similarly protected by Bucher, who installed friends she trusted to live there as a way of making sure the Nazis did not move in. Henri Goetz, the French-born surrealist, remembered Bucher for the way she disdained the style of fashionable wealthy dealers. ‘As for the previews she held,’ he recalled, ‘nothing could be further removed from the fashionable events of the time: the privileged few were discreetly asked into the kitchen where they were seated on a long bench and served tea and biscuits.’
Bucher found solace in her gallery among the art she loved. She was uncompromising in her determination to continue exhibiting, which she said mattered more to her than food. She refused ever to use the black market. As a long-term smoker she found that not being able to get tobacco – women did not have the right to buy this during the war – was a particular penance. Men could get one packet a week, so her friends, several of whom believed they owed their lives to her, gave her their allowance whenever they could.
*
‘You have to understand that the forms of resistance were innumerable,’ explained Jeannie de Clarens (née Rousseau), who had never spoken about her own particular story of resistance until she was ferreted out in 1998 by David Ignatius, a reporter from the Washington Post. Jeannie was not at first part of any organized group, but the moment she graduated in 1939 from the Paris Institute of Political Studies, the Sciences Po – top of her class – she had asked the Director to find her some work where she would be ‘useful’. But then in 1940 her parents decided it was no longer safe to remain in Paris and her father, a civil servant and former mayor of Paris’s 17th arrondissement, took his family to the coastal village of Dinard in Brittany, near Saint-Malo, thinking the Germans would never reach that corner. But soon the enemy arrived in their thousands, preparing for a possible invasion of Britain. So when the local mayor approached M. Rousseau, his trusted neighbour, asking if he knew someone who could speak German to work as a liaison with the army, Jeannie’s father volunteered his own daughter, knowing her fluency in German and insisting, ‘She wants only to be useful.’