The Camondo Legacy: the Passions of a Paris Collector
Edited by Marie-Noël de Gary; photographs by Jean-Marie del Moral
Thames & Hudson, 320pp, £29.95
The terror of the Louvre can be endlessly deferred by Paris's treasury of small museums and, for me, the Musée Nissim de Camondo is the most magical. Now the subject of a lavish book edited by its curator and translated from the French, it has an appeal that lies not only in the fabulous things on view but also in the story of the Camondos, which is glamorous and melancholy.
They were exemplars of 19th-century multi-culturalism: Austrian Jews who were raised to the rank of Italian counts on the unification of Italy, but whose business centre was Constantinople. As bankers to the Ottoman empire, they found they could operate just as well and with a lot more pleasure from Paris, and the two leading brothers moved there in 1869, bringing 40 million francs with them - for starters.
They purchased adjoining properties backing on to the Parc Monceau, the Kensington Gardens of Paris, which was being developed as a sumptuous, high-bourgeois enclave. The benefactor here celebrated is Moïse, son of the younger immigrant brother. He was born, more interested in finery than finance, in 1860, and was trained by Charles Ephrussi, the collector and editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (who was the model for Proust's character Swann).
Moïse's marriage failed, he sold off the bank, and his only son, Nissim, an airman and French patriot, was killed in action in the First World War. So the collection, which had begun with love, ended up as compensation, not only for loneliness, but also for the eye that Moïse had lost in his youth. It comprises French art and furniture of the 18th century, especially the latter half (that is to say, the neoclassical period, which succeeded rococo), and was assembled with the help of the greatest dealers of the age, the Seligmanns and the Duveens. The building that houses it is not the original family home. That was demolished in 1911 and the present mansion put up on the same site to marry the objects to their setting in an idealised whole. Count Moïse de Camondo, on his death in 1935, bequeathed the lot to the French nation in memory of his dead son.
It isn't a collection of staggering, stand-alone paintings and sculptures. The masterpieces are mostly items of furniture or ornament, such as Marie-Antoinette's vases of petrified wood bound by golden serpents. But every item contributes a superb, harmonious note. The photographs are intoxicating and plentiful - hardly a doorknob is missed - and their captions lengthy and informative. Of the accompanying essays, the best is by François Loyer, on the architecture of the building, often cited as an 18th-century re-creation. I always find it weirder than that, like some mansion in an Orson Welles film. The entrance front and the garden front, both dynamic, are entirely dissimilar; where they interact, within, is bound to produce strange effects. Loyer agrees: "The fluidity of the spaces belongs to a modern vision of architecture . . . spaces interlock or dilate in the most unexpected ways." He compares it to the work of Lutyens, Hoffmann and Loos.
So we are taken back not to the age of late-Louis and la douceur de vivre, but strongly to the beginning of the 20th century, underpinned by the finely preserved kitchen and garage quarters. The experience is nonetheless dreamy, partly because this is a quiet, untouristy part of town. Also it is due to the light, which is moderated by the cream stone of the interior and cooled by the pastel pinks, blues, greens and greys of the decor. Such gold as there is is discreet and often silvery. But the unexpected reason for the captivating, poignant mood is that although designated a museum, the place is as much an installation for a 20th-century tragedy.
This is played down in the book because luxury and butchery don't sit well between hard covers. However, from the storyteller's (as opposed to the collector's) point of view, the most important item in the museum is inside the entrance gateway. Among the hundreds of photos in this book, it is not to be found. It is a plaque which tells how Moïse's daughter, Béatrice, her husband and their son and daughter, the last of the family, were deported to Auschwitz in 1943-44, never to be seen again.
Pierre Assouline, in his book on the family, says they were arrested by the police in 1942 and then handed over to the Gestapo. "German police? French police? Both? What does it matter, since they were accomplices," writes Assouline. I think it does matter, especially for a family that gave everything to France. I have heard it said that the original arresting police were French. The fog around this issue is unfinished business. The present volume does, of course, mention the tragedy, telling us that the four were imprisoned first at Drancy, "the French waiting room for the death camps". But it is all done in one, overhasty paragraph, which ends with the unsettling sentence: "Their deaths were the ultimate justification for the Musée Nissim de Camondo."
On the same page is an extraordinary photograph - tiny, tucked into a corner, and so modern that it could have been snapped yesterday. It is of Bertrand Reinach, Moïse's grandson, in a T-shirt and cuddling a little dog in his arms. It was taken in 1938. He was 15 years old. The Camondo Museum remains incomplete; it requires a small additional room, very quietly done.
Duncan Fallowell is the author of "Going As Far As I Can" (Profile), an account of his travels in New Zealand
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