Maurice Rheims, writer, auctioneer; Independent UK obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Voltairean writer and auctioneer
10 March 2003
Maurice Rheims, auctioneer and writer: born Versailles, France 4
January 1910; married (two daughters, and one son deceased); died Paris 6
March 2003.
"Second-hand junk dealer in the ephemeral!" was what the critic Renaud
Matignon called Maurice Rheims. Before I ever knew anything about Rheims, I
bought his Dictionnaire des Mots Sauvages (1969), a vast, learned assembly
of unusual, difficult, arcane and clownesque words found in the works of
19th- and 20th-century authors. For many years, it has been providing my
favourite bedside reading.
But I soon found out that Maurice Rheims was much more than a compiler of
dictionaries. He was a leading expert in works of art and a writer of
exceptional range, who wrote as he talked. Whatever he undertook was done
with a lightness of touch and with deliciously ferocious wit.
He was born into an ancient Alsatian Jewish family. His father was General
Léon Rheims, gassed at Douaumont, wounded at Verdun, and one of Marshal
Philippe Pétain's oldest World War One friends. He had high military hopes
for his son, but Maurice Rheims was a duffer at school and failed his
"bachot" or baccalauréat not once but six times. He got his revenge on an
educational system that was not adapted to a boy of such varied gifts when
he was elected in 1975 to the Académie française. In his acceptance speech,
he exulted: "I've finally got my bachot! - the happiest moment in my life!"
During a vacation in Savoie, at the age of 14 he negotiated his first deal:
he bought from a village priest a sculptured oak pulpit canopy from the 15th
century. At the time of his death his luxurious home in Paris had Picassos
and Toulouse-Lautrecs hanging on its walls among a vast accumulation of
precious art objects that make his home almost a succursal of the Louvre.
Rheims's first book was La Vie Etrange des Objets (1960). By 1935 he had
become a valuer and auctioneer. He was very ambitious. The millionaire art
collector Nubar Gulbenkian helped him to take the first important steps in
his career; in 1941, he was in charge of the dispersal of the great Gentilo
de Giuseppe collection. But during the Nazi occupation of France he was
overheard expressing contempt for the boche and insulting an SS officer.
He was taken to the sinister transit camp at Drancy, to await transfer to
Belsen. On his first day there, a gendarme, impressed by his elegant
appearance and courtly manner, mistook Rheims for a lawyer who had lost his
way and accompanied him to the exit. Rheims had a curious reaction to this
comical contretemps, and demanded to be taken back to his cell. In later
life, he said it was the result of a deep sense of solidarity with inmates
destined to extermination in camps in Germany.
After having been put on the list of prisoners to be shot, he was set free
by a last-minute intervention by Pétain, the old army friend of his father.
By then, the Hôtel Drouot auction house in Paris was displaying a warning
notice: "Off limits to dogs and Jews." Unable for the duration of the war to
carry on his professional work, Rheims entered the Resistance and helped
smuggle Jews and Communists from France into Switzerland. Then he managed to
make his way to Algeria, where he jointed the Free French commando regiment
of paratroopers.
At the end of the war, he returned to the Hôtel Drouot and took up his
former post of expert auctioneer in a French art market enjoying its last
days of glory. He became so well known that de Gaulle once hailed him with:
"Well now, Rheims, still going about your nefarious activities?" One of his
first commissions had been to dispose of the estate of Hermann Goering.
Every morning he would scan the death announcements in Le Figaro and invite
himself to the funeral ceremonies of aristocratic notables with a view to
offering the bereaved family his professional services in the dispersal of
the major effects of the dear departed. He was always fair and honest, and
was often invited to share the funeral meats.
His life's work has been estimated at 600,000 blows of the auctioneer's
ivory mallet, from the hat Napoleon wore at Wagram to the Planetarium of the
Palais de la Découverte, by way of various Rembrandts; and thanks to him the
Hôtel Drouot became the leading salesroom of Europe. He directed some
legendary sales, like that of King Farouk's possessions, or the will of
Louis XIV. But like everyone in the profession, he made one or two big
mistakes.
In 1964, he and two accomplices flew to New York intending to acquire the
Parke-Bennet salesroom, on sale at an advantageous price; but when they got
there, they found they could not speak English. The deal was made in favour
of Sotheby's. Rheims sold Fragonard's celebrated "libertine" picture, of an
ardent young lover bolting the door before seducing a distraught beauty, for
only one-tenth of its value, mistaking it for an anonymous work. He sold to
the Louvre for a song a "School of Carache" which was actually Poussin's
Olympios and Marsias, an enormous art scandal that took 30 years to settle
in court.
In 1964, he auctioned the Beistegui collection at the Palazzo Labia in
Venice. In the following year he founded the glossy art magazine
Connaissance des Arts. He sold the Rothschild collection and the René
Dreyfus library of rare books. In 1973, having sold his practice, he acted
as expert at the prodigious Picasso sale. In addition to all this buying and
selling, Rheims was a prolific author, with authoritative monographs of
Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Carpaccio and many others. He was also a clever
and witty novelist, and in 1983 his La Sainte Office gave an acidulous
evocation of French high society through the eyes of Oscar, a very observant
valet.
With Rheims's death, what auctioneer will be equal to the dispersal of his
fabulous collection? His Voltairean shade will doubtless enjoy every minute
of the performance.
James Kirkup