The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
The art of living
Clementina Stiegler, daughter of the artist Caziel, combines modern life with his legacy at the family home in Somerset. By Jo Leevers. Photographs by Penny Wincer
an old French clock hangs on the wall above clementina Stiegler’s dining table. It is handsome but has no hands. ‘That was my father’s idea,’ she explains. ‘he said, “If you have friends for dinner, you don’t want them looking up to check the time.” Instead, dinners were for conversation and stories – my father did love to tell a tale.’
and what stories. Stiegler’ s father was the artist caziel,bo rn at the beginning of the 20 th century near kraków.Stiegl er grew up hearing of how, after the First World War broke out, a young caziel and his family had fled through their war-torn homeland to revolutionary Moscow, and then into the frozen wastes of Siberia, before returning to Poland. of how, aged 31, he left Poland to take up a scholarship at thee co led es Beaux-arts in Paris, where he caught the eye of edouard Vuillard and went on to work alongside Georges Braque, constantin Brâncuşi and le corbusier. of how Picasso took caziel under his wing, once clasping him in a bear hug and saying, ‘You and I, we are the same, we are artists in exile .’ and of how a British society beauty, the artist catherine Sinclair (daughter of Sir archibald Sinclair, churchill’s second in command during the First World War and one-time leader of the liberal Party), fell for this ‘penniless rogue’.
The whirlwind romance reached a
‘War and struggle had followed my father around. But when my parents came here, he found love, a family and a home’
gentler equilibrium back in England, in this house on the Somerset Levels. ‘ War a nd st r uggle had followed my father around. But when my parents came here, he found love, a family and a home,’ says Stiegler.
Surrounded by meadows and waterways, the converted mill-house is now Stiegler’s home, which she shares with her partner, Ben Van Sommeren, an equestrian trainer. When Caziel and Sinclair pitched up here in 1969, the house was a ruin–a dilapidated Edwardian villa in the middle of an overgrown field, its boundaries marked out by loops of barbed wire. The 10year-old Stiegler was horrified by what seemed like a desolate plot.
‘Until then, we’d lived in an idyllic farmhouse outside Paris,’ she explains. ‘It was a charmed life, where horses worked the land, my parents painted and I ran around t he village with all the other barefoot ragamuffins.’
Caziel set about modifying the house himself, adding more rooms ‘in a very ad hoc way, using shed timbers, old bricks, panels from an old rusted caravan, whatever was to hand’.
Stiegl er moved back into the unconventional house in 1991, when her son Max was a baby, and has worked variously as an artist, a stylist and a florist (‘ I did like doing flowers for Princess Diana ,’ she says breezily ). Recently, she has focused on renovating the house, reworking the hotchpotch of rooms her father built into a single open-plan space that now serves as a kitchen-diner and living room.
‘I wanted to retain the integrity of my father’s original work, but finish it in a more contemporary way,’ she says. ‘I have a very strong feeling that, if he’d had the money back then, this is very close to what he would have created – a sociable big room with lots of light and plenty of wall space for paintings.’
Stiegler brought in Andrea Pyle, an architectural designer at O2i Design, to turn her imagined space into a reality. The house’s old and new sections are
now connected, and the original part of the house includes the bedrooms, a study and a snug, all lined with canvases by Caziel, including several portraits of Sinclair.
‘My mother was a debut an te, expected to marry a duke or the like,’ Stiegler says. ‘But she couldn’t bear all those stuffed-shirt suitors. She’d say, “Oh, he’s so yawn-yawn,” or, “He’s such a drug-on-the- market”–meaning a man was as dull as a sedative.’
The same could never be said of Caziel. In 1952, Sinclair was studying art in Paris and preparing for her first major show there. Caziel was visiting the gallery next door, drifted in, chatted briefly and then left. ‘The gallery owner, Jeanne Castel, hissed at my mother, “Don’t you know who that is? Run after him, say thank you for coming !”’ Sinclair did as she was bid, calling, ‘Monsieur!’ Caziel – so the story goes – turned around and greeted her with a passionate kiss. ‘She said it took her two days to recover,’ says Stiegler.
Caziel was still married to his first wife, Lut ka Pink, a lt hough she was soon to move to America. ‘People say she literally pushed my father into my mother’s arms, saying, “Je te le donne” – “I give him to you.”’ When Sinclair told her father of the affair four years later, against all expectations he was ‘charmed and delighted’ by Cazi el, meaning the two could finally marry.
Together with Max, now marketing manager at leading art fair Masterpiece London, Stiegler feels duty-bound to look after the artistic legacy of her home. Her next goal is getting a screenplay about Caziel’ s life into production. ‘They did the best for me and now it’s my turn to look after their work,’ she says of her parents. ‘This house is very much a family home, but it has so many more stories to tell.’
Picasso took Caziel under his wing, once clasping him in a bear hug and saying, ‘You and I, we are the same’