Paris abode re-created
Retrospective of French designer includes virtual visit to apartment.
Nazi guards saw the children in the back seat: my future father-in-law, then a redheaded teenager; his younger brother; and their little sister. The sentries did not see their father, lying on the floorboards beneath a blanket or a rug. Later, Jane would wonder if it was one of the rugs Chareau had made for the apartment.
The family went to Geneva and to Lisbon, Portugal. From there it was on to Havana, where for a while my future father-in-law was a classmate of a wealthy local — Fidel Castro. Eventually, they reached New York.
“Coming from war-torn Europe,” Jane said, “my father always said there was absolutely no place more beautiful than Broadway in 1942.”
Chareau had an impressive art collection. Da Costa Meyer said he had bought the second painting by Piet Mondrian sold in Paris. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first had gone to a Chareau client.)
The Chareaus also had a painting by Amedeo Modigliani, she said, as well as one by Georges Braque, which hung above their piano and is part of the exhibition.
Da Costa Meyer’s research was painstaking, and sometimes painful. She traced how the Gestapo had taken many of Chareau’s pieces from his clients.
As we left the museum, Jane said the most that she had expected to see was some furniture. She was amazed at what da Costa Meyer had found, including a letter from Chareau to someone who worked for him. It said to go to various clients’ homes and attend to this or that concern.
Typing along, Chareau, or his secretary, had misspelled my wife’s family’s name. I know that feeling. I did the same thing after our first date.