Empty Mansions

of meeting her. He said Huguette “was strangely withdrawn and had the curious habit of maneuvering backward while engaged in conversation.” As they spoke in one of the large rooms in Anna’s apartment, Huguette stepped back, and the violinist stepped forward, continuing the conversation, “executing a series of mincing steps that ultimately landed her and her partner in conversation at the opposite end of the room.”
    One afternoon in December 1945, just after the end of the Second World War, Anna had a few guests over to 907 Fifth Avenue for one of her home concerts. But the events of that afternoon were most unusual, as Anna found a clever way to solve two problems with a single excursion.
    The first problem was Madame Cézanne.
    “You see Cézanne’s portrait of Madame Cézanne?” Anna told her guests. “My daughter Huguette won’t come in here because she hates the painting so much.”
    Anna had bought
Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress
, one of Paul Cézanne’s portraits of his longtime mistress and eventual wife, many years earlier from a Paris dealer. Apparently, Cézanne didn’t have much understanding of women, and his wife didn’t much care for his paintings of her. One can see why. In this depiction, she is an awkward subject with disfigured hands and a confused or worried look in her eyes. Still, there is something tender or vulnerable in her affect, which is not nearly as angry as in the well-known
Woman in a Green Hat
or as grotesque as in
Madame Cézanne with Unbound Hair
. Yet, as Karine tells the story, something in Madame Cézanne’s look bothered Huguette, who came downstairs to visit her mother less often than Anna would have liked.
    The second problem was how to outfit a new string quartet with proper instruments.
    Anna and Huguette had long sponsored musicians, including the well-regarded Loewenguth String Quartet in Paris, for whom Huguette wrote a check to buy four instruments made by the renowned Amatifamily. Word of the Clark patronage got around, and it was not unusual for musicians to play at Anna’s apartment.

    Because this portrait of a stern Madame Césanne was off-putting to Huguette, Anna found a clever use for it
. ( illustration credit6.6 )
    Anna had been introduced to a cellist in need of a quartet, a cellist who she had thought was dead. Robert Maas was well known for his Pro Arte Quartet of Brussels, which Anna had followed closely. Maas had been reported as killed soon after the Germans invaded Belgium in 1940, but he was only wounded. Stranded in his native country, he was ordered by the Nazis to form a quartet with German musicians. He refused and spent the war playing for meal money in a café in Brussels, while his Pro Arte colleagues escaped to Wisconsin.
    Maas was a forceful cellist, his immense bald head leaning forward as he drove his bow “deep into the strings to produce a tone of unique vibrancy and breadth,” as one fellow player described him. “Yet, for all his dramatic power and fervor, his playing was characterized by classic reserve and impeccable taste.”
    On that afternoon in 1945, with the Germans and Japanese defeated,Maas was in New York, in Anna’s living room, playing Bach sonatas. He was a frequent guest, as Anna had grown quite fond of him. Maas was accompanied on the 1940 Steinway grand piano by Agnes, Huguette’s niece.
    “Robert,” Anna said to Maas, “you must form another string quartet.” If he did, she promised to fund it. But what instruments would the new quartet play, instruments befitting the quality of the players and the reputation of their patron?
    Maas told Anna that he had seenfour remarkable instruments at the New York studio of Emil Herrmann, a dealer in rare instruments. All were made by Antonio Stradivari in Cremona, Italy, between 1680 and 1736, and all had been owned by the Italian violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini in the 1800s. The four had been split up, sold off by Paganini’s heir and illegitimate son. Herrmann had reassembled the group and would sell them only if they stayed together. But who could afford to buy four Stradivarius instruments at once?
    Anna immediately took Madame Cézanne down from the wall and called for the chauffeur. A couple of hours later, she returned home to find Robert Maas and Agnes Albert still playing sonatas. She told them she had gone to Fifty-Seventh Street and Madison Avenue, to Knoedler & Co., one of the favored galleries of the Clarks and their peers. There she