They lived and laughed and loved and left.
Wilson-Garling acquired three vintage prints by Giselle Freund. Two portraits of James Joyce and this third seemingly innocuous photo of a chair and bookshelf. Like buried treasure: this single image revealed a long forgotten story about the friendship between James Joyce and the Leon family. Interesting notations by the photographer on the verso led me down a rabbit hole of research.
Who was Lucie Leon? And why did she have James Joyce’s chair? First, some notes on the portraits of Joyce by Freund.
Joyce hated being photographed, and during the initial session with Giselle Freund he hit his head on a light, which cut his forehead. Joyce yelled at Freund, "I'm bleeding. Your damned photos will be the death of me," which he said, "forgetting in his pain that he had made it a rule never to swear in the presence of a lady." Freund was in a taxi crash right after the photo-session, which caused her cameras to crash to the ground. She called Joyce and said, "Mr. Joyce, you damned my photos — you put some kind of a bad Irish spell on them and my taxi crashed. I was almost killed and your photos are ruined". Being superstitious, Joyce was convinced that his cursing in front of a lady had caused the crash, so he invited Freund back to his home for a second round of photographs. In actuality, the first round of photos survived. Two vintage photographs acquired in the lot are from this first session. Time Magazine used one of these photos for its cover on May 8, 1939. The entire series of photographs (and this anecdote) would eventually be published in 1965 in James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years by Freund and V. B. Carleton and a Preface by Simone de Beauvoir.
The first two images in the acquisition were shot in 1938 during this famed taxi crash shoot. The third, Joyce's Chair at Chez Lucie Leon, although originally thought to be a part of this original shoot, was actually taken by Freund in 1964.
James Joyce, between 1928 and 1939, was an almost daily visitor to the home of Paul and Lucie Leon on the rue Casimir-Perier in Paris. His son Alex recalls: "In writing Finnegans Wake, Joyce was breaking the bonds of language. He would check ways of saying things with my father, who could speak seven languages." Paul Leon was a devoted friend and collaborator. The two often sat at a round table, Joyce in his favorite blue velvet chair.
Nora and James Joyce and Lucie and Paul Leon fled to Vichy near the Swiss border in 1939. It was Leon, who risked his own life in returning to Paris from Unoccupied France in 1941 after his friend's death, in order to rescue many valuable items the Joyces had left in their apartment.
"I remember my father going to Joyce's flat, with my mother and uncle, in spite of the curfew. He put Joyce's papers into 19 brown manila envelopes and brought them to the Irish Embassy, with the proviso that they should not be opened for 50 years [the papers were exhibited at the National Library of Ireland in 1992], to protect people still living," says Leon. "A number of Joyce's things were being put up for auction, because he had not paid rent for some time, and my father, mother and uncle went to the auction and bought back as much as they could. My father felt this was a duty and you would do it for a friend.” (quotes are from a 1998 interview in The Irish Times documenting the opening of the James Joyce center in Dublin.)
Not long after this Paul was arrested in Paris by the Nazis. He was murdered in the deportation of French Jews. This photo is the lot of items he rescued from auction in the living room of Lucie Leon in 1964. The chair - a small, comfortable armchair with mahogany arms - has been re-upholstered since then, but is otherwise unchanged. It now resides along with the other items in the James Joyce Centre in Dublin.