How two French sisters rescued their great-grandmother from history

Telegraph

04-05-2025

At first glance, Gabriële Buffet's life story seems to fit a depressingly familiar template: a brilliant young woman meets an egotistical man and finds her artistic ambitions swept aside by his; a talent becomes a muse.
Born in 1881, Buffet launched into life with a fierce intelligence and utter disdain for male attention. By autumn 1898, aged 17, she had become the only woman authorised to study musical composition at the elite Schola Cantorum in Paris. Her next stop was Berlin, where she met the composer Edgard Varèse, the first of many men to be inspired by her radical views on music and art.
Then, at 27, in Paris, Buffet met the 30-year-old impressionist painter Francis Picabia. Wildly impulsive – and, it now seems probable, suffering from undiagnosed manic depression – Picabia was immediately intoxicated by her 'rebel' intelligence and invited her on a road trip to Brittany. For Buffet, it was a potentially life-defining moment: getting in the car would mean abandoning the orchestra with which she played in Berlin.
But, as her granddaughters Anne and Claire Berest put it in their collaborative novel Gabriële, 'it is unthinkable to resist someone like Francis Picabia'. Buffet got in the car. Within months, they were married and she was pregnant with their first child. 'Gabriële's musical career ended,' the Berests write, 'when she met Francis Picabia.'
And yet, speaking over Zoom from Anne's home in the seventh arrondissement of Paris (Claire, at 42 the younger sister by three years, lives an hour from the French capital in Estampes) the sisters tell me that their great-grandmother's story does not benefit from what they call a 'feminist sheen'. Gabriële was no victim, they insist, and Picabia did not exploit her.
Rather, she was, by choice, a conduit for the genius of others. Or, as one of many personal interludes in the book – which combines fact with fiction – has it: 'What's so troubling about her is that no one prevented her from being famous or successful. She was the one who wanted to be forgotten.'
'She had no ego, unlike the men,' says Claire. But she did have an eye for talent and the 'new', and helped to steer entire artistic movements, from Cubism to Dada. Today, Claire suggests, Buffet would have likely been a 'visionary gallerist, who shaped the art scene, someone like Gertrude Stein'. For example, when she and Picabia travelled to America at the height of his fame, Buffet – who spoke fluent English, while Picabia spoke none – took control of his interviews with the press.
Such interviews would go on to define Picabia's legacy. 'Everything 'he' says about painting,' the Berests write, 'harks back to music, so much so that art critics and historians will speak of a 'musicalist' period in his work.' It is clear, for instance, that the following sentence, attributed to Picabia, was really hers: 'I simply equilibrise in colour or shadow tones the sensations which those things give me. They are like the motifs in symphonic music.'
In France, the Berests are literary stars. Anne's novel The Postcard, about Jewish relatives who died in Auschwitz, was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, in 2021. Claire's 2020 novel about Frida Kahlo, Rien n'est noir, won the Elle Readers' Grand Prize. What made them decide to come together to write about their great-grandmother? 'In fact,' says Claire, smiling, 'we had always wanted to write together, to… how do you say…?' She looks at Anne mischievously, who answers: 'Play together!'
They had been searching for the 'right' subject for years. Then, in 2013, Anne read a biography of Marcel Duchamp in which Gabriële Buffet was named as the artist's first love, when he was 24 and she 30 (and still married to Picabia). She went on to make him a name overseas. 'And we had no idea!' Claire marvels. After three years of research, they realised the extent to which their great-grandmother had been overlooked by art historians, despite the archives being full of contemporary references to her influence on the avant-garde. 'Apollinaire, Duchamp, Stravinsky, Calder, Picasso – they all had things to say about her,' says Anne. 'And we made sure to include all our research in the footnotes because we wanted to prove that what we were saying was true.'
They take care, too, to set Picabia's story straight, both with regards to their great-grandmother – 'ultimately [he] could never have forced Gabriële to do anything she didn't want to do' – and to his own legacy, which has become tainted by accusations that he held unsavoury views. After the war, he was arrested for allegedly collaborating with the Vichy regime (while Gabriële joined the Resistance), though he was cleared on lack of evidence.
When I raise the matter, both Berests shake their heads. 'No, no, Picabia was not a fascist,' Claire says. 'He was not an anti-Semite. The truth is, he didn't care about the war. He wanted women, cars, pleasure. He was like a kid – but also a coward.'
I mention that critic Jason Farago has described Picabia's wartime paintings – naked women with Aryan muscle men – as 'Nazi porn'. Anne, immediately exasperated, abandons her excellent English for a withering rebuttal in French: 'Le critique se trompe! (That critic is wrong!),' she says. 'The Nazis would have considered his art degenerate. They would have burnt it. So that is an enormous misreading. Clearly, that critic is very muddled.'
Gabriële is a pleasure to read, the Belle Époque brought back to life in all its splendour. But how did the writing process work? 'We would each write a chapter and then swap, and rewrite each other's,' says Claire. 'We would rewrite so much that by the end we had no idea who had written what.' And did they squabble? 'Of course! There were many fights, many tears. But at the end of the day your sister is the only person who is allowed to tell you what you've written is s---,' Anne shrugs, and they both laugh.
Once the book was finished, the Berests worried how it would be received by one reader in particular: their mother. 'She never spoke about Gabriële,' says Anne, in large part because Gabriële's son, their grandfather Vicente, had died by suicide aged 27, having been neglected by parents who 'loved themselves too much', and their four children not enough. 'He hanged himself right under his mother's bedroom window. He wanted her to find him dead, it's terrible,' says Claire. 'So we just knew Gabriële as our mean great-grandmother who made our mother's father suffer.'
The sisters worried that even the act of writing Gabriële would be seen as a treacherous act. As they write in the book, 'Maybe it took two of us to shoulder the betrayal.'
Eight years have passed since Gabriële was first published in French; has their mother now read it? 'Yes,' says Claire, although 'at first she only pretended she had. She said, 'It's perfect!' and we knew she hadn't, so we said, 'Tell us one thing that happens in it?' And she couldn't!' Claire chuckles. 'She was scared to read it,' adds Anne. 'But once she did, she was proud. The truth is, to create real art, you have to betray. You have to open doors, and look where you were told not to. As long as your purpose is good, everything is OK.'