This is the third article in a three-part series detailing the life and work of painter Diane Esmond, whose surviving collection lives with her son, Victor Wallis, in Somerville, Massachusetts. Its details are pulled, substantially, from interviews with her descendents and writer and researcher Eloise Duguay; excerpts of letters she wrote to her son; and information published by art historians working to uncover collections plundered by Nazi forces during World War II. Readers should begin with part 1 and 2: “Expectations of a Woman” and “Plundered”.
A story in the walls - Adrianna
In the 1980s, there were fewer than 300 people living in Corrençon-en-Vercors, a village nestled in the alpine foothills of the French Prealps. Among them, a girl was growing up in a renovated farmhouse decorated with lovely furniture and paintings passed down through generations of her family. Its walls were hung with a collection of striking oil paintings of all sizes, but to the child, they were nothing more than a part of the walls. Even when she herself began painting at age eight, she thought little of her family’s rich array of artworks. There were few stories about where they came from, as her father, Diane Esmond's younger son, Spencer Wallis—who would have known their origins—died when she was an infant.
Adrianna Wallis grew into her identity as an artist slowly. She first went to business school and worked for a while at design firms. Still, she was drawn to fine arts and, at 27, began a degree program studying them. It was two years after graduating, while at an artist's residency program in Colombia, where she was struck by the nation’s rich jungles and tropical forests and reminded of the paintings that hung on her walls as a child, paintings her grandmother had done of lush forestscapes like these.
That sparked an idea within her that lay dormant for six years.
Then, in 2021, after interviewing Adrianna about her own work, Adrianna's friend Eloïse Duguay began researching to write a book about Esmond. It was her interest that finally prompted a phone call between Adrianna, Duguay, and Adrianna’s uncle, Victor Wallis. That call was the first thread pulled in a tapestry that would fall to reveal a striking family history.
Unseen paintings - Victor
Victor Wallis, the eldest son of painter Diane Esmond, had a similar experience to his niece. When growing up, he remembers a painting of a clown hanging in his father’s home office. It is a somber piece, dappled in reds and grays, its subject appearing tired where he sits slumped and alone outside a circus venue. Unlike the other paintings of his mother’s that adorned their walls, this one was from 1935, before World War II had displaced his family from France to the United States. But Victor never wondered about the discrepancy. “It was just there somehow,” he said. “It’s amazing how you take for granted certain things if you grow up with them.
After her death, most of Esmond’s collection was shipped overseas to her son’s home in Somerville, Massachusetts. What Victor could fit, he and his wife Inez Hedges hung on their walls, turning their three-story home into a lived-in museum. The remainder is stored in the couple’s basement, which they installed with climate-controlling technology to preserve the paintings. Still, for many years, he did not think about the origins of “The Clown”.
It was in 2019 that an Austrian scholar named Patricia Helletzgruber reached out to Victor with news. After retiring, she had become an art historian and began studying the theft of French art by World-War-II-German occupation forces. In her work, she uncovered the name Diane Esmond. What she learned, she shared with the painter’s one surviving son.
During the war, 43 of Esmond’s paintings were confiscated. Of those, 30 are marked as destroyed and another 14 were marked as restored to the artist, but only four were located, meaning they were returned to Wallis or that he was able to trace them elsewhere. That any paintings from this era were returned to Esmond’s family is astonishing.
When the winds began to turn against German forces in the mid-1940s, Nazi troops were faced with the urgent need to deal with the highly valuable art collection they had plundered and stored in the Jeu de Paume museum. Some works—including 30 of Esmond’s listed above—were destroyed: slashed through, or burned. Others, considered “degenerate” art, were loaded onto trains to be shipped to Germany.
Train 40044, or Aulnay Train, held the work of over three dozen artists, including Diane Esmond. This train never made it out of Aulnay-sous-Bois station, where it was intercepted by French resistance soldiers, some of whom lost their lives to protect the work inside.
Still, the knowledge of which paintings were on Train 40044 could easily have been lost amidst the chaos of war if not for the watchful eye of Rose Valland. Valland began working, unpaid, at the Jeu de Paume museum in the 1930s. When the war began, Nazis co-opted the museum to house their collection of plundered work. The operation was highly secretive and no French officials were allowed in the galleries. Valland, though, was unassuming, harmless, a woman, and, thus, permitted to stay. For four years, she spied on the largest art heist in history, fastidiously recording what entered the museum and what happened to each piece afterward. Doing so, her life hung in peril, threatened by both sides of the war at different times.
Her records are the reason the world remembers what happened to much of the most influential works and collections from the 20th century, including Esmond’s.
Esmond’s surviving works that were returned to her son include, “The Clown”, “Loge d’actrices” (actresses’ dressing room), “Joueurs de cartes” (card players), and “Femme au singe” (woman with monkey).
Later, Victor learned that one—the portrait “La Femme avec Carte”, which translates to Woman with Cards—hangs in a Delaware State museum, making it among the first of Esmond’s works to be in a museum collection.
When Adrianna reached out to him, Victor was eager to connect her with Helletzgruber to share what she had begun to piece together about Esmond's story.
The Call
Four people joined the call in 2021. Adrianna, Duguay, Victor, and Helletzgruber. Helletzgruber shared what she knew about Esmond and the items that had been stolen from her family during WWII.
“What struck me was the resonance,” said Adrianna. For years, she had been using art to explore the connection between objects and memory, how the loss of these items impacts people’s relationship with the past. What did it mean for an object to disappear, to wane, to be gone entirely? She had even traveled to Colombia for a residency program led by an internationally renowned artist who explored the concepts of erasement and disappearance through his work. “I thought meeting him would help me understand why I was, in my work, so often doing … these kind(s) of gestures of erasement,” she said.
All her life, she had lived among stories told by objects left behind by people no longer around to tell them, props from a play long abandoned by its cast. Through her art she could ask what it meant to walk through that set and reconstruct the script.
Adrianna dialed in to the call expecting to gather some biographical details about her grandmother that might inform a project on feminism and 20th-century women in art. What she learned in those minutes, however, set her on a new trajectory.
Recovering a family history
She put down the phone and began Googling information on her grandmother and the works that were stolen and destroyed by German forces. She found a trove of records. 15 days later, by coincidence, the art historian Sophie Julliard reached out to Victor. She was working on a thesis project on spoliated artists during WWII and had learned about Esmond in the process. Victor connected her with Adrianna.
“She comes to my place, open(s) her laptop full of (information) about my grandmother: articles from the 30s, and the first inventories of my family,” said Adrianna. Julliard also sent her photos of the Einsatzstab Reichsführer Rosenberg (ERR), which coordinated the seizure of
Jewish-owned cultural artifacts in France during the occupation, occupying the Esmond family home.
A few weeks later, the two traveled together to the Archives Diplomatiques de la Courneuve (Diplomatic Archives) near Paris and found files on Esmond revealing detailed lists of the objects that had been plundered from her family during WWII. At some point after the war, French administration contacted Esmond and many others, asking them to remember what had been in their families' homes so that historians could record, and potentially locate, the missing items.
Esmond had been fastidious in her response. She was used to looking out over a scene, a landscape, a room, and analyzing it, breaking it down into shapes and colors. This had been her process as a painter: to go to a place and sketch it, detailing with notes the colors she would later fill in. When she returned to her studio, her lines and notes would be her template.
She remembered the contents of her past home in the same vivid detail.
These inventories, both the Esmonds' and those of other families, became the basis of Adrianna’s work. She began to explore the idea of emptiness, inspired by how she imagined these people’s flats would have looked and felt after they were stripped of the objects that made them a home. She delved into the complexities of spoliation, including denial about it and the taboo that sometimes surrounds the topic.
Duguay and Helletzgruber were equally inspired by the call and both are currently working on books about Esmond’s life.
While reading through letters Esmond left behind, Duguay began to connect with Esmond’s story. “I really became very passionate about her, the paintings, her work and the choices she made to remain a free artist. In her time, it was very difficult,” said Duguay.
In high-society families at the time, she said, “as a woman, you (had) duties and you [had] to show that the way you look and the way you behave in society is decent.” Most women felt the weight of others’ expectations for them to marry well and pursue a family. This was not true for Esmond, she said. “She was not thinking like this. She was completely independent. She married for love and divorced against social expectations, devoted herself fully to her artistic vocation despite her role as a mother, and chose France as her home, despite exile.”
Still, that independence came at an unfair cost. “(Esmond) was really invested in this independence … it was her priority. And yet she wasn’t fully able to escape … the guilt that often comes with a woman digressing from her path,” said Duguay. This shows up most in her correspondence with her son after leaving New York for London. “You can feel the guilt in these letters.”
Duguay sees the events of Esmond’s life, her ambition and success, the tragedies she endured, and the reaction of society to her choices and resulting work as a rich representation of the 20th-century and gender politics of the time.
“As a person, as an artist, as a woman today, I want to write about how I absorbed her. How, with her life, she inspires me every day. The revelations and torments she went through throughout her life echo our own time and conditions,” said Duguay.
Esmond’s persona, which today comes across as attractively mysterious, driven, and demure, did her no favors during her lifetime, making her an unappealing candidate for artistic fame in the 20th century. Duguay said that one of the last reviews that was written about Esmond’s work during her lifetime was by a male journalist who diminished her exhibition to a reflection of her sensitivities as a woman. “Every time I read it, I feel enraged,” she said. “Because … I would hate a man to speak about my work like this … He’s not speaking about her work; he’s speaking about her social condition.”
To Duguay, reviews like this show how Esmond may have been disenfranchised of the credit she deserves for advances to the art world. “She was not credible enough as an artist, maybe,” said Duguay. “It was not sexy at this time to be rich and to be a woman.”
Esmond’s son agrees that her legacy has not yet been fully honored. For decades, Victor has worked to help elevate his mother’s legacy, hoping her collection might finally earn the widespread recognition he is sure it deserves. He and his wife have facilitated exhibitions of her work at Berklee College of Music and the Community Church of Boston. They continue to look for new opportunities to showcase her work in the United States and Europe.
Victor helped produce a short film and a recorded webinar that detail parts of Esmond’s story and observations from contemporary art critics. He also preserved some biographical information in an online portfolio.
Esmond’s work continues to impress audiences, including contemporary critics who note the similarity between her paintings and those heralded as 20th-century greats. But Wallis has struggled to find a permanent home for the collection. Several museums he reached out to in the area declined the collection. He has since turned to private buyers. The greatest interest that has emerged for her work in recent years has come from historians exploring stories of art plundered by Nazis during WWII.
Despite the lack of institutional engagement with Esmond’s work, her legacy has been deeply impactful to many individuals, particularly women for whom her story feels personal.
“My goal has been to gain for her … recognition … beyond what she gained during her lifetime,” said Victor. He has felt responsible for uplifting her legacy since receiving her collection, but the pressure to do so has been growing. “Increasingly, over the last few years, especially as I realized, ‘I have all these paintings; what’s going to happen when I die?’” With burgeoning interest from Adrianna, Helletzgruber, and Duguay, as well as from the local art community, he said, hope for the collection’s future “(is) just beginning to glimmer.”
Read part I and II of this series: Expectations of a Woman and Plundered
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