Claire and Anne Berest never knew their maternal grandfather, Vincente. He was from a famous family, one of four children of the avant-garde painter, Frances Picabia, and his first wife, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia. Before her marriage, Gabriële was a composer and later the intellectual sparring partner, not only of her husband, but of many other leading modernists, including Marcel Duchamp and Igor Stravinsky. But not only did the Berest sisters never meet their grandfather—he died by suicide before they were born—they never knew anyone from his branch of the family. With their new book, Gabriële, the sisters set themselves to the task of trying to discover who their great-grandmother was. Picabia they could learn about from art history books; Gabriële was another matter.
Author of ‘The Postcard’ Taps Into a Lost Family History
Silence about the past is part of what triggered Anne Berest’s triumphant (and best-selling) novel The Postcard, released in France in 2021, and in America in 2023. The Postcard relates the story of Vincente’s wife (Myriam, the Berest sisters’ grandmother), who survived the Holocaust, though her two siblings and parents were killed. The Berest sisters knew this grandmother, but Myriam never spoke much of these shattering losses. The arrival of a mysterious postcard, featuring only the names of the four relatives who were killed, and later an anti-Semitic incident in Anne Berest’s six-year-old daughter’s Parisian classroom, made Anne want to uncover the truth.
Prior to The Postcard, however, Anne undertook another project close to home with her sister Claire, who has authored seven novels and two works of nonfiction, none of which have yet been released in English in the States. Together, they wrote Gabriële, published in France in 2017 but only this week in the U.S., which describes the life of their long-lost great-grandmother. Coming of age in the early 20th century, the youthful Gabriële Buffet devoted herself to musical composition, earning opportunities to study in Paris and subsequently the chance, virtually unheard of for women at the time, to live and study independently in Berlin. When she meets Frances Picabia, a talented (if spoiled) painter, she’s willing to give up everything to be his muse and partner—but she doesn’t become either, in the conventional sense. She challenges and goads Picabia intellectually, pushing him toward abstraction, surrealism, Dada, and other modernist elements that later define his work. The pair never stop finding each other mutually thrilling, though Picabia is unfaithful (wildly so) throughout the marriage. He’s also undependable, irresponsible, and an opium addict. Gabriële puts up with all this, as well as Picabia’s abrupt departures from wherever they happen to be living, and his immature self-absorption. Together, they manage to have four children who they barely parent, employing nannies and often simply leaving the children with Gabriële’s mother. Shockingly, when Francis Picabia dies (even though he and Gabriële were divorced for 35 years at the time of his death), Gabriële exhumes Vincente (the son who committed suicide) so Picabia can take his place, as there isn’t room for both in the family burying place.
Jean Arp, another close friend of the couple, writes, in one of the novel’s epigraphs, “Gabriële is a King, Gabriële is a Queen./She adores bewitchment. Even caught in/a spider web, she remains bright as day.” The novel means to bear this out, entertainingly showing us the nature of her kingdom: the (now well-known) denizens of the bohemian art world in early 20th century Paris and (eventually) New York. For contemporary readers, her devotion to Picabia, the apparent spider of the epigraph, is puzzling, particularly in light of her vivid energy and intelligence.
The drama of Gabriële is less the life-and-death drama that drives The Postcard than the drama of biography, of how an unconventional life unfolds, and the drama of thought, specifically the ideas that change prevailing notions about mimetic art. The Berest sisters excel at offering refreshing interpretations of the artwork they describe, including a particularly welcome extended take on Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircase.
The book is true to life, but published as a novel, given that the sisters are imagining how Gabriële thought about things based on her unpublished and published writing, and what is known of her from other sources. (The French version of the text footnotes this material. The English version has a bibliography but doesn’t attribute most of the quotes, which seems an odd choice for Tina Kover’s otherwise eminently readable translation of the original.) The narrative ends by mentioning Gabriële’s major involvement in the French Resistance, material that is addressed in parts of The Postcard and may be fodder, the sisters have suggested publicly, for a future book.
I confess to not being too interested in that possible future book. It would likely have the breadth, thoughtfulness, and detail of Gabriële, but as the sisters note themselves, Gabriële did not particularly like the limelight. She’d often retreat after having arranged an opportunity or event that highlighted her husband or others. It’s unclear if she would have even wanted a book written about her, though it’s evident why the Berest sisters wanted to uncover this remarkable part of their past (and meet, as they do, living relatives in the process).
Rather than center her again, I wish Anne and Claire would center themselves. They’re so interesting when they let themselves appear at the close of select chapters to mull over their findings. Why not a sequel to address how the Picabia-Buffet inheritance, its gifts and its complications, influences the Berest sisters’ own art, upbringing, and mothering?
Anne Berest and Claire Berest, Gabriële (Europa Editions, April 22, 2025), 350 pp. Translated by Tina Kover.
Debra Spark is a professor at Colby College and the author, most recently, of the novel Discipline, which also deals with the art world.
