Seeking Berthold

Maria was a lovely woman. Full of enthusiasm and joy despite a hard life, and having lost her husband. He had died in 1968 I think, just a few years before we met. We had tea, or was it coffee, in their tiny apartment on rue du Vieux-Colombier, not far from St-Sulpice and the trendy cafes of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The apartment was on the walk-up level, one floor above the elevator limits, as befitted an artistic couple on a sub-modest income. Pat and I met her once again, and she showed us Berthold’s paintings.

They were stored carefully under the bed. He had suffered from arthritis and his painter’s hands were too crippled to produce the large canvases which were then most popular amongst the art buyers of the day. Besides, he hadn’t had much public exposure. In the one show he had at a provincial gallery in the Pas-de-Calais region, the Curator wrote:

Le Monde a ignore Bertold Bartosch. Parce qu’il ne pouvait plus faire du cinéma, il a consacré les huit dernières années de sa vie à la peinture.

Born in the land of Rilke, he had made his way to Berlin where he was involved with the artistic ferment of the post-WWI era, a period which saw artistic talent crossing all borders. There he became involved in movies and made a remarkable film, l’Idée, based on a story and woodcuts by Masereel. Subsequently his anti-war and anti-fascist stance led him and Maria to settle in Paris, where he worked painstakingly on another film. But war overtook them and it was destroyed before it was completed.

Many months after Pat and I had dined at the Vagenende with Maria, I sent her a letter and received no response. Some time later her neighbours, the Flannerys, kindly sent me a postcard to tell me she had died. But where are the paintings? Some months ago I contacted the current management at the Musée de l’Hotel Sandelin in Saint-Omer, where Berthold’s work had been shown in 1973. There has been no reply.