PARIS — A small portrait of Anne Sinclair as a blue-eyed little girl hangs in her impressive townhouse on the Place des Vosges.

Nearby, there’s a late Picasso watercolor of a figure in a wide-brimmed black hat. A replica of a Picasso still life — the original is in a vault — has pride of place above the living-room fireplace.

The artwork is a legacy of Sinclair’s maternal grandfather, Paul Rosenberg, the art dealer of Picasso, Braque, Matisse and others, who amassed a vast collection of French art — and a fortune — before his business was confiscated by the Vichy government. The family survived, but more than 400 paintings were lost, of which 60 are still missing. Last fall, a Matisse emerged in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, and the family is trying to recover it.

Paul Rosenberg is the subject of Sinclair’s new book, “My Grandfather’s Gallery: A Family Memoir of Art and War,” which is being published in the United States this week, two years after its release in France. The book is something of a comeback for Sinclair, one of France’s best-known television journalists and now the editorial director of Le Huffington Post, the site’s French incarnation, after years in which she was perhaps best known as the wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

The lady reappears

Hers is a life with powerful themes — art, Nazis, Jews, money, power, sex — and several next acts. In a wide-ranging conversation last month that touched on art (inspiring), the media (racing to the bottom), anti-Semitism in France (worrisome, but not unduly), French politics (depressing) and the Mideast (even more depressing), Sinclair, 66, came across as friendly, approachable and warm. Her face was topped by dark bangs. She wore a black-and-white silk blouse, black slacks and pink lipstick, and her red-painted nails were visible through peep-toe heels.

But she didn’t reveal much about her inner life. Nor would she talk much about “the incident,” as she called it. “What happened three years ago was not the brightest side of my life, but I can’t be summarized to that,” Sinclair said in fluent English, sitting in a low swivel chair at a small glass table in her high-ceiling study. “All this has been very painful, but it’s far behind now.” She said she started writing the book in 2010, when she was living in Washington with Strauss-Kahn, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and wrote the final pages while living with him under lockdown in a Tribeca apartment, hounded by tabloid reporters, during the months between his arrest in New York in May 2011 on charges of assaulting a hotel maid, and that July, when the charges were dropped.

The portrait of Sinclair as a little girl was done by Marie Laurencin, a rare woman in the male-dominated world of cubism, the muse to poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the first artist to sign with Rosenberg’s gallery, in 1913. “She always made black eyes,” Sinclair said, pointing to another small Laurencin portrait hanging above hers. “And when she painted me, I said, ‘Please, I have blue eyes.’ ”

Even as a child, Sinclair knew how to look after her image. Over the years, she has honed those skills. With media savvy, excellent timing and one of the best Rolodexes in France, she pulled off a significant feat: emerging from a grotesque scandal with her dignity largely intact. She stood by Strauss-Kahn when his libertine tendencies were revealed to the entire globe and bailed him out of jail, and after the headlines faded, the couple quietly divorced in 2012.

By the time her memoir appeared in France in 2012, it was seen as part of Sinclair’s rehabilitation project. Had it come out in 2011, as planned, it would have explained her family fortune — built on culture, that most precious French commodity — to potential Socialist voters for Strauss-Kahn.

Before his fall from grace, he had been expected to announce his candidacy for leadership of that party. (Until she paid $1 million to bail her husband out of jail, most people, even in France, had little idea of her background.)

“The book was basically written for the election campaign, then the news changed that,” said Christophe Barbier, the editor in chief of L’Express, a French weekly. The more left-wing currents in the Socialist party were not enthused about the couple’s wealth. Raphaëlle Bacqué, a journalist for Le Monde and an author of “The Strauss-Kahns,” said, “There’s a big part of the left that contested her as ‘gauche caviar,’ ” roughly, a limousine liberal.

The new book

The book begins when Sinclair — who writes that she once posed for a statue of Marianne, the embodiment of France displayed in government offices — goes to renew an identity document and a bureaucrat questions her about her French bona fides. That, and her mother’s death in 2006, prompts a backward look. Paul Rosenberg, who died in 1959, when Sinclair was 11, inherited the gallery from his father, a former grain merchant who had switched to dealing in Impressionist art. In 1910, Paul set out on his own, opening a large gallery in the fancy Eighth Arrondissement of Paris. “If visitors were unsure about Braque or Léger, Paul invited them upstairs to see softer-contoured works by Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir or Auguste Rodin,” Sinclair writes.

Rosenberg sold works by Géricault, Ingres, Delacroix, Cézanne, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Bonnard and Modigliani, among others. But he was particularly close to Picasso. After they met in the south of France in 1918, Picasso gave Rosenberg the right of first refusal on his paintings.

In 1919, Picasso’s first exhibition at Rosenberg’s gallery introduced his postcubist work. Over the years, the artist and dealer exchanged many letters, now in the archives of the Musée Picasso in Paris, which is reopening this fall after a long renovation.

Throughout the 1930s, with war on the horizon, Rosenberg had the good sense to send works abroad and lend others to museums, including the nascent Museum of Modern Art, whose first director, Alfred Barr, was a close friend. After war was declared in Europe on Sept. 3, 1939, Rosenberg moved his family to New York. They arrived in 1940 and stayed until 1945. Paul opened a New York gallery, which his son, Alexandre, Sinclair’s uncle, kept until the 1980s.

Sinclair writes that when Rosenberg, a World War I veteran and patriot who was hazy on the grim reality back in France, was informed in 1942 that his family had been “denationalized,” he sent a fruitless telegram to the leaders of Vichy, stating: “I am learning of my denationalization by order of 23 February 1942. Protest energetically and have strong reservations. Letter follows.”

But “My Grandfather’s Gallery” isn’t an angry book. Sinclair says that in general, France has owned up to its wartime sins. As for members of her family, they “just suffered materially,” she said. “Of course, the artworks were looted but, well, they didn’t die.”

Sinclair said the family was in touch from 1923 with German and Swiss authorities about “Seated Woman,” the Matisse painting found last fall in the Gurlitt collection. Of the more than 400 paintings recovered from Paul Rosenberg’s original collection, Sinclair has kept four major works, inherited from her mother, but declined to reveal what they were or if they included the Picasso above her fireplace.

In France, there is a popular perception that Sinclair must have sold some art to finance Strauss-Kahn’s legal bills, but she said that wasn’t the case. Still, in 2007, she sold Matisse’s “L’Odalisque, Harmonie Bleue,” inherited from her mother, which fetched $33.6 million at Christie’s.

Back then, it looked as if Strauss-Kahn stood a chance of becoming president of France. Now, Sinclair professes, somewhat unconvincingly, that she wasn’t hoping for that. “I’ve seen the political scene so closely for years that I never dreamt to be part of it,” she said. “But as I’ve said to my children and as I said to my husband: ‘Well, if it is your life, your feeling. If you want to go, I’ll follow. But I’m against it.’”

Her new image

Today, Sinclair seems content. She enjoys working with Le Huffington Post. “She’s truly exceeded all my expectations,” said Arianna Huffington, adding that Sinclair, “a natural” on TV, was helping the site expand its Web video operation. This fall, Sinclair will start a radio interview program. She is now together with Pierre Nora, a French historian and publisher.

Questions linger. What goes through a woman’s mind when she chooses to stay with a husband like Strauss-Kahn? What would she say to the hotel maid, Nafissatou Diallo, if she met her? Perhaps if Sinclair had been interviewing herself, she would have asked these questions. “Yes,” Sinclair said, standing beside the Picasso watercolor.

She smiled. “And I wouldn’t have answered them.”