Picasso's War, page 10
The dealer needed his paintings, but how would he get them? Over the next few days, he wrote to as many of his friends in France as he could. As a German national, he knew it would likely be impossible for him to return to Paris. Juan Gris, who was a Spaniard, reported that the French authorities had been summoning foreigners to the town hall in the place where he was staying in the south of the country; he also thought the situation was worse in the capital. “Some have even been threatened with expulsion,” he wrote Kahnweiler.[23] One alternative for the dealer was to enlist in the French Foreign Legion: If he agreed to fight for France, he would be allowed to return to Paris. But taking up arms against his own country seemed as unthinkable as fighting for Germany itself. Finally, Kahnweiler considered enlisting as a medic in the French army, but even this seemed to go against his pacifist principles. Slowly, he confronted the reality that he was going to remain exiled until the war was over.
As long as Kahnweiler was separated from his gallery and his bank accounts in Paris, though, there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t sell his paintings; he couldn’t even pay his artists, including Picasso, to whom he owed a large sum for his latest batch of paintings. At the same time, Kahnweiler was cut off from his clients in Russia and Germany, where he was now officially a draft dodger. The far-flung European network that had brought him such success was coming back to haunt him. Yet he still had one more card to play—in a country that was not involved in the war and which potentially had a large new market for his artists.
In the years when Kahnweiler was aggressively expanding in Central Europe, he had paid little attention to the United States. The country was far away, and he had few connections there; and the reaction to the paintings he had sent to the Armory Show had hardly given him confidence that Americans were ready for his artists.[24] A few months before the war started, however, two young Americans had turned up at Kahnweiler’s gallery with a bold proposal. Robert J. Coady was an Irish American painter with an idealist streak; his business partner, Michael Brenner, was a Lithuanian American sculptor who was based in Paris and had met Picasso and other members of his circle. With money provided by Coady’s mother, they were planning to open a modern art gallery in New York called the Washington Square Gallery. According to their plan, Coady would run the gallery in New York, while Brenner would serve as its Paris agent. They were deeply interested in Kahnweiler’s artists and were prepared to purchase a substantial number of his paintings. They also hoped to serve as his agents in the United States.
Kahnweiler was agnostic, but Coady and Brenner agreed to buy a minimum of 2,500 francs’ worth of art and cover all related costs up front, and in the spring of 1914, he signed a contract with them giving the Washington Square Gallery exclusive American rights to the artists in his stable. At the time the war started, Kahnweiler had sent them an initial consignment of artworks, and they were planning shows of Juan Gris and Picasso for the coming winter. Could the Washington Square Gallery provide a refuge for Kahnweiler’s operations?
As the German invasion of France loomed, Kahnweiler got in touch with Brenner, who was still in Paris and about to return to the United States. As Brenner took in Kahnweiler’s difficult situation, he sensed an extraordinary opportunity. The dealer was now cut off from his gallery, and amid the onset of war, the European art market was virtually frozen. Hundreds of paintings by Braque, Picasso, Gris, and Derain were simply sitting there in Paris. “Let me take them to New York,” he told Kahnweiler.[25] Going further, Brenner suggested that Kahnweiler could come to New York himself and run his business out of their gallery.[26] It should have been a tantalizing prospect. The United States was a wealthy neutral power, and the paintings would be out of harm’s way, where Kahnweiler could access them. And they would be arriving at a moment when Quinn and his friends were trying to give advanced modern art a permanent foothold in New York. Moreover, from what Kahnweiler had heard from his own sources in Paris, it would not be too difficult for Brenner to get the paintings out of France. “I could easily, if I had wanted, have had my things moved out of rue Vignon by friends,” he recalled.
But Kahnweiler would have none of it. For all his readiness to take huge risks on new art, he was oddly inflexible in his own affairs. Just as he had refused to let the talk of war interfere with his annual vacation, he could not quite imagine, even now, with the German army rapidly advancing toward Paris, abandoning the city where he had built his trade. Somehow, he still believed that the war would be over by Christmas and that he would soon be back on rue Vignon, selling to his old clients in Moscow, Prague, and Berlin.
In the end, he balked at sending even some of his paintings to New York. “No, no, we mustn’t do that,” he told Brenner. “We must leave them where they are. Anyway, nothing will happen to them!”[27]
9
THE GRAND ILLUSION
Henry McBride, the New York Sun’s adventurous art critic, was a man of uncommon experience. Having spent his adolescence in a boardinghouse in southern Pennsylvania, he had worked variously as an illustrator for seed catalogs, a teacher of immigrant children on the Lower East Side, and a cattle inspector on transatlantic ships before becoming a newspaper columnist in his midforties. Unlike nearly all his peers, he also knew the contemporary Paris art world. He had been to Matisse’s studio and had at least passing familiarity with many of the artists of Picasso’s generation. And having watched the Armory Show at close hand, he was acutely aware of the peculiar unease that many Americans seemed to feel around modern art.
During the first winter of the war, however, what struck McBride as he wandered around the city was not the familiar resistance to advanced work. To the contrary, it seemed to him that the “wild men” of Paris had suddenly taken over Fifth Avenue. There were the Matisses—three roomfuls—at the erstwhile conservative Montross Gallery. Farther uptown, the Bourgeois Gallery, run by an émigré Frenchman, was showing Van Gogh and Cézanne along with Braque, Derain, and a number of American modernists. At the Washington Square Gallery, though they had managed to get only a single consignment from Kahnweiler, Robert Coady and Michael Brenner were giving the city its first good look at Juan Gris and Diego Rivera. And on East Forty-fourth Street, the new Carroll Galleries, directed by a fashionable young woman named Harriet Bryant, seemed to be surveying the whole course of French modernism from Van Gogh to Picasso.
“Who shall say the return of Cubism is bad for business?” a stunned McBride asked his readers. He had just watched a steady stream of “white whiskered gentlemen and lovely ladies in Persian costumes” filing into the Carroll Galleries’ latest show. This was hardly the crowd that frequented Alfred Stieglitz’s 291. Though Bryant was showing some of the most daring recent paintings and drawings from Paris, she seemed to attract the same Midtown crowd that frequented Delmonico’s, a bastion of the New York establishment on the same street. People left the restaurant with every intention of heading up Fifth Avenue, McBride wrote, but “some invisible force” pulled them into Bryant’s avant-garde gallery instead. “Isn’t that strange?”[1]
By all appearances, the sudden gallery boom was a powerful validation of Quinn’s and his friends’ efforts to bring modern art to New York. In part, it was the war that did it. As Quinn’s friend Frederick James Gregg argued in Vanity Fair, Paris, Moscow, and Berlin had gone “out of business” as far as new art was concerned, leaving New York as the place where “paintings and sculptures are viewed, discussed and purchased.”[2] At the same time a small but growing number of foreign artists, men like Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, had decided to sit out the fighting in the United States, pushing Americans themselves to extraordinary new work. Arthur Davies, the erstwhile landscapist, was absorbing so many new ideas that, according to McBride, he was now putting “post-Impression, cubism, dynamism, and even disintegration…all in one picture.”[3] But the new crop of galleries was also indebted to Quinn’s campaign to repeal the modern art tax, which had overnight eliminated a significant barrier to exhibiting and selling new paintings and sculptures from Europe.
Much harder to account for, though, was the “invisible force” that was shifting public taste and apparently sustaining the scene. After all, Stieglitz had been showing many of the same artists for several years and had rarely made any sales, and the Armory Show, for all the interest it had attracted, was hardly a commercial success. Yet now, apparently, New Yorkers were not only attending numerous shows of the new paintings but actively buying them. Such was the speed of the transformation that Gregg somewhat breathlessly announced that Quinn’s prediction to Congress was already coming true. New York, his Vanity Fair article proclaimed, was now “the world’s new art center.”
In fact, there was another, more straightforward explanation for the boom: the activities of Quinn himself. By now, the lawyer had a growing reputation as the city’s leading promoter of modern art, the man who had backed the Armory Show and almost single-handedly persuaded the U.S. government to change the tax code. Throughout the winter and spring, as New Yorkers marveled at the explosion of modern art exhibitions, the proliferation of new galleries, the foreign artists flocking to the city, and the growing coverage of the new scene by progressive magazines and critics, it was not difficult to find Quinn’s hand in almost every part of it. Just as he had done with the Armory Show, he talked up the shows, got his critic friends to write about them, and subsidized the modernist journals that covered them. When European painters arrived in the United States, it was Quinn who found them jobs, bought them dinner, and if necessary, provided them with funds—or, in Duchamp’s case, a restorative week on the Jersey Shore. (“Duchamp looked thin so I invited him to go down to Spring Lake as my guest,” Quinn explained.[4])
What hardly anyone seemed to realize, though, was that Quinn was also the main driver of the market. When the Montross Gallery staged its big Matisse exhibition, not only did Quinn urge his critic friends to write about it and his professional contacts to go see it, he also took home the two most important paintings in it. It made the show look like a commercial success, despite few other sales. Returning to the same gallery a month later, he single-handedly saved a show of challenging new American art, spending $2,800—an enormous sum for contemporary art at the time—on a whole cache of works by Davies, Kuhn, Charles Prendergast, and Morton Schamberg, among others. Further such large-scale purchases followed throughout the spring: Other people may have attended Montross’s shows, but it was Quinn who bought.
At the Washington Square Gallery, Quinn’s support proved to be a lifeline. Already in the spring of 1914, with the gallery barely open, Quinn had acquired from Coady and Brenner a series of Derain and Picasso prints that had come in the first shipment from Kahnweiler.[5] Soon, he would also buy several Cubist still lifes by Braque, Gris’s mathematically inspired Man in a Café, and a Derain self-portrait.[6] And Quinn was buying more and more from Stieglitz as well, including a pair of Brancusi sculptures that laid the ground for what would soon be the most important avant-garde sculpture collection in the world. Still more intense, though, was his activity at the upscale Carroll Galleries, whose business so intrigued Henry McBride. In February, when the gallery put on a show of the American modernist Maurice Prendergast, Quinn took home sixteen paintings all at once, more or less assuring the show’s success. And in March and April, Quinn bought four Fauvist works by Raoul Dufy, Duchamp’s Chess Players, a work by the Cubist theorist Albert Gleizes, and three Cubist paintings by Jacques Villon, nearly all of them from a single exhibition.[7]
Sometimes, Quinn’s frenzied buying stood in for the market itself. In the middle of 1915, Marius de Zayas, the Stieglitz associate who had organized the 1911 Picasso show, decided to open his own gallery, called the Modern Gallery. Observing the apparent success of the new crop of dealers, he was confident that, unlike 291, his enterprise would be able to “pay its own way” by bringing the best new art to mainstream collectors, or what he called “the purchasing public.” With financial backing, de Zayas was able to mount an impressive series of small shows devoted to Van Gogh, Picasso, Braque, Derain, Brancusi, and Marie Laurencin—the avant-garde painter known for her elegant, elongated figures who was part of Braque and Picasso’s circle before the war—but he was mistaken about the purchasing public. “In the three years of its existence,” he later wrote, “there were only two buyers, Arthur B. Davies, who knew all there was to be known about buying pictures, and John Quinn, who just bought and bought.”[8]
Yet nothing better captured the extraordinary lengths to which Quinn was prepared to go to spur the new trade than the mysterious bulk sale of Picassos from the Carroll Galleries in the spring of 1915. At the time the war started, Picasso’s work had utterly failed to gain traction in the United States. There was Stieglitz’s disastrous 1911 exhibition, with its eighty-one unsold drawings. At the Armory Show two years later, the only Picasso to find a buyer was the small watercolor acquired by Davies. And in the fall of 1914, Stieglitz had shown a new group of works by Picasso and Braque—works he had gotten from the exiled painter Francis Picabia—that produced such dismal results that he had been forced to make embarrassing excuses. (According to McBride, he blamed the total lack of sales on the fact that “all the millionaires have moved uptown.”[9])
In the second week of March, however, Harriet Bryant opened the third and most ambitious of her shows of French modern art. By her gallery’s own account, the show set out to provide “a complete survey of the evolution of Cubism from its beginnings to the present day.”[10] However extravagant the claim, the show was filled with advanced work by artists who were still largely unknown in New York. Starting with a few post-Impressionist paintings by Van Gogh and Gauguin, the show went on to present works by a half dozen leading Cubists, including Roger de La Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Jacques Villon, and others. The centerpiece, though, was an exceptional group of Picassos, spanning from his Blue period to analytical Cubism, all of which were appearing in the country for the first time. McBride, who had tried unsuccessfully to meet Picasso in Paris before the war, was floored. Just consider, he asked in his Sun column, “the gravity of the public exhibition of seven Picassos in New York.”[11]
McBride was not the only one who was impressed. Critics and visitors flocked to the show, which was accompanied by an elegant bound catalog, printed by one of the city’s top printers, with an essay on the seven Picassos by Gregg. (“If anybody is not able to see their intrinsic beauty and power,” he wrote, “so much the worse for him.”[12]) That the gallery had managed to bring over such recent work from Paris during wartime—paintings, not drawings—was all the more surprising. Still, given New York’s previous track record with Cubism, few expected the Picassos would find buyers. Surely, this would be a show to acclimatize the public rather than to generate sales.
But then came the bombshell. Shortly after the opening, the Carroll Galleries announced that five out of the seven Picassos had already been bought by an anonymous collector. Observers of the city’s art scene were tantalized. Finding an American buyer for a single Picasso painting was rare enough; selling a group of them, before they had been seen by critics and the public, was almost unimaginable. Even rival dealers were baffled. After all, there were only a handful of serious collectors of twentieth-century modern art in the entire country—people like Quinn and Davies—and they were well known. Fresh from his own most recent Picasso failure, Stieglitz was determined to solve the mystery. One day in mid-March, he decided to go see Bryant in person.
In both decor and clientele, the Carroll Galleries was as different from Stieglitz’s Spartan 291 rooms as Paul Rosenberg’s Right Bank emporium was from Kahnweiler’s rue Vignon storefront. Occupying an airy former design studio, the Carroll Galleries exuded a sense of refinement and glamour, a seductive Peitho to 291’s fearsome Prometheus. The walls were lined with gray silk, and the two main rooms were spacious, with artworks laid out in an uncrowded display; the whole place seemed to have a sort of studied affluence about it. “The spots of color upon the silvered walls had that indefinable air of being smart, and important and the real thing, even before the spots were examined in detail,” McBride wrote, after one visit to the gallery.[13] In many ways, the look was everything that Stieglitz, in his anticommercial purism, resisted.
Yet Stieglitz could not but have a certain grudging admiration for Bryant, the gallery’s young and enterprising proprietor. Slim, tall, and smartly dressed, she was an early forerunner of the art world power woman—a type that, a century hence, would become a fixture of the international gallery scene. At the time, though, she was virtually one of a kind, the only major female art dealer in New York. And though she had no prior experience in the art world, she also appeared to be remarkably successful. Try as he could, however, Stieglitz was unable to make any headway on the Picasso mystery. Soon after, he sent another associate to make inquiries, but Bryant told both of them that she was under strict orders not to mention the buyer’s name.
What Stieglitz couldn’t pry out of Bryant was what Quinn had privately relayed to his close friend, the critic James Huneker. “I hope you have seen the Picassos,” Quinn wrote to him, a few days after the show opened. “Strictly entre nous, I have bought five of them but that is very very confidential.”[14] At first glance, Quinn’s insistence on anonymity was puzzling. After all, his activities in the modern art world had long been well known, and he had never objected to publicity. Moreover, he had been especially eager to get attention for this show in particular, urging as many of his contacts as possible to go to it, sending out copies of the catalog, praising Gregg’s essay on Picasso, and calling the paintings “the best pictures that have been shown in this city this winter.” Yet apart from Gregg, Huneker, and a few other close friends, he told no one that he had already arranged to buy the five Picassos back in late February, more than two weeks before the show opened.[15]
