Picasso's War, page 11
But Quinn had another motive for secrecy about the Picasso sale. At other galleries, he had rapidly established himself as the city’s dominant player. In this case, however, he was doing far more than that. As his advance purchase made clear, he had prior knowledge of what Bryant was showing. Not only was he accounting for the lion’s share of her gallery’s sales; he was also closely involved in the gallery’s operations. The reason he was able to buy the Picassos so early was that he himself had procured them from Ambroise Vollard in Paris and arranged for them to be in the show. At the Carroll Galleries, Quinn was not just the chief client. Much as he had been at the Armory Show, he was also the gallery’s chief backer.
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Quinn’s involvement with Bryant’s enterprise had begun in 1914, a few months after the collapse of his initial plans to establish a permanent exhibition space for modern art on Fifth Avenue. That spring, he had met Bryant, an attractive interior decorator who ran her own design studio in Midtown. Impressed by her poise and her understanding of affluent taste, he decided to help her transform her studio into a new kind of art gallery. Despite her lack of art world experience, the arrangement seemed to offer considerable advantages: Quinn had contacts in Paris and knew many artists; Bryant was at home among uptowners and had a talent for creating stylish and inviting spaces. She could be responsible for the day-to-day management of the gallery, while he supervised the operation from behind the scenes. For additional modern art expertise, he enlisted Walter Pach, a trusted associate who knew Paris and had assisted Kuhn and Davies with the Armory Show. The new venture would not be the museum-like space that Quinn originally envisioned, but it would offer the chance to pitch living art to an entirely new audience.
But then the war started, and almost immediately threatened to derail their plans. Improbably, the Germans had reached the outskirts of Paris within weeks; as British and French casualties quickly reached the tens of thousands, Quinn began hearing from friends in Europe about the unfolding horror. It also put a stark new perspective on the artists Quinn wanted to show, many of whom were now in the fighting. “The war is indeed horrible, tragic, awful beyond words,” he wrote the director of the Contemporary Art Society in London, who was trying to create a fund for painters and sculptors serving in the war. “If later on your suggestion of raising a small fund seems to be practicable, I will do what I can.”[16]
At first, given the circumstances, gathering artworks in Paris seemed out of the question. But staging shows in the United States, Quinn felt, would be another way to support threatened artists, and after the French stopped the German advance at the Marne, he decided it was calm enough to send Pach to Europe. (To reduce the expense of the trip, they shared costs with the Montross Gallery, for which Pach had agreed to select the Matisses.) Still, the wartime mission was risky, and Quinn supplied Pach with $1,100 in gold, as well as a letter of introduction from former U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt.[17] In the event, the journey went smoothly, but with so many galleries shut and most artists at the front, Pach had considerable difficulty getting art. Complaining that Pach’s initial Paris haul amounted to “chicken feed,” Quinn eventually persuaded Vollard to relinquish the Picassos and other paintings, which, together with other sources, provided the makings of Bryant’s three French shows that winter.[18]
Almost immediately, the Carroll Galleries attracted notice—as much for its unusual look as for what it contained. In its first show, the gallery announced that it aimed to put the new art “in surroundings that have none of the deadness of a museum, or the baldness of an ordinary gallery,” but that “suggest life itself and places where people live.”[19] The atmosphere was enhanced by the gallery’s socially adept proprietor, and critics like McBride had taken notice. Though it would be several years before Quinn would meet Paul Rosenberg, his and Bryant’s efforts to domesticate the avant-garde were remarkably similar to what the French dealer had set out to do a year earlier in Paris.
By the time of her third French exhibition, the one with the seven Picassos, Bryant was getting frequent attention from the Times, the Sun, and The Evening Post, as well as from magazines like Vanity Fair and Puck. She also was spending more and more time with Quinn. In February, while they were planning the Cubism show, he took her to a marionette performance in Little Italy; soon after, he invited her on a motoring trip to Rye, New York, together with another lady friend, Belle da Costa Greene, the remarkable librarian and director of J. P. Morgan’s rare book collection. Later, Bryant joined Quinn and a small group of his friends for a getaway on the Jersey Shore. Such was their closeness that spring that at one point he felt it necessary to dispel rumors—however accurate they might be—that they were romantically involved.[20]
In reality, however, the gallery was hardly selling any art. Overwhelmingly, it was Quinn’s purchases, and Quinn’s alone, that accounted for what little commercial success Bryant had. Again and again, when a show reached the end of its run, she found herself saddled with large quantities of artworks; again and again, Quinn would acquire a large portion of them. Even after buying the five Picassos, Quinn came back two months later and bought one of the remaining two in the show, another striking Cubist picture. And at the end of the season, when Bryant was still left with a large inventory of unsold works, Quinn swooped in and bought five André de Segonzacs; five sculptures by Raymond Duchamp-Villon; nine Dufys; a porcelain panel, a ceramic nude, and two paintings by Georges Rouault; and three works by Auguste Chabaud, a Frenchman he put in the lesser rank but nonetheless felt he had to support since he was fighting in the war. (“I know this isn’t the way to buy pictures,” he told Pach.[21])
By late spring, Quinn was accumulating advanced art at a frightening pace. Almost every week, a fresh load of artworks was delivered to his ninth-floor apartment; the paintings accumulated in stacks in his guest bedrooms, the sculptures lined the hallways or cluttered desks and tables. Despite the accelerating pace of his acquisitions from Bryant’s gallery, he did not slow down his purchases elsewhere. While he kept his Carroll Galleries Picassos secret from Stieglitz, he did not hesitate to buy frequently from Stieglitz himself, including, that summer, yet another important Picasso, an earlier Cubist watercolor from the artist’s “African” phase.[22] “I think I have bought more modern art this year than anyone else in America,” he wrote Vollard.[23]
What was perhaps even more striking, though, was the modest resources with which Quinn had achieved this dominance. As a top Wall Street lawyer with an almost legendary capacity for work, he was handsomely compensated, if not at anything close to the multiples that someone in his position would enjoy today. At times, he would receive payments of $10,000 or more for a case, a considerable sum. Yet Quinn could not come close in spending power to a figure like the Philadelphia collector Albert Barnes or the Washington, D.C., patron Duncan Phillips. He had to pay his law partners, and despite his continual earnings, he could often just barely keep up with his general cultural patronage and his art purchases, which usually amounted to no more than a few thousand dollars each. Even in later years, when his earnings grew, he would complain that “Renoir is beyond me in price.”[24] Indeed, in the letter to Vollard boasting of his success, he also informed the dealer that he needed “a month or two” before he could pay the first installment on the six Picassos he had bought that spring for 21,500 francs, or about $3,800. “Collections have been very slow here,” Quinn explained.
If Quinn’s buying spree had come at a bargain, it was also yielding dramatic results. With extraordinary speed—and despite a war and the virtual impossibility of travel—Quinn was beginning to amass a distinguished, if uneven, collection of avant-garde art. Vollard’s Picassos alone were an exceptional catch, including three of the artist’s most important Blue period paintings, as well as a Rose period masterpiece and two important Cubist works. At the same time, Quinn’s own art education was progressing rapidly. If during the Armory Show he had begun to feel an unformed attraction to the bracing abstractions of Picasso and Braque and the dazzling colors of Derain and Matisse, now he was beginning to understand these artists as seeking to lay out important new pathways for art itself. As he explained to one acquaintance, the works on view at the Carroll Galleries were difficult, but they also captured the complexity of an era in which there were no longer any easy, comforting truths. “They are not story-telling pictures, they point no moral, they are not part of the ‘uplift’ and the artists are not interested in any movement outside of painting or sculpture,” he wrote. “But they are alive.”[25]
As the year wore on, however, Quinn began to have nagging doubts that his broader strategy was succeeding. For many of the American artists he supported, he knew that his purchases were often the only thing separating them from destitution. “The advanced men, the courageous, younger, progressive, honest fellows, are not bought at all,” he wrote the expatriate sculptor Jacob Epstein that summer. “Some of them have said that I saved the art season last year.”[26] For the European artists, the brutal truth was that other American collectors were hardly more prepared to spend money on them than they had been before the Armory Show. “As you know, some of the very wealthy men here buy the so-called Old Masters,” Quinn told Vollard. “But it has been very difficult, if not impossible, to sell modern art this year.”[27] For all his effort, Quinn was no longer making the market. He was the market.
The experience of the Carroll Galleries was especially illusory. Almost as rapidly as Bryant captivated New York society, her star seemed to fade. For all of Quinn’s own purchases, she was still unable to pay many of her artists, and the gallery quickly ran into financial trouble. Much of the fascination with the gallery had owed to its elegant spaces, but overhead was enormous and she struggled to keep up the lease. In June, having barely finished her first season, she was forced to vacate the Forty-fourth Street space and seek a smaller and more affordable location downtown.[28] Meanwhile, Quinn was left with the growing headache of placating his artist friends in Europe, who had often received nothing for their contributions to the gallery. It was the beginning of a long and expensive unwinding of his involvement—with Harriet Bryant, and with the modern art trade.
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By the late spring of 1915, the war in Europe was beginning to touch the United States as well. A few weeks after the end of the Carroll Galleries’ Cubism show, Quinn met Lady Gregory’s nephew, Hugh Lane, a brilliant young Anglo-Irish art dealer who had sought to bring French modern art to Ireland and who was visiting New York on business. Quinn and Lane were unusually well matched—Lane affectionately called him “my rival”—and during Lane’s two-week stay, they dined with Quinn’s friends, went to auctions together, drove out to Sleepy Hollow with Harriet Bryant, and talked endlessly about art. (Lane was skeptical about Quinn’s Picassos but came around to his Gauguins, as Quinn put it, “after the champagne had some effect.”[29]) The night before Lane’s departure, they dined again, and Quinn urged Lane to prolong his visit and postpone his return: Lane was scheduled to sail on the Lusitania, and Quinn had heard from contacts in Washington that Germany was threatening to torpedo the British liner. They talked it over, and decided such an extreme act was unlikely. Seven days later, Lane drowned with more than eleven hundred fellow passengers when the Lusitania was sunk.[30]
The atrocity rode Quinn hard. He blamed himself for Lane’s death, but he also turned violently against Germany, developing a hatred that would never subside. In later years, he would even refuse to buy German modern art, a rare blind spot in his prescient collecting activities. At the same time, however, the Lusitania disaster drew him more firmly than ever into the French camp. He was furious at the Wilson administration for failing to come to the aid of the French and the British, and he was increasingly conscious of the fact that many of the artists whose works he had been championing were risking their lives at the front. “Of the nine living artists represented here, Picasso is a Spaniard and is not in the war,” Bryant had noted, in the introduction to her Cubism show that spring. “Six of the other eight…are fighting for the land of art.” Several of them had already been injured. “Derain has been wounded and returned to the trenches, and de La Fresnaye has been wounded twice and is either still in the hospital or has returned to the front.” It was uncertain, she added, “whether any or all of these artists” would “survive this war.”[31]
10
CUBISTS AT WAR
By the fall of 1914, the breakup of Picasso’s old circle was devastatingly complete. Not only were most of his fellow painters now in the army, but many of those who were not, like Francis Picabia, had fled the country. In all the time that Picasso had been in France, he had never experienced such a rupture. When he had painted the Demoiselles, he had alienated his closest friends; now, there was no one even to alienate. Adding to the sense of isolation was his immigrant status, which brought anxieties of its own. Though he had lived and worked in Paris for ten years, he remained a Spanish citizen, and as a man of military age who was not fighting for France, he was now regarded with suspicion, a person who lacked a legitimate place in the national order. Notably, Juan Gris, a fellow Spaniard who was stuck in a different part of the south, was threatened with expulsion.[1]
Above all, though, was the collapse of the unique arrangement that had sustained Picasso’s life in art. Day after day, while he and Eva lingered in Avignon and watched French troops preparing for war, he expected to hear from Kahnweiler, but no news came. For years, the dealer had subsidized his and Braque’s ever deeper excursion into Cubism when hardly a collector would go near their work. And Picasso had come to depend on his letters, his daily visits, his continual purchases, and even, at times, his efficient management of Picasso’s messy personal affairs. Two years earlier, when Picasso broke with Fernande and, telling no one but Braque and Kahnweiler, abruptly ran away with Eva to the Pyrenees, it was the dealer who moved his things out of Fernande’s apartment, while Braque rescued Frika, Picasso’s beloved spaniel-shepherd mixed breed, and had her shipped to Céret, where they were staying.[2] But now Kahnweiler was abroad somewhere, apparently cut off by war, and he owed Picasso a large sum of money. All at once, Picasso’s single source of security was gone.
Meanwhile, Eva’s health was deteriorating again. She had long suffered from what she vaguely described as angine, or bronchial inflammation. But now it appeared that the operation she had had earlier in the year, for what was more correctly called cancer, had been unsuccessful.[3] By October, Picasso was increasingly unnerved and they began to contemplate going back to Paris for treatment. “We saw a doctor here but not knowing him we do not feel altogether confident,” he wrote Gertrude Stein. Finally, in mid-November, they returned, and found the city utterly transformed. As Eva had been warned, it was “like a village, nobody in the streets after eight P.M.”[4]
The art world was especially dark. During the opening weeks of the war, German troops had advanced so rapidly on Paris that French forces commandeered taxi drivers to drive soldiers to the front. On the night of September 1, with the capital under threat, French officials also took the unprecedented step of evacuating the Louvre, giving curators a few hours to load 770 of the most important paintings and sculptures, including the Mona Lisa and Poussin’s The Rape of the Sabine Women, into special train cars bound for Toulouse, a designated safe haven in the south. For the works left behind, the government sandbagged all the windows, and later, because of the threat of chemical warfare, distributed gas masks to the staff. The museum would not fully reopen for five years.[5] The day after the Louvre evacuation, the French government itself had left the city and set up temporary headquarters in Bordeaux. For many Parisians, the flight of the nation’s leaders and its treasures was a heavy blow to morale, but it also showed how much the country’s art was implicated in the war. Less than three weeks later, the German army shelled and largely destroyed the thirteenth-century Reims Cathedral, in what quickly became an infamous symbol of cultural destruction.
Along with Paris’s museums, the city’s art galleries had been shuttered, and, like their artists, dealers of military age were mobilized. Just months after he had staked his career on his huge new gallery, Paul Rosenberg was posted to French military headquarters; his brother Léonce, who had already become an important Cubist patron, joined the flying corps. Following the Louvre’s lead, many dealers also sent their inventories out of Paris for safekeeping. Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which represented Matisse and other modern artists, sent fifty-four crates of paintings to Bordeaux for storage.[6] Vollard, while taking advantage of the chance to sell Picassos to Quinn in New York, ultimately decided it was prudent to store much of his art in the Loire Valley.
But what about Kahnweiler? In Paris, Picasso found the rue Vignon storefront locked up like the other galleries. Yet something else was not right. The dealer had never come back, and at the Banque Française, where Kahnweiler did his banking, Picasso learned that the gallery’s account was empty. In fact, as he soon discovered, unlike the other dealers’ inventories, Kahnweiler’s had never left Paris, including the most recent batch of paintings Picasso had given him at the start of the summer, for which he had not been paid. If he couldn’t get the money he was owed, Picasso was determined to get his paintings back. But though they were close at hand, these works were completely inaccessible—to Picasso or anyone else.
