Picasso's War, page 15
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For Rosenberg, taking on Picasso was by no means an obvious move. The market for his work remained tiny. Upended by war and revolution, many of Kahnweiler’s most important clients were no longer active. Forced into exile by the Bolshevik regime, the onetime avant-garde fanatic Sergei Shchukin took refuge in France, but he was a changed man. Having been stripped of his fortune and briefly imprisoned, he was so embarrassed by his destitution that, according to one story, when he saw Matisse in the street, he crossed to the other side.[14] Moreover, Cubism itself was broadly out of favor in Paris, and there was little consensus on what kinds of modern art were going to succeed with the postwar public. Rosenberg’s own brother, Léonce, had gone nearly bankrupt investing in the paintings of Picasso and his friends during the war. And dealing on the level that Rosenberg preferred, with large-scale gallery shows and continual promotion, was far more expensive than Kahnweiler’s lean operation before the war. It might be several years before Rosenberg’s investment in Picasso would begin to pay for itself, and that was only assuming that he would, in the end, be able to build a market.
Nonetheless, Rosenberg was utterly convinced about Picasso, and, in keeping with his preferred practice, devised an approach that was the exact opposite of Kahnweiler’s. First, unlike Kahnweiler, he did not agree to buy all of Picasso’s output, but only to have first right of refusal on his paintings. Picasso would be handsomely paid for whatever the dealer bought, but it would be up to Rosenberg to decide what to market and sell. At the same time, Rosenberg would center his operation around frequent, event-like shows, for which he insisted on wide latitude over what to show and when. Significantly, while he bought a large number of Picasso’s Cubist paintings soon after they formed their alliance, he decided to devote his debut show instead to drawings and watercolors that the artist had created in a neoclassical style. Here was a radical artist, Rosenberg seemed to be arguing, whose gifts could nevertheless appeal to uninitiated viewers: More challenging work could follow in due course. Sometimes, he gave Picasso more specific instructions about what to paint. During their second winter together, he urged Picasso to produce a whole series of Harlequin paintings, which he felt would be more likely to draw in a wary public.
Even more unusual, though, was Rosenberg’s stage-managing of Picasso’s private life. Not only did the dealer set up Picasso and Olga in a model rue La Boétie apartment adjacent to his own, he also went to great lengths to help the couple craft an appropriately upscale lifestyle in it. Thus, while the dealer kept careful watch over Picasso’s work, Margot Rosenberg schooled Olga in the finer arts of household management and society hosting.[15] In public, the Rosenbergs took the Picassos to the opera and the theater; at home, the Rosenbergs suggested decors and furnishings, counseled the Picassos on where to shop, and attended to other needs. Margot was known to send Picasso pairs of the espadrilles she knew he preferred at the beach; and when Picasso and Olga went to London with the Ballets Russes in 1919, the Rosenbergs took care of their parakeet. (Unfortunately, the dealer proved far less adept at nurturing tropical birds than modern artists, and the creature dropped dead within a few days. “I fear you will accuse me of negligence,” he wrote Picasso, protesting that he had done everything he could to keep it soigné.[16])
By the time that Georges Martin was profiling him in the pages of L’Intransigeant, Picasso had cemented an alliance with Rosenberg that was virtually without parallel in the history of modern art. Ordinarily, Picasso would have bridled against a dealer telling him what to paint and where and how to live. It went against nearly twenty years of defiant bohemianism, and it also was at odds with Picasso’s career-long mistrust of the art market. (Even as he was joining Rosenberg’s gallery in the fall of 1918, he was telling Rosenberg’s brother Léonce that “the dealer is the enemy.”[17]) Yet the war had left Picasso profoundly changed. With his marriage, he desperately needed financial security, but he also was impatient to reassert himself creatively. With Rosenberg’s lucrative support, he could continue to pursue his radical experiments privately, even as he gained a new audience for his paintings in Rosenberg’s gallery. If securing the dealer’s powerful backing meant living a bit like a marionette in a glass box, it was a bargain Picasso was prepared to make.
In turn, Olga had her own reasons for embracing the curated lifestyle that Rosenberg laid out for them. From her conservative upbringing in St. Petersburg, she was far more in tune with upper-middle-class mores than her free-spirited predecessors, Eva Gouel and Fernande Olivier. But she was hardly the grasping minor dancer that Picasso’s biographers have made her out to be. Perhaps as important, as the researcher and archivist Thomas Chaineux has recently shown, was the personal tragedy she was escaping. Her courtship with Picasso had played out against the violence of the Bolshevik Revolution. Along with the wrenching destruction of the Russia of her childhood, the upheaval had left her cut off from her White Russian family, who were now on the wrong side of the war. Though she feared the worst, she was unable, for several years, to make any contact.[18] Marriage itself was a form of consolation, and she welcomed the distractions of Parisian society. Soon both Picasso and Olga had fallen into the Rosenberg orbit.
In fact, Rosenberg’s plans for his new artist went well beyond the salons of rue La Boétie. Like Kahnweiler before him, he had his sights on other countries, though his reading of the international market was almost the opposite of Kanhweiler’s. By the end of the war, Central and Eastern Europe seemed to hold little promise for the modern art trade: Germany was bankrupt and Russia was in the throes of establishing a Communist state. By contrast, Scandinavia and London seemed to have growing markets. And then there was the country that Rosenberg had been watching with interest throughout the war: the United States. As Rosenberg knew well, for several decades, American collectors had been spending unimaginable sums on old European paintings and they were starting to be interested in nineteenth-century modernists. The country also appeared to be obsessed by art. By 1920, the number of American art museums had more than doubled since the start of the century, and nearly every self-respecting city seemed to be building a well-endowed public gallery.[19] Granted, these museums were overwhelmingly historical in emphasis, but Rosenberg saw no reason why Europe’s most important contemporary art couldn’t make its way onto their walls as well.
In the early summer of 1920, Rosenberg began to conjure a large-scale assault on the United States. What he had in mind was characteristically ambitious—and characteristically over the top. He was going to organize a landmark show of Picasso’s work in one of America’s leading cities that would, in a single onslaught, win over the public to the artist and conquer the American market. As he told the artist, the show would include both Cubist and non-Cubist work, and he hinted, grandly, that he would collaborate with an institution such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the Art Institute of Chicago. “Think of the retentissement [resounding impact] that it will have,” he said. “In one of the most beautiful museums in the country, next to the Verrocchios and Pollaiuolos and the great chefs d’oeuvres of past eras.” Rosenberg had yet to explore the idea with American partners, and for the time being, it was not much more than an extravagant fancy. But throughout the summer, he kept bringing it up with Picasso, who had gone with Olga to Juan-les-Pins in the south of France. “I hope you’ve been getting a good rest,” Rosenberg wrote in mid-July, “because I need a large number of canvases for the big show I am planning in the United States.” He added, with his usual hyperbole, “I am now placing an order for 100—deliverable this fall!” In another letter, a few weeks later, he pleaded for more works, telling him, “Don’t forget the American show!” And by late August, he was anxious that Picasso hadn’t returned to Paris. “Haven’t yet had enough of the pines [of Juan-les-Pins]?” he wrote. “Don’t forget that the walls of all the museums of America are empty and avid to show Picassos.”[20]
Reading Rosenberg’s letters at the modest, somewhat overgrown house he had rented in the quiet beach town in Antibes, Picasso did not think much of this grandiose project. Olga had just learned that she was pregnant, and they were enjoying a blissful escape from the social pressures of rue La Boétie. Amid frequent swims in the sea, Picasso had been taking lots of photographs and playing with new approaches, such as his almost Surrealist depiction of giant figures at a beach with shrunken heads. The notion of huge numbers of his paintings filling some stately museum on another continent could only provoke amusement. After all, he had yet to be given a museum show in Europe itself, and what few attempts had been made to show his work in America, even on a small scale, had fallen flat. Whatever the twitchy dealer was planning, it could wait. For much of the holiday, Picasso’s output mainly consisted of some racy drawings of Nessus, the wild centaur from Greek mythology, assaulting the naked wife of Heracles.[21]
In fact, Rosenberg’s American plan was almost ludicrously far-fetched. He had not bothered to assess whether there was interest in such an exhibition, and he seems to have been wholly ignorant of the conservative forces that continued to hold sway at the Metropolitan and the Art Institute. Yet for all his naïveté, his determination to bring Picasso to the United States was real and would shape his efforts for years to come. Already, he had set up a partnership with Wildenstein, the Old Master dealer, to promote Picasso’s work internationally. Wildenstein was not really interested in avant-garde art, and for all practical purposes, it was Rosenberg who handled Picasso. But Wildenstein could offer something else: a branch gallery in New York. In theory, then, Wildenstein could provide Rosenberg the foothold he needed to begin promoting Picasso’s work in the United States, if no museum were ready. First, though, Rosenberg would need to find a few Americans who supported his ideas. It was around this time that he received a letter from Henri-Pierre Roché, who had sometimes worked with him as an art agent, about an unusual friend of Roché’s in New York. The man was wary of art dealers, Roché wrote, but he already had a large number of avant-garde paintings and was gradually assembling a premier collection. “I will bring him to you if he comes to Paris,” Roché wrote. He added, “His name is John Quinn.”[22]
13
IN PICASSO’S GARDEN
Roché was sitting down to lunch with one of his former mistresses when the telephone rang; he was at her home, but the call was for him. It was his mother. “Mr. Quinn is in Paris,” she said. He wanted Roché to meet him at 2 P.M.
Roché held the receiver in startled silence. For nearly two years, he had been corresponding with Quinn, and Quinn had shown no interest in traveling to Europe. Just a few weeks earlier, Roché had urged, in one of his letters, that he come to France to meet his artist friends, but the letter had gone unanswered.[1] Now, on an exceptionally hot Tuesday morning in July 1921, he had simply turned up. Rapidly finishing his meal, Roché excused himself and rushed out.[2]
For Roché, finding art for Quinn had become something of a vocation. In Paris, it had given him a pretext for rekindling old friendships and cultivating new ones. It was also an education in taste, training him to identify the exceptional works that might appeal to his demanding patron. As he had earlier told Quinn, he felt like a dog scaring up “some big birds” for Quinn to shoot or not, as pleased him.[3] Nearly as important, though, was the question of money. For all his worldliness, Roché, at forty-two, continued to live with his mother, and the work for Quinn was finally bringing him closer to taking control of his baroque personal life.
Since his return to Europe, Roché’s existence had revolved around two women in particular: Germaine Bonnard (“Mno”), a longtime French companion with whom he had a largely untroubled open relationship; and the stormy and conflicted Helen Hessel (“Luk”), the German journalist with whom he was madly in love. A strong blonde, Helen was the wife of one of Roché’s closest friends, the writer and translator Franz Hessel, and he had been spending months at a stretch with the Hessels and their young children in a town near Munich. (Their triangular affair would provide the material for Roché’s late-career novel Jules et Jim and the François Truffaut film based on it.) Roché dreamt of having a child of his own with Helen but feared that his own finances were too precarious for it. With his work for Quinn, however, he had new hope. “Quinn is buying everything,” Roché wrote in his diary the previous autumn, after helping him acquire several of Picasso’s most important recent paintings. “I am finally earning money. I will have the ‘right to be a father.’ ”[4]
At the moment of Quinn’s arrival, in fact, Roché was on the cusp of setting in motion his grand plan. Helen had agreed to divorce Franz that summer, and Franz had told Roché to go ahead and have a child with Helen if they felt they were “in the right.” Roché had gained the approval of his mother and—with some difficulty—even sworn himself to celibacy with Germaine and his other mistresses. As soon as the divorce went through, he planned to go to Germany to be with Helen. He had even converted a large part of his French savings into German marks. Fueled by Quinn’s Picasso habit, Roché was going to settle down. In order to do that, however, he needed to be available for Quinn at a moment’s notice. For the next six weeks, he would do almost nothing else.
Shortly after the phone call from his mother, Roché found his American patron at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery. He was looking at Matisses in the company of a striking woman he introduced as Mrs. Foster. Roché was immediately intrigued—“Good and gentle (Will they marry?)” he mused in his diary—but Quinn was all business: “Activity, galleries, paintings,” Roché wrote.[5] It was Quinn’s first trip to Europe in nearly a decade, and he counted on meeting as many artists and writers as possible. Foster, in her own playful, gracious way, was also formidable. She knew Paris well, was knowledgeable about the theater scene, which she followed in French, and had already been complaining to Quinn about what she called the “stupid made-to-order Bohemianism of Montmartre.”[6] For Roché, it was the beginning of some of the most intense weeks of his life.
Over the next few days, the three of them visited the studios of Derain, Dufy, Segonzac, Duchamp. They met Roché’s friend Marie Laurencin, whose paintings Quinn had been buying for several years. They dined with the composer-eccentric Erik Satie; shared cold grog with the art critic and anarchist Félix Fénéon; and examined late Cézannes with Ambroise Vollard. One morning, taking a rattling taxi out to Issy-les-Moulineaux, on the outskirts of Paris, they visited Henri Matisse. Conversation did not come easily for the painter, and with cool formality he showed them his house, which was filled with art, old furniture, and violins. When Quinn described the large number of Matisses that he had in his apartment in New York, however, the painter relaxed and began to talk about his winters in Nice, where the locals thought he was mad because of his habit of working all day and going to bed at nightfall. “I follow the sun,” he told them.[7]
They saw a good deal of André Derain and his spirited wife, Alice—“a very beautiful woman,” Quinn observed—including an evening at Foottit’s Bar, a popular night spot run by a retired English clown. They had an extravagant lunch with Pound, who was trying to write music for a modern opera based on François Villon’s fifteenth-century poems; and a terse encounter with Joyce, who was struggling to complete Ulysses in his dark, barren apartment: “Quite a misanthrope,” Roché decided.[8] During a series of visits, Georges Braque showed them his latest paintings, and also the long dent in his skull from his German shrapnel wound. (“Put your finger in it and see,” he told Quinn, and Quinn found he could fit the length of his little finger in the depression.[9])
One evening, Roché took Quinn and Foster to dine with Brancusi at his studio in the Impasse Ronsin, a Left Bank cul-de-sac. Quinn had been fascinated with the sculptor since the Armory Show, and during the war, he had quickly become his leading patron. They had corresponded frequently, and at times, when Quinn was worried about Brancusi’s health or livelihood, he had fronted him money. And with Roché’s help, Quinn had accelerated his purchases of Brancusi’s work. Until now, however, they had never met. Brancusi occupied a rambling building at the end of the street, and when the group appeared, they found him amid a forest of wood columns and chunks of marble. Broad-shouldered, with a white-streaked beard and thick, black curly hair covering a strong, square head, the artist was nearly as striking as his sculptures. “Like an elderly faun,” Foster observed. He also was fond of food and drink, and on the stove he had built in the studio, he made them a hearty soup followed by broiled chickens, which they consumed with grappa, white wine, red wine, and cognac. As they sat at his large stone table, he told stories about farmers, Roman architecture, and his boyhood in Romania, with Roché translating. The meal ended with a no-name champagne, which Brancusi, lacking coupes, served in oil cruets.[10]
On a blistering hot Saturday morning, Quinn, Foster, and Roché drove to Fontainebleau, where Picasso and Olga were renting a house for the summer. Europe was suffering from a record drought, and as they made their way south, they could see farmers already beginning the dry harvest. Several hours later, after they traversed the Forest of Fontainebleau, they arrived at a plain-looking stone house enclosed by a high wall. When they pulled up, they could see someone waving at them from the window and indicating a green door in the wall. Entering through the door, they found themselves in an enclosed garden with a dry fountain and a large catalpa tree. Then the man they had seen at the window appeared. It was Picasso.[11]
