Picasso's War, page 19
As Quinn considered his collection against the weight of history, he also began to form more programmatic ideas about the great artists of his time. Outlining his personal pantheon to friends, he placed at the very top Picasso, Matisse, Derain, and Braque; just beneath them was a second tier that included Georges Rouault, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, and Raoul Dufy, with Constantin Brancusi, as a sculptor, in a category of his own. These in turn were followed by a broader group of exceptional modernists, including the Cubists Roger de La Fresnaye, Juan Gris, Jean Metzinger, and Jacques Villon, and the Cubist-influenced Marie Laurencin. Supporting them were a select group of modernist progenitors, led by Cézanne and Seurat and followed by Gauguin and Van Gogh.[31] Perhaps most strikingly, next to Cézanne and Seurat, he also placed Rousseau, a figure who seemed to stand apart, yet whose importance for Quinn seemed to equal or surpass any of the others’. As he put it to one friend, Rousseau was “a naive mind, a pure mind, an artistic saint, a man who has had an enormous influence upon the great living artists.”[32]
By twenty-first-century standards, Quinn’s exceedingly narrow view of modern genius—let alone the hubris of trying to rank artists in order of importance—seems distinctly old-fashioned. Among other things, his German hatred left him blind to the innovations of Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Wassily Kandinsky, and many other German and Austrian modernists whom Roché admired and whose innovations would later be widely acclaimed. But at a time when no such hierarchy existed, indeed, when there was hardly any systematic study of modern art at all, his choices were remarkably prescient. He was defining the core of what he took to be an enduring movement, and for the most part, he was right. And he was also acting on it, by giving chase to single exceptional works by as many of these leading figures as his income would allow.
* * *
—
By the spring of 1922, Quinn, though he was an ocean away, had acquired an almost magical presence in Paris. In February, while Picasso was reserving his best new paintings for him, James Joyce, from a different corner of the city, was cabling him, with laconic gratitude: “ULYSSES PUBLISHED. THANKS.”[33] If Quinn needed an opinion about a late Cézanne he was considering at Vollard’s, Derain was glad to oblige. When he required a large-format photograph of a Picasso or Braque that no one had seen yet, Man Ray was ready to cross Paris to take it.[34] So eager was Brancusi for Quinn’s reactions to his latest works that he would study his letters line by line; one day that summer, Roché found the sculptor in his studio holding the lawyer’s latest dispatch—“scratching his head, using his dictionary, jumping now then from marble blocks to wood blocks, hot, excited, and asking me to read it once with him so that he be quite clear about it.”[35] As they came to know Quinn and his exacting taste, his artist friends also gave considerable thought to their works in New York: Brancusi designed special bases for him to use with his sculptures, and on one occasion, Picasso spent hours at an antiquarian market searching for the perfect frame for a painting he was sending him.[36]
In the international art world, the legend of Quinn’s collection continued to grow. One day, Kojiro Matsukata, Japan’s leading connoisseur of French art, turned up on his doorstep; on another, Emil Gauguin, the painter’s son, came to offer him Gauguins that had remained in the painter’s possession. (Quinn decided his own Gauguins were better.) Among a small but growing number of young acolytes, an invitation to see Quinn’s Picassos was not to be missed. “From a most unlikely looking corner were drawn a dozen paintings that simply swept me off my feet,” Sheldon Cheney, an aspiring critic who went on to write one of the standard primers on modern art, wrote, about an evening at Quinn’s. “Picasso of the Harlequins, Picasso of the ‘blue period,’ Picasso the Cubist (and all Cubism rose in my estimation), Picasso painting great structural women almost without color.”[37]
Despite vows to the contrary, Quinn also continued to provide the backbone of almost every modern art exhibition in New York. That winter, when the Hungarian dealer Joseph Brummer wanted to stage a pair of ambitious shows devoted to the work of Derain and Vlaminck, he relied on two sources: Kahnweiler in Paris and Quinn in New York. (Through Quinn, Kahnweiler was belatedly discovering the potential of the United States, or at least of one New York collector.) Later that spring, when a new space called the Sculptors’ Gallery put on a show of “Contemporary French Art,” arranged by Arthur Davies, it might have been better described as a raid on Quinn’s apartment: Along with a selection of his Braques, Picassos, Derains, and Matisses, the show featured twenty-three of his Brancusis, including the celebrated Golden Bird, which Pound had already written about in The Little Review and on which Mina Loy would soon publish a poem in The Dial. Not in France itself could such a comprehensive show be found, and this was just a sampling of what Quinn had. Even Rosenberg was now borrowing from him to give his Paris exhibitions more luster.
For Roché, Quinn’s paintings had begun to provide the sense of permanence that he found lacking in his own life. That spring and summer, even as he and Quinn were conquering the French art world, Roché had been abandoned by Helen, who had aborted his child and remarried Franz, barely a year after their divorce; Roché was no closer than before to finding an anchor for his restless existence. Yet as he pursued with Quinn what he had begun referring to as “our collection,” he seemed to be building something of lasting value. Surely, the “museum rank” paintings and sculptures they were amassing at Central Park West would one day find their way into a prominent American institution. When Quinn hesitated about the size of some of the paintings Picasso offered him, Roché reassured him that someday, when Picasso’s “name is quite made, museums may want them.”[38]
And yet it was unclear if Quinn would be able to wait that long. By June, he was in precarious health again, and ruled out a repeat summer in Paris. By now, it was four and a half years since his cancer operation and if he was in denial, Jeanne knew that he was on an increasingly limited clock. But while he talked vaguely to Roché about retiring to a “little country place near Paris” where he could install the best of what he called his “French things,” he also couldn’t quite imagine stopping.[39] Even that summer, when his doctor advised two months’ rest, he had difficulty getting away for a short vacation with Jeanne in the Adirondacks, near the mountains where she grew up. During their stay, he gave up smoking, and came back more rested than he felt in years. But soon he was back in the fray, clenched and determined, on Nassau Street. He would have to double down in the time that remained.
16
DINNER AT QUINN’S
Rosenberg arrived in New York City in November 1923, a year and a half after Quinn and Roché began buying directly from Picasso. It was the dealer’s first transatlantic crossing, and he was bringing with him nearly two dozen recent, large-format Picasso paintings. At last, he was carrying out his long-held ambition to launch the artist in the United States. The effort would begin with a three-week show at the Wildenstein Gallery in New York; then Rosenberg would take the paintings to Chicago, where he was going to show them at the Art Institute under the auspices of the Arts Club of Chicago. He aimed to stir up interest in the two metropolises that he, and many others after him, would see as holding the key to the coveted American art market.
Even now, though, Rosenberg was operating on blind confidence. Though the U.S. economy was far stronger than it had been in 1921, there were still few indications that interest in twentieth-century modern art was growing. Nor was Rosenberg particularly prepared for what he was getting into. For all of his prominence in Paris, he was, like Picasso, largely unknown in the United States, and while he had a firm grasp on the subtleties of Parisian upper-bourgeois mores, he had hardly any knowledge of American culture and American social dynamics. In New York, he found it difficult even to get appointments with prominent collectors. Meanwhile, because of financial upheavals in France, the French franc was in free fall, threatening to make his already costly trip ruinously expensive. So dejected was he a few days after his arrival that he wrote to Picasso that he was “seized with homesickness” and took consolation in looking at Picasso’s paintings and “imagining myself back on rue La Boétie.”[1]
Still, the dealer counted on several advantages for his show. With the Wildenstein Gallery, he would be able to reach an established New York audience that was apart from the fledgling avant-garde scene. At the same time, he had decided to shun Cubism entirely, shaping the show around a series of large neoclassical paintings of saltimbanques, Harlequins, and other stock characters from Picasso’s repertoire, works of almost calculated beauty and polish that would, he felt, be readily accommodated in any Manhattan townhouse. Above all, he had his friendship with John Quinn, whom he knew had had a central part in the American contemporary art scene for years. Surely, with Quinn’s support, the show would be a success.
* * *
—
At the time of Rosenberg’s arrival, Quinn was even more irascible than usual. Over the summer, he’d had a terrible, inexplicable falling-out with Joseph Conrad, his friend of many years, who had snubbed him during a visit to the United States. The matter had so upset him that he had resolved to auction off all of his cherished Conrad manuscripts, breaking a vow never to sell what he collected. (“Mr. Quinn has never been the same again,” Jeanne Foster told a mutual friend, the writer Ford Madox Ford, in Paris, warning him never to speak of Conrad.[2]) Meanwhile, Quinn’s legal work was taking him on multiple, harried errands to Washington and Albany and he was by now deeply unwell. He had lost weight during the fall, and could only tolerate a highly restricted diet.
Despite his general fatigue and physical discomfort, he had also just completed another strenuous voyage to Europe with Foster and Roché—his first since their trip to Paris and Fontainebleau two summers earlier. In the end, it had been a remarkable success, yielding, among other works, another important haul of Picassos, a huge Matisse still life, another major Rousseau, and a striking Cézanne portrait of his father, which Foster had picked out at Bernheim-Jeune on an afternoon when Quinn was too done-in to venture to the galleries. They had even managed to introduce Erik Satie and Constantin Brancusi to the game of golf in the Bois de Boulogne. (Satie, in his bowler hat, jacket, and umbrella, watched and told jokes while Brancusi, with determined precision, hit the ball as hard as he could. Quinn later bought Brancusi a set of clubs.[3]) But the trip had left him wasted and depleted, and Foster had once again stayed on in Paris, leaving him alone in New York.
Nonetheless, Quinn agreed to help Rosenberg in various ways. With the collapse of the French franc, he offered to pay him in dollars for his latest purchases—a huge windfall for the financially strapped dealer. He also shared his legal expertise, incorporating Rosenberg’s gallery as a New York company to facilitate American sales and avoid onerous taxation. As the show was getting under way, Rosenberg was effusive in thanking him, telling Quinn in his idiosyncratic English “how I appreciate your way of doing the things.”[4] But Rosenberg ignored Quinn’s advice about showing Picasso in New York. In their earlier conversations, Quinn had urged Rosenberg to present a “representative” selection of Picasso’s work in different styles, and to include less expensive drawings, which he thought would have a better chance with an uninitiated public. He also warned him not to use the Wildenstein Gallery, which was primarily known for Old Masters. “They have clients who are not educated up to Picasso,” Quinn told him. With painful speed, Rosenberg discovered how right Quinn had been.[5]
The Wildenstein Gallery was located in a five-story mansion on a part of Fifth Avenue known as Vanderbilt Row. The neighborhood was the very epicenter of the Gilded Age aristocracy, with much of the surrounding property owned by Astors, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers. For anyone selling Rembrandts and Holbeins, the location couldn’t be better. For Picassos, it was another story. Despite Rosenberg’s efforts to tame his artist into a handsome matinee idol, Wildenstein’s wealthy clientele stayed away. “Where in Paris one would be thronged with visitors,” Rosenberg wrote Picasso, “very few people have come—in a city of 6 million inhabitants.” Meanwhile, the small coterie of New Yorkers who already knew about Picasso’s work—the city’s “Montparnassians” as the dealer put it—were baffled by the bland presentation. “They think that someone has changed their Picasso,” he wrote, with seeming lack of self-awareness.[6]
As the exhibition continued, Rosenberg became more and more worried. He also realized he needed Quinn. If only he could tap into Quinn’s modernist circle, he might stir interest in the show. Soon he found the opening he needed. He had long been determined to see Quinn’s storied art collection, and given all the business they had done together, Quinn would surely be glad to oblige him. Such a meeting would provide an opportunity for Rosenberg to reengage him in his American Picasso venture. Contacting the lawyer again, he asked for a tour. “Rosenberg was very, very anxious to come see my things,” Quinn wrote Roché. At first, pleading fatigue and overwork, Quinn delayed, but as the exhibition reached its final days, he saw he could wait no longer, and, at the last minute, decided to host a small dinner for Rosenberg and a few other friends at his apartment.
On a wet Wednesday evening in early December, Quinn brought together a characteristically lively group: Mitchell Kennerley, the flamboyant British American publisher, whose books Quinn had defended against obscenity charges in court; Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach, a bibliophile and polymath who was one of the leading rare book sellers in the world; Muriel Ciolkowska, a brilliant poet and journalist who had lived in France for years and was close to James Joyce; and “El Greggo”—Frederick James Gregg—who had been Quinn’s ally in the modernist cause going back to the days of the Armory Show. Rounding out the company were the two prominent art dealers: Felix Wildenstein, the émigré Frenchman who ran the New York branch of the Wildenstein Gallery, and Rosenberg himself.
Lubricated by two quarts of pre-Prohibition champagne, the dinner got off to a racing start. Rosenbach, who traveled to Europe constantly and reveled in Shermanesque marches through the London and Paris book auctions, was an exceptional raconteur. Madame Ciolkowska, who had arrived with him, more than held her own in the otherwise all-male company. In between, while Quinn furnished acerbic comments about French politics and Irish writers, Gregg contributed his devilish wit and Kennerley his off-color humor. The art dealers seemed to be enjoying themselves too. Quinn had never met Wildenstein, who was the cousin of Rosenberg’s Paris colleague Georges Wildenstein, but he was affable and worldly and mixed easily with the others. For his part, Rosenberg, too, seemed pleased to find himself among the friends of the most important Picasso collector in the world.
In reality, though, Rosenberg was not at all at ease. While his English was proficient, he found it difficult to follow the rapid cross talk, and as the evening progressed, he grew more and more agitated. At first, as the guests flew from one topic to another, he kept trying to steer the talk to the art world. Then, addressing Quinn directly, he began to tell him about several paintings he had brought with him from Paris that he was storing at Wildenstein’s. “Mr. Quinn,” he said at one point, “won’t you come in to see me so I can show you a wonderful portrait of Madame Cézanne?” A few minutes later, Rosenberg tried again. “Mr. Quinn, why don’t you come in and let me show you a wonderful Lautrec?” This time, the lawyer was stony; he could not abide the “shop” talk at dinner. Still, Rosenberg would not let up. Misreading Quinn’s pique as distraction, he was determined to get his attention. “Mr. Quinn,” he interrupted again, how about “some lovely Braques.” The other guests began to notice it as well: Rosenberg seemed fixated on his paintings and could talk of nothing else.[7]
In fact, the dealer was facing a looming crisis. The show at Wildenstein’s had gone nowhere; his high-end strategy was proving to be a disaster. No one was buying his Picassos, and the dozens of American collectors whom he assumed would be ready to follow Quinn into modern art had not materialized. Even to Picasso, he could not hide his bitter disappointment. “Your exhibition is a great success,” he wrote him. “And like all successes, we have sold absolutely nothing!”[8] He still needed to go to Chicago, where sales were even less likely, and with the collapsing French franc, he was hemorrhaging money. Now, as the guests finished eating and he waited for Quinn to begin showing his paintings, Rosenberg was nearly desperate. He felt that it might be his last opportunity to stir Quinn into action. As with New York itself, however, he fatally misjudged his host.
Around 9:30, Quinn began his familiar ritual. Many of his best pictures were stored in two back bedrooms, and he brought out the ones he wanted to show them, one by one. This time, though, he chose with special care: He didn’t want Rosenberg to see the paintings he’d acquired directly from Picasso, to preserve the possibility of future such arrangements; nor did he want Rosenberg to know about some of his recent purchases from other private sources in Paris. One of these was Seurat’s spectacular final painting, Circus, which had not been on the market but which Quinn had managed to acquire from Seurat’s protégé, Paul Signac, after a prolonged secret negotiation. Kennerley and Gregg knew about Circus, but Quinn had ordered them to keep their mouths shut, and during the entire evening it remained in a back room under a cover.
Even so, as Quinn brought out some of the Picassos he had acquired in earlier years and many other paintings, it seemed to put Rosenberg on edge. Finally, he turned to him and brought up what was really on his mind:
“Mr. Quinn, why doesn’t Arthur B. Davies come to see my Picasso exhibition?” he asked. Quinn was surprised and annoyed to be put on the spot about his longtime New York friend. He said he had no idea about Davies. But Rosenberg pressed on.
