Picasso's War, page 21
The next day, Roché was invited to lunch at the home of Jacques Doucet, the fashion magnate and avant-garde art patron. Now in his early seventies, Doucet lived in a townhouse filled with works by Picasso, Derain, Modigliani, and other contemporary artists, as well as thousands of modern literary manuscripts and printed books, and he was one of the few Parisian aesthetes whose advanced taste in art and prose rivaled Quinn’s. He was also a great Rousseau admirer, having earlier beaten out Quinn for the Charmeuse de Serpents, one of the painter’s most acclaimed works. Roché wondered what he would make of the Kahnweiler painting. It was a delicate matter. Doucet’s wealth far exceeded Quinn’s, and once he saw the painting, he might well want to buy it himself. But Roché was already deep in negotiations with Kahnweiler, and though they had not yet agreed on Quinn’s option, the dealer, as a point of honor, would probably not go behind his back. Moreover, since Doucet had acquired the Charmeuse, it seemed unlikely that he would pursue a second big Rousseau. In balance, Roché decided that the chance to get Doucet’s opinion was too good to pass up. He told Doucet about the Kahnweiler painting, and straight after lunch they went to see it.
At the gallery, even Roché was shaken by Doucet’s response. The old designer was utterly transported, confessing that he found the painting “even more important and surprenant”—astonishing—than his Charmeuse.[13] Hurriedly, Roché cabled Quinn again: The owner of the greatest known Rousseau felt that the new painting was better. That same afternoon, Kahnweiler told Roché he was willing to accept the 4,250-franc option until the photograph reached New York. Everything now depended on Quinn. Each day, as Roché awaited a response from New York, he went to Kahnweiler’s to have another look at the painting. On the tenth day, fearful that Kahnweiler’s photograph might have been held up in the mail somewhere, Roché asked Man Ray to come take a new set of pictures of the painting. Then he sent Quinn another letter. “I hope and believe it will be, if you take it, one of your greatest joys as a collector,” he wrote.[14]
On February 15, two weeks after Picasso had alerted Roché about the painting, Kahnweiler’s photograph finally arrived at Quinn’s apartment. As he examined it, Quinn was baffled. The black-and-white image was not particularly convincing; whatever power the composition had, it certainly wasn’t evident here. He had spent too much on art the previous fall, and was not yet ready for another large purchase. His inclination was not to take it. Before he could get off a message to Roché, however, another cable arrived from Paris.
By mid-February, news of the huge, unknown Rousseau was rapidly spreading around the French art world. Dozens of people were coming to Kahnweiler’s gallery each day to see it and a group of avid supporters had begun raising funds to donate it to the Louvre. For all of Roché’s efforts, it was starting to look as if this one would slip away. But there was still one connoisseur he hadn’t consulted, a man whose opinion might carry more weight than anyone else’s.
Antoine Villard was a well-off landscape painter who had developed a passion bordering on obsession for Rousseau. Over time, he had amassed a dozen of his paintings, amounting to one of the largest and most distinguished collections anywhere. Roché had met Villard the previous spring, reporting to Quinn that he was “crazy about Rousseau, loves him, cannot stop speaking about him and his works.”[15] Eventually, Roché had persuaded him to let Man Ray photograph all of his Rousseaus for Quinn. What would Villard, a man who lived and breathed Rousseau’s work, think of Kahnweiler’s painting? Roché needed his judgment immediately, and in the end, managed to convince him to see it that same day. In the new cable to Quinn—the one that arrived while Quinn was examining the photograph—he recorded Villard’s response: “VILLARD PROCLAIMS THIS PICTURE GREATEST MIRACLE. IS DESPAIRING NOT POSSESSING IT.”[16]
Quinn read it and the other cables again. He read Roché’s letter. He looked at the photograph. Uncharacteristically, he didn’t know what to do. He called Jeanne Foster and asked her to come downtown for a walk. They went down Broadway, a few blocks from Quinn’s Nassau Street office. After they passed Trinity Church, it started to rain; they sought shelter under the el. As they stood there in the downpour, Quinn brought up the painting and told her about the cables from Paris. He knew he was not a well man and asked her to decide. She looked at him, at his frail frame and tired face. “Buy it,” she said.[17]
Quinn was happy. Somehow, she had understood. They walked back, and when he returned to the office, he cabled Roché. Then he called his bank and ordered 175,000 francs to be sent to Kahnweiler the next morning. Not only had Quinn not seen the painting; neither he nor Roché knew its title. Six weeks after the sale, they learned from Kahnweiler that Rousseau had called it La Bohémienne endormie—The Sleeping Gypsy—but even Kahnweiler knew nothing of the painting’s history since the time of its creation more than a quarter century earlier.[18]
In Paris, news of Quinn’s coup spread quickly. Congratulations poured in from Picasso, Brancusi, and his other friends; Roché was ecstatic. Kahnweiler himself wrote Quinn that he was glad it had “gone in the collection of somebody who is able to appreciate it entirely.”[19] Improbably, one of the most important paintings of the entire modern era was not going to stay in Paris, where there was a legion of modern artists who admired it, numerous connoisseurs who coveted it, and even a world museum that might have received it. Instead, it was destined for an apartment thousands of miles away, in a city that was still deeply ambivalent about modern art. That Quinn was able to pull this off, for a moderate price, without even seeing the painting, was an extraordinary statement of the influence of one American and his ambition.
The morning after the painting’s arrival, Quinn, in a letter to Roché, called it a “glorious victory.” With the Rousseau, his collection now formed a remarkable, gemlike unity: the best Seurat; the best Rousseau; standout paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh; defining works by Picasso in almost every one of his major phases; a definitive series of Matisses; a sweep of Brancusis; singular works by Derain, Braque, Vlaminck, Duchamp, and many others. It was hard, though, not to see the irony. While the apparition of The Sleeping Gypsy in Quinn’s living room left all of Paris seemingly in awe, the event passed largely unnoticed in New York. In fragile health, Quinn had kept the unveiling a private affair, inviting just a few of his intimates for the small celebratory dinner. And though he didn’t know it yet, The Sleeping Gypsy would also be the last battle he and Roché fought.
* * *
—
In the weeks after the Rousseau arrived, Quinn struggled to carry on. By now he found it uncomfortable to sit in any one position for long, yet he still crawled to the office for a number of hours each day. Most evenings, Jeanne Foster came over to sit with him and talk, and, to the extent he could, he followed events in Paris and New York. In late April, a friend wrote to him about yet another Italian Renaissance show that had gone up at the Duveen Gallery. It sent him into a rage. “The god damned benighted, provincial country has not yet got beyond Rembrandt and the early Italians,” he snapped. “These things belong in Italy. They don’t belong in New York in the twentieth century.”[20]
A few weeks later, Quinn received a belated diagnosis: advanced liver cancer. At the end of May, he stopped going to the office and canceled all plans for the summer. Foster, returning to his apartment after a visit with her family upstate, was shocked to find him reduced almost to a skeleton. She did not leave his side from then on. Retiring mostly to his bedroom, he surrounded himself with the paintings he admired most. As was his usual practice, he didn’t bother to hang The Sleeping Gypsy. Instead, he simply propped the enormous painting on a table next to his bed, between two east-facing windows, where he could watch it gradually fill with light from the glow of the sun rising over Central Park.[21]
In late June, in one of his last letters to anyone, Quinn dictated a long letter to Roché. “This letter is for you personally,” he began. “I have cirrhosis of the liver.” He said that he didn’t think his case was as dire as his doctors thought, but that he had been put on morphine. He thanked Roché for giving the extra copies of Man Ray’s photo of The Sleeping Gypsy he had ordered to a number of friends in Europe—Picasso, Brancusi, Erik Satie, Robert Delaunay, Wilhelm Uhde, Antoine Villard, Jacques Doucet. Quinn made one final dig at Rosenberg, for his “trickiness” in up-pricing Picasso’s work. Then he said that, given his situation, he wouldn’t be able to buy any more art for six months to a year. (“Of course,” he added, “my refusal to buy paintings does not include the Braque if it comes off well and is a real masterpiece.”) Finally, he told Roché not to worry about him and to keep everything he had said in confidence. “I don’t want my condition to be told to anybody, not even Brancusi.”[22] As a kind of defiant farewell, he wrote that he hoped that he and Roché would someday “have many long tramps and games yet and play out in the open.”
As Quinn’s strength dwindled, Foster was distraught. Their time had been cruelly short. And they had been truly free only in Europe, during those two trips. After their first sojourn in Paris in 1921, she had stayed behind, writing to him wistfully about the “lost years” of his life, his inability to escape his driven New York existence. She had also promised him she would never “give the ‘wolves’ a chance to tear your life work down.”[23] But now, confronted with losing him, she began to wonder about that life work—all his plans and dreams, the projects that had pulled him, searching forward, in the few years they had been together. The wolves were still there.
He had never said much about what he wanted to do with all of his art, and they never discussed it. He also had few living relatives, and she herself had no formal legal connection to him. But one day, as he drifted in and out of sleep, he turned to her and said that if anything happened to him, it would be terrible if his paintings were sold. Two weeks later he was dead.
18
THE MAN VANISHES
In January 1926, Alfred Barr went up from Princeton to New York to see some paintings. For a brief period of time, the Art Center, a two-story exhibition hall on East Fifty-sixth Street, was offering a rare glimpse at one of the most unusual private art collections in the world. Many of the nearly one hundred works in the exhibition were by artists who were still scarcely known in the United States; a number of them were said to be among the most distinctive of their kind. For Barr, it was a crucial opportunity.
Four and a half years after his first fleeting encounter with Matisse and Picasso at the Metropolitan’s controversial post-Impressionist show, Barr had become an aspiring scholar of modern art. Though he was barely out of college, he had gained a reputation at Princeton and Harvard for his brilliance and his quiet radicalism. Already the previous spring, despite only a single year of graduate coursework, he’d opted to take his general exams—and astonished his examiners by his performance. “One got the impression that he had thought deeply and ranged widely over the whole field,” one of them wrote.[1] But Barr was bored with the curriculum and had taken to complaining openly about the universities’ disdain for the current era. At Princeton, where he was now on a one-year teaching fellowship, there was still no course in twentieth-century modern art; at Harvard, the post-Impressionists were completely ignored.[2] In fact, few museums in the United States had works by any of these artists, and much of Barr’s own patchy knowledge came from back issues of The Dial and Vanity Fair.[3] Now, however, there was an exhibition hall in New York that was apparently filled with their paintings.
Arriving at the Art Center, Barr quickly found that the show exceeded his expectations. It began with several dozen paintings by some of the most interesting and daring living Americans, artists like Max Weber, Alfred Maurer, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Sheeler. Ordinarily, these canvases would have made a distinguished show in themselves. Here, though, they were merely a prelude to something else. As Barr went farther into the gallery, he found himself in front of a series of astonishing paintings by the modernists whose names went unmentioned at Harvard: Van Gogh, Seurat, Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Derain, Vlaminck, Dufy, Rouault, de La Fresnaye, and Picasso. There was a terrifically inside-out work by Braque, a green-and-gray cluster of fractured volumes from which emerged the contours of a large violin and a tall candlestick; and an enormous Matisse still life, transfigured by geometric structuring and bold swaths of color. Scattered among them were Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s wittily abstract bronze woman, and Brancusi’s Golden Bird. Then, at a certain point, Barr found himself ensnared by a supremely strange painting of a lion and a sleeping woman. It was by Henri Rousseau. He would never forget the encounter. “It made a profound impression on me,” he wrote almost three decades later. “More than anything else in a show of wonderful pictures.”[4]
* * *
—
Barr was getting his first—and, as it would turn out, only—sustained look at the art patronage of John Quinn. Officially titled The Memorial Exhibition of Representative Works Selected from the John Quinn Collection, the show was a small and imperfect sample of what had been found in the lawyer’s apartment when he died eighteen months earlier. Left out were many of his most important Seurats, Picassos, Matisses, Brancusis, Gaudier-Brzeskas, and other works, while the show also included lesser English and Irish works that Quinn had acquired earlier in his career. Yet as Barr took in the presentation, he began to appreciate the audacity of Quinn’s project, and to understand that he had been up to something greater than simply buying paintings he liked. As Barr would later reflect, in the short time that he had pursued modern art, Quinn had managed to assemble “many of the best works by many of the best artists.”[5]
Barr was not the only one impressed by the exhibition. “Eight square feet of Matisse with his blacks and burning reds and greens,” Murdock Pemberton, the jaunty, Kansas-born critic wrote in Harold Ross’s brand-new New Yorker. “Rousseau’s great lion with mane of rope and asses nose. ‘The Maternity of Picasso.’ The haunting melodies of Redon’s palette.” In The New York Times, Sheldon Cheney, the art writer who had met Quinn a few years earlier, wrote, “America has plenty of great art collectors of the ‘safe’ variety….John Quinn stands out from all those safe collectors as something of an epic figure.” In a lead editorial, Forbes Watson, the editor of The Arts, a prominent arts magazine, argued that “any museum, desirous of acquiring contemporary art” should be envious of the paintings at the Art Center. “Perhaps more than any other American collector,” Watson wrote, “Mr. Quinn ate, drank, argued, played and lived with artists actively engaged in promoting the cause of modern art.”[6]
But if the exhibition conveyed the peculiar power of one man’s unusual taste, it also gave Barr a visceral lesson in the limits of the American art world. For all the critics’ interest, the excitement was short-lived. The show ran for only three weeks; and far from establishing the collection in the city’s cultural firmament, it amounted to little more than a last-ditch effort by Quinn’s friends to exhibit a group of works that would never be seen together again. A few days after the Art Center show opened, The New York Times reported that the estate of the late collector had sold fifty-two of his Picassos, together with many of his Seurats, to a Paris dealer.[7] A few months after the show, many of Quinn’s most important remaining French paintings, including works by Cézanne, Derain, Matisse, Gris, Redon, and Rouault, were also sent back to France to be auctioned at the Hôtel Drouot. Some of Quinn’s final purchases, like Rousseau’s incomparable Sleeping Gypsy, would be leaving the United States barely two years after they arrived. “See the show,” Pemberton urged his readers. “For when the collection is dispersed you will not have the chance without traveling far and wide. There will be none left in New York.”
For much of the previous year and a half, Quinn’s friends had done everything they could to prevent this outcome. Already, the day after his death, Frederick James Gregg had argued in the New York Sun that the collection “ought to find a home somewhere in its integrity.”[8] Soon after, Ezra Pound had written to Quinn’s legal secretary urging that the paintings be kept in the United States and open to the public, a call that was echoed by Arthur Davies, Henry McBride, Walter Pach, and other members of Quinn’s circle. Though he did not know Quinn well, Duncan Phillips, the prominent Washington, D.C., collector and founder of the Phillips Collection, went further: The collection, he said, should be kept intact as a “museum of modern art.”[9]
But Quinn had left his own final intentions oddly unresolved. In Paris, Henri-Pierre Roché had long assumed, like Quinn’s New York friends, that the immaculate big game works they were hunting were destined, as he put it, “for the Metropolitan or for some other museums of the U.S.A.” Yet in a moment of distemper two years before his death, Quinn had privately dismissed the idea. He told Roché that he wanted to preserve the core modern and avant-garde works that they had assembled since the war. “What I have in mind is a certain selection of French works that are of museum rank and importance,” he told Roché. “These are paintings I would never part with.” But he also said that after so many years of struggle for modern art, he had lost faith in the United States. Anyway, the Metropolitan was highly unlikely to accept his paintings. “These Picassos belong in France,” he had said.[10]
If Quinn hoped to preserve his most significant artworks, whether in France or the United States, though, his wishes were poorly understood. The main instrument for dealing with his assets was the hasty will he had drawn up back in 1918, at the time of his cancer surgery, and redrafted shortly before his death. But that document made no differentiation among his paintings and sculptures and ordered that all the art he owned be liquidated to benefit his sister and her daughter.[11] It also did not seem to take account of the final six years of his life, when he and Roché had assembled a cohesive group of avant-garde paintings and sculptures. And while Quinn had grown increasingly disenchanted with the American art world after the “degenerate” art controversy at the Metropolitan, he made several later addenda to the will that seemed to conflict with the idea of a total liquidation. To start with, he wanted Seurat’s final masterpiece, Circus, to go to the Louvre, as he had promised Seurat’s protégé, Paul Signac. But he made no mention of the many other standout works that he had especially prized—Picasso’s lyrical late Cubist masterpieces and his archaic nudes; Matisse’s Blue Nude, which had once scandalized visitors to the Armory Show; Brancusi’s Golden Bird; Derain’s The Bagpiper; nor The Sleeping Gypsy, which, along with Circus, he had set up next to his deathbed.
