Picasso's War, page 22
In fact, in a separate set of instructions, Quinn had outlined a plan—a “possible contingency,” as he put it—to keep his most important paintings and sculptures together. The core of the collection—perhaps several hundred paintings and sculptures—could be preserved for the public trust, he wrote, provided that Davies, his well-connected friend, could raise $250,000 to purchase them from the estate.[12] The quarter million figure was perhaps only half of what Quinn had spent, but the plan would create the nucleus of the modern museum that he had long envisioned, while ensuring that his sister and niece would be well cared for. In an era in which a single painting by Rembrandt or Gainsborough could go for several multiples of this figure, the amount was hardly extravagant. And Davies also knew several wealthy women—including Quinn’s friends Lillie Bliss and Mary Sullivan—who understood the importance of Quinn’s legacy.
Davies made an impassioned case. His own alliance with Quinn went back to the Armory Show, and he had followed his art conquests for years. During the wartime art boom in New York, he had gone on almost weekly rounds with Quinn to the galleries to select paintings. Later, he had organized the 1922 show of Quinn’s paintings and sculptures at the Sculptors’ Gallery, and then, in the final months of Quinn’s life, he had attended the small dinner at which Quinn had unveiled The Sleeping Gypsy, the keystone of his collection. Davies fervently wanted these works to stay together. But for all the sympathy his plan drew, he was unable to persuade the women to fund the project.
Meanwhile, Quinn’s estate itself was in disarray. For one thing, he had never bothered to catalog what he owned, and no one was certain just what his apartment contained. Nor were his executors particularly interested in modern art. Quinn had intended his longtime legal secretary, Thomas Curtin, who had followed his purchases for years, to provide guidance, but Curtin died six months after Quinn. That left, as his remaining executors, a New York lawyer who had known Quinn for years but did not share his aesthetic tastes; and the National Bank of Commerce, for which Quinn had long served as legal counsel, an institution that was far more comfortable with monetary trusts than radical paintings and wanted to get rid of them as soon as possible. “We don’t want Wall Street laughing at us as the Cubist bank,” one of the bank’s officers told a friend of Quinn’s.[13]
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Quinn’s years of overlapping female relationships created problems of their own. Alongside Jeanne Foster, he left financial bequests to several women he had been with over the years. One of them was Dorothy Coates, a schoolteacher he’d had a desultory relationship with in the early part of his career, and who had pursued him for years afterward. (Foster referred to Coates as “the dragon,” and Quinn, during his final illness, asked Foster and his caretakers not to let Coates see him under any pretext.) Shortly after the will was unsealed, Coates came forward with an explosive claim: She asserted that she was Quinn’s common-law wife and was entitled to a much larger share of his estate; she also maintained, absurdly, that she “knew every picture he bought and its history.” The case was eventually dismissed in Surrogate’s Court, but not before it made sensational headlines. (GIRL CAN’T COLLECT FROM QUINN ESTATE, the Times had reported.)[14]
Left with no alternatives, the executors decided to liquidate the collection. At first they contemplated doing exactly what Quinn feared most: putting everything into an enormous auction. Jeanne Foster knew better than anyone else that Quinn regarded his collection as a work of art in itself and had feared its dispersal in an unsympathetic world. “If anything happened to me and there was a sale of my paintings,” he had told her during his final illness, “there would be a slaughter.” As much as he loved his artists, he sensed, in his bitter decline, that they carried very little meaning in 1920s America. “The large Picasso nudes could hardly be given away now,” he had told her. In desperation, Foster wrote to the executors, pleading with them to delay their plans and warning that many of Quinn’s paintings were “fifty years ahead of popular taste.”[15] But Foster had no legal standing with the estate and her influence was limited.
Still, there was Roché. Serendipitously, he had been invited to New York a few months after Quinn’s death, to assist a prominent French theater director who was touring North America. Foster had warned him that the fate of Quinn’s pictures hung in doubt and the trip gave him a perfect opportunity to meet with the executors and try to influence the outcome. Aware of Roché’s close collaboration with Quinn and his expertise in the Paris market, they welcomed his help. After he met with them in New York, they asked him to evaluate the most important works in the collection; they also wanted his advice about their disposal.
That winter, Roché spent several days alone in Quinn’s apartment, surrounded by all the paintings he had helped acquire.[16] For the first time, he could see the ensemble of works that the two of them had assembled. As he waded through the stacks and piles of paintings, turning them over one by one, his esteem for Quinn, the choices he made, the risks he took, grew further. “No other collection had this kind of concision and punch,” he wrote.[17] Like Foster, he knew that auctioning the paintings in New York would be disastrous; only in Europe was their true value known. He advised the executors to delay any sales, and to consider holding them in Paris instead.
Then, looking at all of Quinn’s Picassos, he had another idea. It was true, as Quinn had told Foster, that few people in the United States seemed ready for Picasso’s big nudes, his Cubist still lifes, or even his Blue and Rose period masterpieces. But Roché knew at least one art connoisseur who had a deep interest in Picasso and had long followed Quinn’s exploits in the Paris art world. He also knew that this man stood to lose almost as much as the Quinn estate if there was a general collapse in prices for Picasso and other artists. He felt fairly certain that the man would be more than eager to make an offer on Quinn’s Picassos, if he were given the chance. The man was Paul Rosenberg. What if Roché engineered a private deal between Rosenberg and the executors?
In fact, Rosenberg had had his eye on Quinn’s collection from almost the moment he learned of Quinn’s death, if not well before. (“Perhaps you know that Quinn is dead and there’s talk of selling his paintings!” Rosenberg wrote Picasso in the fall of 1924.)[18] Rosenberg was intrigued by Roché’s plan, and in early 1925, Roché approached the executors about a possible deal. “I presented you as the only man who has financial interests that are identical with those of the estate,” Roché wrote Rosenberg.[19]
The executors took their time, but in the end, the strategy worked. By the time the memorial exhibition opened at the Art Center, the executors were anxious to get rid of the artworks as quietly and efficiently as they could. Persuaded that Rosenberg was rescuing them from looming catastrophe, they let him walk away—for a significant discount—with nearly all of Quinn’s Picassos, as well as several important Seurats and other paintings. For Rosenberg, it was a remarkable coup. Having long fought with Quinn over how best to promote Picasso’s work in the United States, he was getting the last word: For the foreseeable future, the center of the artist’s work would be rue La Boétie, not Central Park West.
When they learned of the Picasso sale, some of Quinn’s friends were furious. Here was an unparalleled sweep of works that told the story of one of the leading modern artists through some of his most important paintings. If ever there were a case for keeping the core of Quinn’s collection intact in the United States, it was the Picassos. Yet now they were being scooped up and sent back across the ocean. In The Dial, Henry McBride grumbled about “the immense loot from the Quinn Collection that Mr. Rosenberg is taking back to Paris.”[20] In The Independent, Gregg wrote that the loss of Quinn’s paintings was “likely to put us back by a quarter of a century.”[21] But Roché was certain he had done the right thing: The United States was not ready for these Picassos. Quinn had said so himself. In turning them over to Rosenberg, he was doing the best he could for Quinn and his estate, while saving Picasso from yet another American embarrassment. He also stood to gain a handsome commission on the deal.
That fall, the other post-Impressionist and avant-garde masterpieces that Quinn’s executors had sent back to France were put up for sale at the same Paris auction house where Kahnweiler’s own vast collection of Cubist works had been dispersed a few years earlier. The catalog for the sale was introduced by Picasso’s friend Jean Cocteau. “John Quinn was one of the four or five people in all the world who discovered everything that vibrated, everything that moved,” Cocteau wrote. Buoyed by Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy and Matisse’s Blue Nude, the auction attracted enormous attention. “The John Quinn Collection, which should be in a state museum, is now up for resale, its magnificent unity destroyed in the Parisian auction rooms of the Hôtel Drouot,” Janet Flanner wrote, in one of her first French dispatches for The New Yorker. She added, “For forty-eight hours Mr. Quinn was better known in Paris than he had ever been known in New York.”[22]
Flanner was not wrong. Although a few adventurous American buyers took an interest in his paintings, Quinn remained an enigma. In early 1927, after the cream of the collection had been sold in Europe, the remaining eight hundred paintings and sculptures were sold off in a four-day auction in New York. The sale attracted considerable attention and, owing to the sheer quantity of lots, yielded $91,570; though the amount still paled in comparison to the value of a single Gainsborough or Vermeer, it would stand for years to come as the most lucrative sale of modern art ever held in the United States. Yet it was hard to deny the darker story about American culture told by the dissolution of the Quinn estate. In New York, some Cubist and Futurist works went for as little as $7.50 apiece; Roché called the sale a “massacre” and estimated that it achieved about 50 percent of the purchase prices.[23]
Devalued and dispersed, many of the works would disappear altogether. Decades later, when an art historian attempted to trace the present location of the paintings and sculptures that Quinn had collected, she concluded that three-quarters of them could no longer be found.[24] And once the collection was gone, there were remarkably few traces of Quinn left. Summoned home to care for her aging husband and her father, Jeanne Foster resigned from the Review of Reviews and withdrew to her family in Schenectady, where she kept a small private shrine to Quinn. Roché resumed his complicated life in Paris, deciding, finally, to marry Germaine, his demure and patient French love, while not quite abandoning his affair with Helen, his German torment. Even the apartment where Quinn had kept all that art turned out to have been merely a rental, and no known photographs of its cavernous art-filled rooms would survive. Soon his singular achievement was little more than a fading, exotic memory among those New Yorkers and foreigners who had had the fortune to be invited to his home, or to see the Art Center exhibition.
At least for Alfred Barr, though, the unusual show was less an end than a beginning. He was struck by what he called Quinn’s “astonishing prowess” for finding the most interesting new art, when much of it was deeply unpopular. There was also a thrilling sense of freedom in his choices, the same freedom from traditional ideas and cultural restraints that seemed to be present in the new artists themselves. Reflecting on the show, he would call Quinn the country’s “most emancipated” art collector. But he was also struck by his motivations. Here was a comprehensive vision of French modern art, told through its most inspiring examples, a vision that began with ancestors like Cézanne and Seurat, and continued through Matisse and Picasso to the present day. It was a story that was utterly absent from the country’s museums. It was also a story that Barr himself desperately wanted to tell.
19
THE VERY MODERN MR. BARR
At the time he saw the John Quinn memorial show, there was little about Alfred Barr that suggested he was destined to transform the American art world. Physically slight to the point of frailty, he had large round glasses and boyish features that made him look even younger than his twenty-three years. He was also reserved and scholarly, and tended to speak in measured paragraphs followed by excruciatingly long silences. Outside of his studies, he limited himself to such serious pursuits as organ concerts, chess, and occasional tennis; he was not known for dating. Frequently, he was in precarious health. And where most of his Harvard classmates came from cosmopolitan backgrounds of wealth and privilege, Barr was a scholarship student who had grown up in a parsonage.
He also had had remarkably little direct exposure to the art that interested him most. In New York and Boston, works by modern and avant-garde artists remained scarce; and Barr’s sole experience of Europe was a conventional sightseeing trip to Italy and France, which he had undertaken, on a shoestring, with a childhood friend at the end of college. (Like Quinn on his first trip to France, he had visited Chartres Cathedral.) As he confessed to his mother after starting graduate school, his own knowledge of modern painting was “woefully superficial”; when he had a rare opportunity to see an actual abstract painting by Kandinsky, he initially dismissed it as “hashish.”[1]
Yet, like Quinn, Barr sensed early on that an extraordinary cultural upheaval was under way, and mainstream resistance made him all the more intent on fighting for it. “It’s…a feeling for the underdog,” he once commented. “I like to see him win.”[2] He also shared the lawyer’s relentless self-drive and determination to master all that was new. By 1926, finding the material he absorbed from books, magazines, and other sources insufficient, he began asking J. B. Neumann, a modern art dealer who had recently arrived from Berlin, to import European publications for him; to many of his classmates, and a few of his professors, his intellectual precocity was somewhat terrifying. After meeting Barr in the late twenties, the British modernist Wyndham Lewis, Quinn’s old friend, commented that “he looks like a defrocked Spanish Jesuit.”[3] Philip Johnson, at the time a somewhat unfocused Harvard undergraduate, had the impression that “he was nearly God.”[4]
In fact, Barr did have a religious background, though not in the denomination Lewis suggested. Born in Detroit in 1902, Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr., came from a line of Presbyterian clergymen going back to the seventeenth century. When Barr was nine, the family moved to Baltimore, where his father became minister of the First Presbyterian Church; Barr was enrolled at the conservative Boys’ Latin School, where he excelled. Early on, though, it was not religion but the natural world that gripped him. Equipped with an unusually analytical mind and a passion for taxonomy, he was drawn to butterfly collecting and birdwatching; in his high school newspaper—which he edited—he was described as a “born scientist with a real desire for things bizarre, grotesque, and occult.” He also was fond of grand strategy, and liked to restage decisive battles like Gettysburg and Waterloo on his living room floor. By sixteen, he had graduated as “Head Boy” and won a scholarship to Princeton.[5]
In college, he planned to study paleontology, but he abandoned fossils after taking a course in medieval art during his sophomore year. Led by an innovative scholar named Charles Rufus Morey, the class catered directly to Barr’s scientific bent. Rejecting prevailing understandings of art as an expression of national history and limited to painting and sculpture, Morey sought to trace the common evolution of all art forms across huge sweeps of time and space. At the center of Morey’s radical project was an effort to discipline the bewilderingly complex and poorly understood world of medieval art—a thousand-year morass—into a single, geneaological story, an approach that seemed to do to art what Kepler’s laws had done to astronomy.[6]
For the empirically minded but visually stimulated Barr, the class made an indelible impression and soon after, he switched his major to art history. But the tools Morey offered seemed far more exciting when applied to the modern era. Inspired by his magazine reading and by John Quinn’s post-Impressionist show at the Metropolitan, Barr began to seek out as much information as he could about the new art movements in Europe. By the time he had finished a year of Harvard graduate school, he could assert that he had already “passed through” most of the significant epochs of art, including Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque, and that he was now mainly interested in an epoch that no one was teaching: the present. “Contemporary art is puzzling and chaotic,” he wrote in one application for funding, “but is to many of us living and important…as a manifestation of our amazing though none too lucid civilization.”[7] Like Quinn, he was beginning to sense that “living” art could often speak more powerfully than any historical masterpiece. It also was still awaiting its Kepler.
At Harvard, Barr socialized little, but he gradually fell in with an ambitious group of young men who shared his ardor for modernism. Beginning in 1925, Barr formed an especially important friendship with Jere Abbott, a brilliant young pianist and physicist who had studied music in Paris, and who had, on Barr’s recommendation, decided to study art history at Harvard. In Cambridge, they became roommates and constant companions, and Abbott sometimes came to Barr’s lectures to play polytonal pieces by Milhaud and Stravinsky for his students. Dazzled by Barr’s genius, Abbott quickly embraced his ideas about modern art.
