Picasso's War, page 23
Most of Barr’s professors, however, did not. In one of his first courses at Harvard, Picasso was held up to ridicule. “After the tittering subsided the professor told three funny stories,” Barr complained.[8] Another prominent faculty member had long tried to keep modern art out of the city’s museums altogether. In one of Barr’s first attempts to organize an exhibition on campus, he was unable to locate any works even by the founders of the modern movement. “It is actually impossible,” he wrote in a blistering attack in The Harvard Crimson, to find “a single painting by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin, masters who are honored the world over.”[9]
Soon Barr was gaining a reputation as a young Jacobin. At Wellesley, he launched a controversial course in twentieth-century art, the first of its kind in the country. Showing up in mismatched suits, he asked his students to read James Joyce and Luigi Pirandello rather than art books, to visit factories and train stations rather than museums. (One assignment was to study the new Necco candy factory in Cambridge, which was one of the very few modernist buildings in the area.) Local critics, responding to his strident modernism and his disparagement of the local culture, began to savage him as “the very modern Mr. Barr of Cambridge and Wellesley.”[10]
Like Quinn, Barr seemed to enjoy the controversy. “I have had some good fights over modern art,” he told one friend.[11] His outspoken fervor did not endear him to the Harvard faculty, though. Seeking a travel grant to Europe—essential in a field in which much of what he was interested in could not be found in the United States—he was repeatedly turned down. By the late 1920s, Barr complained that he was living “hand to mouth,” and his determination to become the country’s first scholar of modern art was beginning to look distinctly unpromising. “I have no funds to travel with or buy books and material,” he wrote.[12]
Still, he had at least one powerful ally: Paul J. Sachs, the associate director of Harvard’s Fogg Museum. A small, courtly man from the Goldman Sachs banking family, Sachs was unlike other members of the faculty. He had come to Harvard after a fifteen-year career in international finance and regarded himself more as a connoisseur than as a scholar. As a distinguished collector of prints, he was well connected in the European art world; he was also deeply concerned by the state of American museums, which he felt had become stale repositories for rich men’s treasures. He preferred to teach in the long living room of Shady Hill, his large nineteenth-century estate near Harvard, where he could surprise students with unknown objects from his art collection, rather than in a classroom. In his pioneering “museum course,” he set out to give a new generation of art scholars the combination of eye training, business expertise, and social skills he felt was needed to manage an elite public museum collection. Though Barr lacked the poise of some of his wealthy peers, Sachs recognized his unusual gifts, and quickly adopted him as a protégé.
Crucially for Barr, Sachs was also open to modern art. While he steered clear of Cubism and abstraction, he knew some of the modern dealers in Europe and felt that the movements they were promoting should be better known in the United States. As early as 1920, when hardly any Americans apart from Quinn were pursuing Picasso’s work, Sachs had bought a Picasso drawing from Paul Rosenberg—initiating a transatlantic friendship with the dealer that would one day prove vital in ways that neither of them could imagine. Sachs also understood that Barr needed direct exposure to the European art world. And when Barr was unable to secure funding, Sachs paid for the trip himself.
Spanning an entire academic year, Barr’s Wanderjahr in 1927–28 upended his understanding of modern art. For any ordinary American scholar of the time, it was natural to visit the art capitals of Western Europe. While Barr spent several weeks in London and Paris, however, his primary interests lay elsewhere. Where Quinn had sought to identify and support the most important artists of his time, Barr wanted to witness how these artists were changing civilization. Together with Abbott, who was paying his own way, Barr traveled to Holland, where the De Stijl movement had produced a flourishing scene of advanced design and architecture. Even more important, though, were the months they spent in two other countries farther east, the same two where Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler had first established the avant-garde art market a generation earlier: Germany and Russia.
In both the Weimar Republic and the young Soviet state, modernist ideas had taken hold to a degree that was almost unimaginable in the United States. In Germany, Barr found advanced museums in almost every town they visited. They also spent four days at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where they met Walter Gropius and most of the other artist-leaders who were seeking to bring new aesthetic and design principles to everything from the color patterns of rugs to the shape of door handles. In Moscow, Vsevolod Meyerhold, the avant-garde theater director, showed them his Cubist stage sets and Sergei Eisenstein let them watch him edit October, his latest revolutionary film; they also visited the Museum of Modern Western Painting No. 1—the nationalized prewar collection of Sergei Shchukin—which housed the largest collection of Picassos and Matisses in the world. Even as America’s biggest cities had yet to embrace contemporary painting and sculpture, Barr observed, “little German industrial towns such as Halle and Erfurt, Essen and Mannheim, Russian cities such as Witebsk and Kharkov, have galleries devoted primarily to modern art.”[13]
But as they lingered in Moscow, Barr and Abbott also discovered something else: that modern art depended on political freedom. At the time of their visit, Joseph Stalin was just beginning to consolidate power over the Soviet state; during their stay, Trotsky was arrested and bundled onto a train for forced exile in Kazakhstan, part of the sweeping purge of the party’s main opposition faction. To ordinary citizens, the ideological hardening was not yet apparent, and Barr and Abbott were able to move freely around the country. But already, a chill had descended over avant-garde art, which was seen as insufficiently socialist. In the years leading up to the Russian Revolution, Moscow had had one of the most dynamic art scenes in the world, with painters like Kazimir Malevich and Natalia Goncharova and sculptors like Alexander Archipenko pushing Russia to the forefront of abstract art. By the time of Barr and Abbott’s visit, however, many of the country’s leading artists had gone into exile or given up painting altogether. “That’s all in the past,” the painter Aleksandr Rodchenko told them.[14] They also discovered, despite the exhilarating work of Eisenstein and Meyerhold, a growing climate of censorship in film, theater, and public exhibitions. In fact, they were witnessing the final twilight of the Russian avant-garde. Shortly after their departure, the Shchukin museum would be shut down and most of its Matisses and Picassos locked away; over the next few years, Stalin would formally repudiate modern art in favor of Socialist Realism, and many modern artists and writers would be persecuted. Eisenstein would soon have trouble getting his films made; Meyerhold would eventually be executed.[15]
For Barr, the European sojourn provided a tantalizing sense of the promise, and peril, of the new art. He was fascinated by the extent to which novel aesthetic ideas were spreading across culture, and soon he was lecturing Wellesley undergraduates about Soviet cinema and the Bauhaus. But it was also his first exposure to the conflict between modern art and antidemocratic politics. The rise of Stalin would not be the last time he witnessed up close the advent of a totalitarian regime and its consequences for a society with an advanced art culture. Years later, Barr would reflect that “painting and sculpture were perhaps the first arts to succumb to cultural tyranny.”[16]
Barr returned to the United States in the summer of 1928 filled with ideas. Given all that he had experienced, he was more determined than ever to study modern art. Yet he soon realized how difficult this might be. Forced to take on a heavy teaching load, he had no time to begin his Ph.D., or even to assimilate what he’d seen. More ominously, his supervisors were less than convinced by his proposal to write about what he called “primitive” tendencies in modern art—a subject for which Picasso’s work would be central. That fall, despite his stellar academic record, and unusual knowledge of Germany and Russia, both Harvard and Princeton declined to give him funding. It was a serious setback, and Barr thought he might have to rethink his plans altogether.
Once again, Sachs came to the rescue. “You must not be discouraged by your failure,” Sachs wrote him in early 1929.[17] First, he suggested that Barr transfer to New York University, which seemed more likely to support his unorthodox subject. A few months later, with Sachs’s support, Barr was able to obtain a one-year Carnegie fellowship there to begin his dissertation. Just as he was preparing to transfer to NYU, however, Sachs wrote him with an even more unusual opportunity in New York, one that went to the core of John Quinn’s unfulfilled legacy: Would Barr like to run a new museum that was going to be devoted entirely to modern art?
20
“HAD HE LIVED ANOTHER DECADE…”
As origin stories go, the serendipitous founding of the Museum of Modern Art has long had the quality of a Stanley-Meets-Livingstone legend. In early 1929, with the stock market at dizzying heights, two New York society women were wintering in North Africa and the Middle East, respectively. One day in southern Egypt—“among the temples and pyramids,” as one writer has it, or perhaps “in the desert sands,” as another asserts—they ran into each other. Soon the talk veered from the Nubian tribes of Wadi Halfa to the Metropolitan Museum’s persistent allergy to Van Gogh and Matisse.[1] Something, they decided, had to be done. Then, in the first-class tearoom of the boat back from Europe, one of the two ran into a third friend of theirs, also a committed modernist, who quickly concurred: It was time to start a new museum. By the time the three “adamantine ladies” reunited that spring in Manhattan, the project was well under way, and within six months, the thing was done. Amid the ruins of the ancient world, a home for the newest art was born.
It is a seductive tale, but little of it happens to be accurate. The three New York friends—Lillie Bliss, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Mary Sullivan—were indeed the driving forces behind one of the most adventurous museum start-ups in a generation. But the plan was hardly concocted during a chance meeting in the shadows of Giza. (Bliss’s and Rockefeller’s parties did have an unplanned encounter, but it was at the far more mundane port of Haifa, not in Egypt, and no pharaonic monuments were involved.[2]) Nor did the project have the unlimited backing that Rockefeller involvement suggested. The women had been tossing the idea around for several years, and far more important in inspiring their “great scheme,” as it was later called, was the event that had shamed the New York art world back in 1926: the breakup of the John Quinn collection. More specifically, the plan was set in motion by the sudden death of Quinn’s friend and ally Arthur B. Davies—in baroque circumstances that carried eerie echoes of Quinn’s own demise.
It began with personal connections to Quinn himself. Bliss had quietly supported Quinn’s efforts ever since the Armory Show, including the 1921 post-Impressionist exhibition. Though she was no radical, she had recently ventured as far as Picasso, and her magnificent Cézannes positioned her as one of the city’s most important modern patrons. Sullivan, who was in her late forties, had even closer ties to Quinn: Raised in Indianapolis by Irish immigrant parents, she was, like him, not from an elite background and had made her own way in New York. A pioneering art teacher at Pratt, she had married one of Quinn’s Harvard classmates, and for years, she had avidly followed Quinn’s avant-garde patronage. Quinn was mindful of both women’s interest in his ideas, and when he had instructed his executors to let his friend Arthur Davies try to raise $250,000 to save his collection as the nucleus of a new museum, it was Bliss and Sullivan he had chiefly in mind.
Although neither was able to come up with the funds, they quickly came to recognize that the dispersal of Quinn’s Seurats, Rousseaus, and Picassos on the European market was a stain on the city. Bliss was already in her early sixties, and, like Quinn, she had no immediate heirs; she must have wondered about the fate of her own collection, given the Metropolitan’s entrenched conservatism. In fact, despite years of advocacy by Quinn and his friends, the Manhattan establishment seemed hardly more ready for the new art than it had been at the time of the Armory Show. In 1928, Valentine Dudensing, one of the city’s most progressive art dealers, confessed, “I do not want Picasso[s], because I don’t know who to sell them to.”[3]
Bliss and Sullivan were not alone in sensing a crisis. So did their socially prominent friend Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who had led progressive causes in the city for years. Around the time of Quinn’s death, Rockefeller discovered modern art, and bought several drawings from the Quinn estate. By 1927, she had also made friends with Davies, who must have talked to her, as well, about his failed Quinn plans. At first there appeared to be little Rockefeller could do: She was married to Junior—John D. Rockefeller, Jr.—who, along with being the richest man in America, was dour and humorless and detested modern art. A collector of medieval tapestries and giant Kangxi urns, he refused to have strange new paintings in the public rooms of their eight-story townhouse; he also strictly limited what Abby was allowed to spend on modern art. At one point, the billionaire’s wife found herself having to explain to a French cultural official why she had only a single small Matisse. “The only reason I have not more,” she told him, “is my inability to acquire them.”[4]
Then, in October 1928, Davies died of a heart attack in Florence, leaving behind a legacy of art and women that was nearly as messy as Quinn’s. Though he had a wife and children in New York, Davies had been traveling with his secret longtime mistress, Edna Potter, with whom he also had a child. Bliss, as one of Davies’s closest friends, was drawn into the cover-up. (In a panic, Potter asked Bliss for advice; Bliss told her, “You’ll have to tell his wife.” Soon after, Potter and Mrs. Davies, who had never met, joined forces to try to keep the story out of the papers.[5]) But Bliss and her friends were equally dismayed by the fate of Davies’s art collection, which included works by Picasso, Matisse, Derain, and other artists that Quinn had pursued. Like Quinn’s, Davies’s paintings had no obvious home, and they, too, were liquidated and scattered at auction. It marked a sordid end to the circle around Quinn who had tried for so long to bring modern art to New York.
* * *
—
Davies’s unexpected death spurred Bliss and her friends to action. It was finally time to do something about the plan that Davies had urged on them after Quinn’s death. “His influence on these women,” Bliss’s niece said, “is what brought it all about.”[6] As Bliss, Rockefeller, and Sullivan gathered that spring under the sedate chandeliers of the Rockefeller townhouse, though, they quickly began to see the scale of the challenge they faced. If Quinn’s collection had been saved and Davies were around to oversee it, they would have had the makings of one of the greatest modern museums in the world. Now they had neither. Even for three exceptionally determined women—even with the Rockefeller name—starting an entirely new kind of museum from scratch, without anything to put in it, was daunting.
But then Mary Sullivan told them about the museum man from Buffalo who had a colorful history with one of Quinn’s Picassos.[7] A former military colonel as well as a lumber and railroad baron, A. Conger Goodyear had been a longtime trustee of the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo’s large museum. In the mid-1920s, the Albright was, alongside the Metropolitan, one of the country’s most resplendent museums. Built with more than five thousand tons of Maryland marble, it occupied an opulent turn-of-the-century temple that was meant to evoke the fifth-century-B.C. Erechtheion in Athens; only the U.S. Capitol had more columns. Its galleries were filled with an increasingly ambitious assembly of classic European paintings and sculptures, and its giant, skylit sculpture court featured ancient works from Egypt, India, and Cambodia. But Goodyear had an unusual taste for modern art, and sought to bring more of it to the museum as well.
Goodyear happened to be in New York when Quinn’s collection was being dispersed, and one of the paintings that most caught his eye was Picasso’s La Toilette. Though it was painted only a year before Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the works could not have been more different. Exquisitely serene, the full-length La Toilette depicts a young woman in the nude nonchalantly tying up her hair, while another woman, clad in a long blue robe and shown in profile, holds up a mirror for her; they stand before a warm but almost abstract background. The painting marked a high point of the reddish-tinted naturalism that Picasso had perfected during an unusually tranquil summer with Fernande in Gósol, in the Pyrenees, and captured its subject with unrestrained grace and beauty—as Alfred Barr later observed, here were a pair of demi-goddesses who seemed to be directly inspired by Athenian statuary.[8] By the time Goodyear discovered La Toilette, it had just been sold to Paul Rosenberg in the controversial deal he made with the Quinn estate; in the normal course of things, it would have gone back to Paris with the rest of the Picassos. But Goodyear was determined to get it, and, with the support of the Albright’s new director, William M. Hekking, who shared Goodyear’s interest in modern art, quickly arranged to buy it. At the time, no major museum in the United States owned a Picasso painting, and Goodyear and Hekking thought it would make a bold addition to the Albright’s collection.[9]
When La Toilette was unveiled in Buffalo, however, all hell broke loose. The nudity was too much for some of the other trustees; soon the controversy extended to Goodyear’s larger plans to expand the Albright into modern art. “Not only the Picasso, but the other works acquired through Conger’s influence, had offended them,” Goodyear’s son later wrote. The conservatives were led by the museum’s architect, the man who had designed all those Athenian columns, and the Albright family, which had in large measure paid for them, and when Goodyear’s board seat came up for renewal, they kicked him off. Around the same time he went through a divorce, and in the small world of Buffalo society, he was tarnished goods; soon after, he fled to New York City.[10]
