Picasso's War, page 24
For Rockefeller and her friends, Goodyear’s efforts to bring Picasso to Buffalo took on a decidedly different cast. They were trying to create a museum for precisely this kind of art, and early Picasso, at least, hardly seemed cause for alarm. As Sullivan suggested, Goodyear might be just the man they needed. In late May, they invited him for lunch and asked him outright: Would he like to be chairman of a new museum they were planning? It must have seemed somewhat whimsical, given that none of them knew anything about running a museum, and they had no collection, or building, or staff, or as yet, funds: This was a very long way from the million-dollar Albright Art Gallery. Still, he was at loose ends after Buffalo, and he was intrigued by his socially prominent hosts. The next day, he accepted.
But Goodyear was an executive, not a curator. They would need an expert in modern art to direct the enterprise, someone who could organize shows at the highest level possible. At the time, not only were many museums skittish about the paintings that Quinn had collected; their curators were often ignorant about modern art. True expertise, in Europe as well as the United States, came from the modern art market and the dealers and connoisseurs who engaged in it. “Mr. Quinn was advised by artists,” one prominent New York critic had written during the breakup of the Quinn estate. “Who advises our museums?”[11]
Seeking additional help, Goodyear and Rockefeller recruited Paul Sachs, who knew more about museums than almost anyone in the country. As Sachs scanned the landscape, however, he was not hopeful. American institutions were notably weak in modern art. They could try to hire a director from one of Germany’s advanced museums, but it seemed unlikely that one could be lured for such an experimental venture. Then he thought of his unconventional Harvard protégé. While it was true that Alfred Barr had never run anything, he had just spent a year investigating the newest museums and art schools in Europe and arguably knew more about modern art than anyone in America. He also was already trying, in his own teaching, to elevate avant-garde art to the same status as its historic precedents. Sachs told Goodyear and Rockefeller that if they didn’t object to “a very young man,” he had a perfect candidate in mind.
At first Rockefeller was underwhelmed. After meeting Barr, she told Goodyear she was disappointed that he didn’t have a “more impressive appearance.”[12] Nevertheless, she was struck by his intellectual potency, and she summoned him to the Rockefeller compound in Seal Harbor, Maine, for a more extended audition. Known as the Eyrie, the vast estate featured a half-timbered Tudor-style “cottage” with one hundred rooms and a staff of twenty-two. Perched on a verdant hillside, it overlooked a dramatic, rock-strewn natural expanse dropping down to the sea. It was an intimidating place to talk about the Bauhaus, but Barr was surprised to discover the extent of Rockefeller’s enthusiasm for her project. During long walks together through the Chinese-inspired gardens, he told her some of his ideas about artists, movements, and schools, his experiences in Europe, even his observations about lighting and wall labels. Already he was thinking of the new museum as a laboratory for the kind of advanced art culture he had found in Germany. He also envisioned a pioneering collection of exceptional works that could tell the story of modern art. (In theory, this part was an easy sell. “We must show only the best,” Rockefeller said.[13])
Whatever she made of all of his ideas, Rockefeller was convinced by his energy and knowledge and gave him the job. He even persuaded her to summon his longtime Harvard roommate and devoted friend, Jere Abbott, to Seal Harbor as well, and after a brief interview, she offered him a job as Barr’s deputy. Abbott had been about to begin a prestigious academic position, but he was willing to pass it up for this. (“I WOULD RATHER WORK WITH YOU ON THIS THING THAN ANYTHING I KNOW,” he cabled Barr.[14]) For a student who, only a few months earlier, had been unable to secure funding for his Ph.D., it was a remarkable turnaround. But there was no time to celebrate. It was already August, and Rockefeller and her friends were determined to open later that fall. And they still needed to define the museum’s formal mission. Once again, Barr turned to ideas that had originated with John Quinn.
In a draft position statement that summer, he set out to diagnose the crisis that the city faced. In previous eras, the most innovative artists were embraced by rich men and kings. “Popes bowed to Michelangelo, an Emperor to Titian,” he observed. In contrast, the leading painters of the modern era had been greeted with “contempt and derision.” By now, these attitudes had gradually shifted, with a growing number of international collectors and critics coveting the most important examples of the new art. He noted that while John Quinn had paid just $7,000 for Seurat’s Circus ten years earlier, it would now be worth “not much less than $150,000, that is, if the Louvre to which Quinn bequeathed it decided to sell.” Yet New York had spurned Quinn’s paintings. In a remarkable echo of Quinn’s complaint at the time of the Armory Show more than sixteen years earlier, Barr noted that “the Metropolitan, the foremost museum in America, owns no Van Gogh, no Gauguin, no Seurat, no Toulouse-Lautrec (men long dead) and among the living no Matisse or Picasso, no Segonzac, no Derain.” As a result, he continued, some of the old prejudices had persevered: “Obtuse” viewers, even now, continued to regard any artist who followed the modernist tradition as a “madman, degenerate and (more absurdly) bolshevik.” Such was the scale of the problem that only a new museum could address it.[15]
Back in 1914, in his initial plans for a “modern museum,” Quinn had identified the Luxembourg in Paris as a model. He had called for a public gallery that would not only showcase the newest art but also build a permanent collection of the best examples, a notion that was completely alien to the nation’s historically oriented museums. Later, he had set out to form such a collection of advanced modern art himself—the “magnificent unity” whose dispersal had spurred Rockefeller and her friends in the first place. That fall, as Barr and the founding committee presented their new museum to the public, they turned to these same principles. Already Barr was envisioning a museum that would collect premier works by the most important artists, as Quinn had done, while putting on a continual program of loan shows. “The Luxembourg…was founded in order to solve a problem very similar to that which confronts New York,” Barr wrote in Vanity Fair. “It is…with an ideal Luxembourg in mind,” he continued, that they were making “remarkable progress toward the foundation of a Museum of Modern Art.”[16]
While he did not invoke Quinn explicitly, Barr made clear that the idea for their venture had its origins in the aftermath of the “riotous, epoch-making Armory Exhibition of 1913.” Not only, then, would the museum set out to remedy the crisis posed by the dispersal of the Quinn collection. It would also take the form that Quinn himself had once advocated. In recollecting the founding of the museum decades later, Barr went further, imagining how Quinn himself might have contributed to the project. “Had he lived another decade,” Barr reflected, “what a wonderful president of the Museum of Modern Art he would have made.”[17]
Barr’s plans faced formidable challenges. Along with Quinn in the flesh, they also lacked his paintings. They wouldn’t have a single one of the dozens of Picassos and Brancusis that only a few years earlier had been in an apartment less than two miles from the Rockefeller townhouse; they lacked his Circus and his Sleeping Gypsy. For the time being, they would have to borrow the art they needed. Nor was it clear whether Rockefeller and her friends would be prepared to follow Barr into the later stages of Cubism, let alone the more recent movements in art, architecture, film, and design he had witnessed in Dessau and Moscow. “Now remember, Alfred, that we cannot get all the things that we want at once,” Sachs warned him when he accepted the job, adding that he would need to “follow the line of least resistance” with the board.[18]
Still, the economy was strong, and the long-overdue museum showed every sign of attracting wide support in the art world. “Funds must be raised, the co-operation of collectors, critics and dealers invited,” Barr wrote in August. “But there is so much enthusiasm and interest in New York that these things will scarcely be lacking.” He could not know that the world would look very different by the time the museum opened three months later.[19]
21
A MUSEUM OF HIS OWN
Three and a half months after Barr began his new job, an Italian graduate student named Daisy Scolari invited her friend Agnes Rindge down to New York City for Thanksgiving weekend. Rindge was a brilliant young Radcliffe Ph.D. who was teaching art at Vassar; Scolari was a svelte, dark-haired woman from Rome on a prestigious art history fellowship at New York University. They had both heard about the new museum that was stirring up an enormous fuss on Fifty-seventh Street and they wanted to see it. For weeks, there had been lines of people waiting to get in the building; a few days earlier, the museum had announced it was adding special hours for art students, because the crowds were too large for sketching. Rindge suggested they go together, and one morning, they set out for Midtown.[1]
By its location alone, the Museum of Modern Art was unlike any public art gallery in the world. At the time, the prevailing American museum ideal was still some variant of a neoclassical temple, usually set back from its surroundings or placed in a park. The new venue, by contrast, was halfway up a Midtown high-rise known as the Heckscher Building, where its fellow tenants included a cigar company, a bank, and several interior design firms. The museum had no presence at street level, and, as the Times had explained, in order to reach its galleries, “you take the elevator up to the twelfth floor.”[2]
As Scolari and Rindge approached the entrance, the elevator line was spilling onto Fifth Avenue. When they finally got up to the right floor, they found themselves in a series of spaces that were as unusual as the museum’s address. According to prevailing tastes, museum galleries usually featured elaborate moldings, columns, and paneling to create a luxurious setting; walls tended to be covered in rich red or dark green brocade. Here, everything was the exact opposite. Clean and Spartan, the rooms were completely devoid of decoration and color save for the paintings themselves. “If the walls were not totally white then they were the palest possible grey, absolutely neutral,” Scolari recalled.[3] Even the rugs and few pieces of furniture were light gray. In fact, it was the beginning of an approach that would one day spread throughout the international art world: the so-called “white cube” gallery, in which walls, ceilings, and floors serve as neutral backdrops for pure contemplation of the art itself. By the late twentieth century, the approach would become so dominant that it would provoke a backlash. For Americans in 1929, though, it was utterly novel.
And then there was the art. Spread across every available wall in the museum’s seven small galleries were nearly one hundred paintings by Cézanne, Seurat, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Though these were founding figures of the modern movement, their work was still relatively rare in New York, and they had never been shown on this scale. For the two young art historians, though, as striking as the paintings themselves was the way they were hung.
In the early twentieth century, many museums displayed paintings in the popular “salon style,” with paintings organized symmetrically by size and hung in vertical stacks that sometimes went up to the ceiling. It had a decorative effect as wall cover, but it was a terrible way to look at art. Here, instead, the paintings were mounted in a single row at eye level and arranged so that they told a sequential story. Even the wall labels were interesting. Rather than merely listing titles and dates, they provided crucial information about a work’s significance and meaning. “Such a thing had never been done before,” Scolari recalled.
Around the margins, there were indications that the whole operation was considerably more bare bones than its fresh look suggested. For one thing, the galleries were small, crowded, and poorly ventilated; the windows had been papered over, and the existing spaces had to be divided up by partitions to provide enough wall space. Even so, they had run out of room: Two Cézanne self-portraits and a Van Gogh interior were hanging over closed doors. And the paintings themselves were all borrowed and would be going home the moment the show was over. If this was a museum, it was certainly doing a good job of hiding the fact.
Then, as they pushed their way into one of the larger galleries, Rindge recognized the thin young man who had installed the show: Alfred Barr. They had known each other since Harvard, where she, too, had attended Sachs’s museum course, and she ran over to greet him. After they chatted for a while, she introduced her friend. “Of course you know Daisy Scolari?” she said. Scolari had already heard a lot about the young iconoclast from Harvard who was supposed to have been her classmate at NYU but had taken the museum job instead. They began to talk. Reticent and excited at the same time, Barr must have been distracted watching the crowds react to the paintings. But he found Scolari amusing. She had a way of anticipating his words with her own. He told her he hoped they would see each other again. And then she and Rindge left.
* * *
—
By outward appearances, at least, Barr’s first show had been an improbable success. People were clogging the elevators at the Heckscher Building; the critics were almost unanimously positive. “If the exhibition has a flaw it is that of too great power,” Art News declared. The Times put it more succinctly: “Quality disarms.” More dramatically, The Nation asserted that the new museum marked the end of the “long and bitter struggle for modern art” that had gone on ever since the Armory Show, noting that modernism had finally found “acceptance by respectable society.” To hear these critics tell it, Quinn’s battle had been won.[4]
Barr knew otherwise. In large part, the response owed to the extraordinary care he and Goodyear had put into the selection of paintings: They had insisted on only the most outstanding works, and Barr had even letter-graded potential candidates. (Barr may be one of the few curators to have given Cézanne a B on some of his canvases.) But as he was acutely aware, there was another explanation, too. Despite all the fanfare, the works they had packed into the Heckscher Building were hardly very modern. The museum was showing the work of four late-nineteenth-century painters who were already internationally recognized, artists whom Quinn had once referred to as “men who are dead.” This was certainly not the wild Cubist and Futurist work that had provoked bitter struggles at the Armory Show, and there was no guarantee that the public, or even his own trustees, would be equally receptive to the advanced twentieth-century art whose interpretation he saw as the museum’s chief task. Meanwhile, they were using rented spaces and relying almost entirely on borrowed art. In many respects, they were hardly a museum at all.
Particularly threatening to Barr’s plans was the sudden crisis the country was in. The Museum of Modern Art had opened on November 8, 1929, exactly ten days after the largest stock market crash in U.S. history. In a single day of trading, the market lost some $14 billion; by early November, nearly half of the overall value of the market had disappeared. Though the broader effects were impossible to predict, for anyone with significant investments, the impact had been immediate. It was difficult to imagine a less promising moment to start a new museum of any kind, let alone one devoted to a kind of art whose long-term value was highly uncertain.
Before the crash, Goodyear managed to recruit a number of wealthy donors—some two dozen in total—to contribute the $76,000 needed for the first year of operations. Even then, though, there was barely enough to pay for a staff of five people and cover their modest rent. Had Rockefeller and her friends begun planning their museum even a few months later, it is doubtful it would have opened at all.
Following the dire headlines, Barr must have worried if he had been right to abandon his Ph.D. At New York University, he had funding and, with his doctorate and contacts, would likely have landed a tenured position in one of the country’s growing art history faculties. Now he was entirely at the mercy of the museum’s donors, and everything would depend on their continued willingness to support it. Even before the economic crisis, the founders had decided that the museum would rely entirely on art loans for its first two years: Like the inaugural exhibition, shows would be built around paintings borrowed from private collections and dealers that would be returned as soon as the shows were finished. At the cramped Heckscher Building, the museum was on an annual lease, and if the finances proved untenable, the whole operation could vanish as quickly as it had started.
As it was, the economic crisis was only one of the challenges he faced. In trying to set up the first full-fledged modern art museum in America, he also had to contend with the inherent conservatism of his own trustees. Rockefeller, Bliss, and the other founders may have thought of their tastes as modern by New York standards. But they were still catching up to Quinn, let alone the bracing new currents that Barr had witnessed in Germany and Russia. In opting to begin with the four “ancestors” of modernism, the museum had been able to draw from the trustees’ own collections. But they would not be much help in supplying Cubist collages and Surrealist paintings. Bliss, who was the most forward-minded of the founders, owned just two Picasso paintings, one of which was the neoclassical Woman in White; Goodyear had only a few drawings. Even to attempt some of the shows he wanted to do, Barr would have to first persuade the people who had hired him.[5]
Already, Barr found himself being upstaged, at least in intellectual daring, by some of his old circle at Harvard itself. Over the previous year, an upstart group called the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art had started organizing shows in Harvard Square devoted to living avant-garde artists. The society was run by Lincoln Kirstein, a brilliant undergraduate who had been a protégé of Barr’s, and two other undergraduates, and had ambitions, if on a far smaller scale, that closely paralleled Barr’s own. On the same day the Museum of Modern Art opened its doors with Cézanne and Gauguin, the Harvard Society opened its own show of Derain, Picasso, and Matisse. Given the challenge of locating major works by these artists in the United States, the Harvard show was small and uneven. But it included such notable works as Derain’s The Bagpiper, which had belonged to Quinn, and Picasso’s large neoclassical Bathers, which they had managed to get from Paul Rosenberg. In introducing the show, Kirstein made a prescient assessment of Picasso that might have been written by Barr himself. “Only the critic of fifty years from now,” he wrote, “can fully appreciate how profoundly he has altered, controlled, and assimilated European painting of the first quarter of the twentieth century.”[6]
