Picasso's War, page 27
When they arrived at the fifth-floor studio, Barr found a series of rooms still outfitted with bourgeois moldings, marble fireplaces, and mirrored mantelpieces, and offering striking views, through a series of windows, of chimneys and rooftops receding back to the Eiffel Tower in the distance. But the place was nearly stripped bare of furniture and filled instead with the detritus of Picasso’s work: piles of books and old newspapers, brushes, paints, pails, scraps of paper, cigarette butts, old mail—and stacks of canvases. On the day of their visit, Barr must have glimpsed a number of the many paintings that Picasso kept around the studio; perhaps he showed them his Crucifixion, a small, remarkable painting he had created that winter—a rare engagement with a religious theme that Barr would come to regard as one of Picasso’s most unusual works. (“Its strange mixture of styles, its violent distortions, its richness of invention and the concentrated intensity of its color suggest that it must have had some special significance to the painter,” Barr later wrote.)[18]
For Picasso, the reticent young American must have presented an unusual figure. “In those early years,” Marga recalled, “[Alfred] was so singular in appearance, distinguished, dark-haired, quiet, yet with a responsive face and eyes that really took in pictures.”[19] It didn’t help that Barr spoke very little and that he and Picasso didn’t share a common language. Finally, with Mauny translating, Barr asked the question: What did he think about doing a major show of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York? Picasso must have been surprised. The new museum meant almost nothing to him. Still, he was intrigued. Following Quinn’s death, his youthful fascination with America and Americans had lived on, spurred by his socializing with Gerald and Sara Murphy, the expatriate Jazz Age hosts, on the Côte d’Azur, and through his exposure to ragtime, tap dancing, Louis Armstrong, and other influences. After his earlier failures, he was also anxious for his work to find a larger U.S. audience. To Barr’s elation, he was very agreeable to the idea and said yes.
As they left the meeting, Barr’s mind was galloping ahead. With Picasso’s support, he could now pursue his leading European patron, the wealthy Swiss-German industrialist Dr. G. F. Reber. Since Quinn’s death, Reber had acquired a huge number of Picassos through Paul Rosenberg, including several that had belonged to Quinn; at his home in Lausanne, Reber had dozens of works by Gris, Braque, and Léger, as well as Picasso, and his collection itself was a powerful symbol of the extent to which the center of gravity of avant-garde collecting had shifted back to Europe. In addition to having a fanatical interest in Cubism, Reber also admired Picasso personally, and seemed likely to support any show the artist was involved in. Barr’s intuition proved correct. When he wrote to Reber, the collector enthusiastically agreed to lend his Picassos to the museum. He also invited the Barrs to visit him in Switzerland before they returned to New York.
At this point, Barr had yet to obtain the support of Rosenberg or any of the other major Paris dealers who handled Picasso’s work. Yet already, he felt that an impressive show was taking shape. With Picasso’s and Reber’s backing, the museum would have access to the artist’s vast personal stock and the greatest collection of his Cubist paintings outside of Russia, which was effectively off limits. On June 17, Barr excitedly cabled to Goodyear: “GREAT PICASSO EXHIBITION POSSIBLE PICASSO LENDING OWN COLLECTION PLUS REBER PLUS PERHAPS ROSENBERG.” Goodyear didn’t need to be convinced. “THINK PICASSO SHOW MOST DESIRABLE,” he cabled back.[20]
For much of the rest of the summer, Alfred would be distracted by the other shows he was planning and had little time to think of Picasso. Before he and Marga returned to New York, however, they decided to make a quick trip to Lausanne. Dr. Reber’s house, the eighteenth-century Château de Béthusy, might have come out of ancien régime France: It was situated in a large park in the heights above the city, and surrounded by orderly, tree-lined allées. While the furniture, crystal chandeliers, parquet floors, and Persian carpets were out of another era, the walls were entirely given over to Cubism: A library contained a series of Gris paintings above the rows of books; a music room included Picasso’s Still Life with Fish, a very large late Cubist work, above the grand piano. There was a huge Léger mural in the dining room.[21] As Reber showed them his collection, they talked about the New York show, and he seemed entirely persuaded. He talked up his close ties to both the artist and to Rosenberg. He also said they could take virtually whatever they wanted from his walls. “REBER ENTHUSIASTIC LENDING THIRTY PICASSOS SUGGESTS NOVEMBER THIRTYONE,” Barr cabled to Abbott in New York.[22]
As they left Switzerland, Barr’s careful strategy seemed, almost improbably, to be working. At the start of the trip, he had never met Picasso and had few contacts in Paris. Now he was returning to the United States with pledges of support from both the artist and his most important patron to let him do the first Picasso museum retrospective anywhere in the world. Reber and Picasso had even agreed to a schedule, planning the show for the following autumn. It would give Barr more than a year to prepare, and much of the hard work was already behind him. Surely, with such prominent support, Rosenberg would not want to be left out and would lend him the other works he needed; after all, the Luxembourg Museum was not interested in Picasso and not even Rosenberg could stage the kind of show he was proposing.
24
THE BALANCE OF POWER
In the middle of June 1931, almost exactly a year after Barr and Picasso first met, a group of Paris’s most powerful dealers and their wives gathered for a lavish private banquet near the Madeleine. Wearing evening clothes, they sat at an immense table, set for thirty; the dinner was accompanied by multiple vintages, served in crystal glasses of varying sizes. Surrounding them on every wall of the room, just a few feet behind the chairs, were more than a dozen Matisse paintings—riotous and spare still lifes, vivid portraits, reclining nudes, eye-conquering odalisques. Together with more than two hundred other Matisse artworks, they were about to be featured in a new kind of exhibition, one of the largest devoted to any living modern artist ever held. Neither Picasso nor Barr had been invited, but the gala meal—and the enormous show it celebrated—would have profound consequences for them both.[1]
The dinner was hosted by the owners of the Galeries Georges Petit, a large, storied exhibition hall on rue de Sèze, and it marked a new frontier in the alliance between the Paris art trade and the city’s leading artists. Strictly speaking, the Galeries Georges Petit was not a gallery at all, but a for-profit corporation whose shares were traded on the Paris Bourse. In its scale and resources, it dwarfed what even the most ambitious private galleries could do on their own. In fact, it represented a consortium of several of the biggest art traders in Paris and London, and it aimed to transform the way modern art was brought to the public. In essence, the dealers were leveraging their combined market power to assemble huge, museum-like shows of the same artists whom Barr was pursuing in New York. And they were doing so for patently commercial purposes: This was Rosenberg taken to another level.
The guests that evening underscored the ambition of the enterprise. Anchoring one end of the long table was Étienne Bignou, the mastermind of the Georges Petit Corporation and the evening’s host, a compact, mustachioed rue La Boétie man who was known as an art market dynamo. Strategically seated among the guests were his business partners, the veteran dealer-brothers Jos Bernheim and Gaston Bernheim de Villers, who had a legendary inventory of post-Impressionist paintings; the organization’s artistic director, Georges Frédéric Keller, a powerful international market player of Swiss-Brazilian background; and the British dealers Duncan MacDonald and A. J. McNeill Reid, whose gallery, Reid & Lefevre, was London’s leading venue for French modern art. Each of these men had considerable clout of his own, and clients stretching from Central Europe to North America. But here they were joining forces.
At the center of the table was Matisse himself, the man of honor, as inscrutable as ever behind his distinguished white beard and round, thick-framed glasses, an artist literally surrounded by his paintings—and by men who saw them as raw untapped capital. Seated directly next to Matisse, however, was not one of the powerful dealers but a very conspicuous New York couple who had crossed the ocean for the occasion: Chester and Maud Dale.
In the late twenties and early thirties, the Dales were an almost ubiquitous presence in transatlantic high society. Maud Dale was an elegant woman in her fifties who wore cloche hats and haute couture, wrote about art, and organized occasional shows at the Manhattan branch of the Wildenstein Gallery. Chester Dale was a high-flying corporate raider who was seven years younger and several inches shorter than his wife but whose forceful personality, along with his flaming red hair and strong blue eyes, gave him an outsized presence in any room. In New York, they lived on the top two floors of the Carlyle, the city’s most luxurious Art Deco tower; they were known for riding around town in a chauffeured convertible that had been custom-built in Antwerp to Maud’s design. (It had a speedometer in the back so she could watch the driver’s speed.) For Barr, however, the couple were important for another reason: Chester Dale was a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art.
As Barr developed his plans for a pioneering Picasso show, the Dales should have been indispensable. Though they had been buying art for only a few years, they had already amassed one of the most important collections of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French modern art in the country. And while their tastes were not particularly adventurous, they had recently taken a strong interest in Picasso’s early work. They also had enviable connections in the Paris art market: The previous year, they had dropped some $81,000 at Paul Rosenberg’s on a large group of Picassos—an astonishing amount that was nearly equivalent to Barr’s entire annual budget. But as the Matisse banquet now made clear, the Dales had other loyalties in play. Alongside his board seat at the Museum of Modern Art, Chester Dale had taken an ownership stake in the Georges Petit Corporation, and far from being an ally of Barr’s, he would soon prove to be one of his greatest headaches.
* * *
—
Departing for Europe a few weeks before the Georges Petit dinner, Alfred and Marga had expected to spend much of the summer selecting art for the big Picasso show they were planning for the fall. Amid the growing economic crisis, there was much at stake in the project. During the spring, there had been a new round of U.S. bank failures, and the financial shock was bearing down on the museum. Already the trustees had largely suspended public fundraising efforts, deeming any such campaign tone-deaf; meanwhile, Rockefeller money had not been forthcoming, causing Barr to complain to Abby Rockefeller about her husband’s “granite indifference” to modern art. While Barr was in Paris to assemble the coming season’s shows, the trustees were trying to come up with a plan just to keep the museum afloat. Citing the “present emergency,” Goodyear warned Sachs that they might have to “discontinue the activities of the museum entirely.” A year and a half after opening, the Museum of Modern Art was on the verge of bankruptcy.[2]
Under the circumstances, Barr recognized that a landmark presentation of Picasso’s work would carry special weight. Goodyear had long warned that they had to keep generating “very striking exhibitions” to justify their existence.[3] Given the controversy surrounding the artist’s work and Barr’s ambitious plan for it, the Picasso show was just the sort of undertaking that could assert the museum’s unique value. In interpreting Picasso’s work, they would be engaging head-on, for the first time, with several of the centermost currents of contemporary modern art. And the trustees had formally given their assent: The show had already been scheduled and they were now expecting it as the main event of the fall season—assuming Barr could come up with the art that he had promised.
When Alfred and Marga checked in to the Hotel Continental, across from the Tuileries, at the beginning of June, everything seemed to be in place. He already had Picasso’s verbal agreement from the previous summer, and during a visit to the United States that winter, Reber had reaffirmed his own enthusiasm for the show and reassured Alfred that the dealers would be forthcoming, too. “We have the support, I believe, of the Wildenstein group, of the Bignou group, and I hope of Paul Rosenberg, so far as the great dealers are concerned,” Alfred had written a few weeks before they left New York.[4] Almost as soon as they settled in, however, Alfred discovered how naïve his assumptions had been. First was the problem of Picasso himself. It was not a question of how many works he was willing to lend them; the artist could not be reached. He did not return messages and calls at rue La Boétie; he seemed to have disappeared. In fact, by now, Picasso was spending most of his time holed up at Boisgeloup, and when he did come back to Paris, he kept an extremely low profile.
Uncertain what to do, and increasingly concerned, Barr cabled Reber in Lausanne. It turned out that Reber had not had further talks with Picasso as he had promised in New York that winter. But with his usual confident manner, he offered to come to Paris immediately to work things out. Soon after he arrived, Reber did make contact with Picasso. But Picasso was apparently distracted and over the next week he failed to make much progress. By now, Barr was getting anxious; the summer was advancing, and they would not be able to make arrangements with other lenders until they had spoken to the artist again. Still, he had the artist’s earlier agreement, and there was no reason to doubt that they would eventually pin him down.
Meanwhile, the Matisse exhibition had opened at the Galeries Georges Petit and was quickly becoming one of the most talked-about events of the season. Featuring 141 paintings and 100 drawings, the huge survey was virtually unprecedented for a living painter; it also was the first Matisse show in Paris in twenty years. Despite his general withdrawal from public life, Picasso was a conspicuous presence at the show, attending the opening and attentively taking it in. Some critics were dismissive of the dealers’ selection, which seemed to emphasize market-friendly works, but in size alone, it was difficult to ignore the commanding statement the show seemed to be making. “It not only confirms the reputation of a painter, that is, of a great painter,” Tériade, the prominent art critic, wrote in L’Intransigeant, “but also that of a whole epoch of passionate experimentation.”[5]
Finally, around June 20, Reber succeeded in having a longer meeting with Picasso. The artist said nothing about the Matisse show, but he was suddenly very definite about the Museum of Modern Art. Under no circumstances, he now told the collector, would he take part in a New York exhibition during the coming year. He was working on an important body of new work, he said, and he needed to complete it before anything else. As Reber recounted the meeting to Barr, he tried to reassure him. Picasso was merely postponing, he said, and would be glad to do the show later. But Reber said he couldn’t lend any of his own paintings to an exhibition that Picasso did not support. Then he returned to Lausanne.
Barr was blindsided. It was just months before the most important show he had ever attempted was supposed to open, and he had now lost his two principal backers. Without Picasso, they would not have the sculptures and collages and many other crucial paintings he kept in his studio. Without Reber, they would lack many of the Cubist works that Barr considered essential to any serious presentation of his art. And if Picasso was against it, Rosenberg would most certainly refuse as well. For all of his carefully laid plans, the show was off. Now he would have to face his trustees, who were expecting the show to anchor the fall season. Indeed, Goodyear himself was on his way to Paris to meet Picasso and help make the final selection of paintings.
As Alfred considered what to do, he was struck that Picasso’s attitude had turned sharply. At the same time, he and Marga had been making frequent visits to the Matisse show and observing its dealer-driven approach and the extraordinary attention it seemed to be stirring up. Turning over the situation in his head, Alfred realized that it might not only be Picasso’s new works that were keeping him from committing to a show in New York: There was also Matisse. For more than twenty years, the two artists had had an almost symbiotic rivalry, with each often responding to the other’s latest challenge. As long ago as the spring of 1907, Picasso had taken the Demoiselles in a radical direction in part to respond to Matisse’s notorious Blue Nude. For Picasso, seeing the huge Georges Petit exhibition—and the way it seemed to crown Matisse as the presiding eminence of the art world—was too much. Even at Rosenberg’s, it had been several years since he’d had a major show of his own. It was silly, childish even, but he could not let such a show stand unanswered.
He needn’t have worried. Bignou and his fellow directors at the Georges Petit Corporation were already looking for their next big play, and within days of Picasso’s pulling out of the New York plan, Bignou offered him a big show of his own. Picasso readily agreed. Rosenberg was not a shareholder in the Georges Petit Corporation, but he knew Bignou and, amid a tightening art market, would be glad to contribute to a Georges Petit show, which would only give his artist greater exposure. Indeed, Bignou was prepared to let Rosenberg and Picasso have a major part in the show’s organization. So Barr was not merely contending with an artist who was not ready. He was also facing a rival institution in Paris whose directors seemed to have considerably more clout with Picasso than he did. Worse, as he soon learned, one of his own trustees was actively helping them.
Among the early board members of the Museum of Modern Art, none was as flamboyant, or as calculatedly self-interested, as Chester Dale. A self-made multimillionaire who never finished high school, he was an unlikely addition to the museum’s board. He had no connection to the genteel world of Blisses and Rockefellers; he also had a volatile personality and a huge ego. Having taken over a number of companies and made them extremely profitable, he had little patience for institutions he couldn’t control. The philanthropist Paul Mellon, who later worked with him, considered Dale a “hard-bitten stockbroker with a crisp turn of phrase and a taste for stiff martinis.” To Henry McBride, he was simply an enfant gâté—a spoiled child.[6] Nonetheless, his large modern art collection made him attractive to the museum, and shortly before the museum’s inauguration, Conger Goodyear recruited him to join the executive committee.
