Picasso's War, page 28
For Barr, the Dales were a maddening conundrum. If anyone could bring around Rosenberg, Bignou, and the other dealers to his projects, they could. But they seemed not in the least interested in the museum. Maud aspired to organize her own exhibitions and had little patience for Barr; Chester could not bear to be an appendage to the main forces that governed the museum. Next to the fawning attention they received in Paris, moreover, the day-to-day affairs of a fledgling institution with no money to spend on art held little appeal. As the summer unfolded, Barr began to suspect that the Dales were not only resisting his plans but actively undermining them: If Picasso was being courted by Bignou, then Dale, as his business partner, must have known about it.
Before Alfred could deal with the Dales’ insurgency, however, he faced an even more pressing crisis. Already, people in the Paris art world were whispering about his Picasso troubles.[7] He needed a suitably ambitious replacement for Picasso as the museum’s main fall event, and it would have to be arranged extraordinarily quickly. Then, one day at the Georges Petit show, he and Marga ran into Matisse himself, who was with his grown daughter, Marguerite. As they chatted, Matisse talked about the United States, where his son Pierre was an art dealer and which he had visited briefly the previous winter. (In New York, he had met the Rockefellers and had been taken aback when Mr. Rockefeller had told him, politely and in perfect French, that despite his wife’s enthusiasm, he had no taste for modern art.[8])
As they stood talking in a room full of Matisses, Barr was struck with an idea. If Picasso was unwilling to do a New York show, why not bring the Matisse retrospective instead? As a matter of principle, he loathed the prospect of a show that originated with dealers: The museum’s mission was to educate the public, not fuel the market. But Matisse was arguably the one artist who could stand up to Picasso, and he knew that he could significantly improve on the Paris show with his own, far more rigorous selection of art. Matisse was delighted. He had not been happy with the dealers’ selection in Paris, and even feared that the show had over-tamed him and tarnished his reputation. He looked forward to Barr’s corrective. Even Bignou was happy to help: A show that had begun at Georges Petit and that would expose Matisse to new buyers in the United States could only be good for him.
Still, before Barr could start the plan he needed the approval of his trustees, and he knew any delay, at this late stage, would be fatal. He was confident that Goodyear would support him, but he needed Abby Rockefeller’s approval to be on firm ground. On June 25—just five days after Picasso’s final meeting with Reber—he dashed off a terse cable to the Rockefeller summer compound in Seal Harbor, Maine: “PICASSO POSTPONES SUGGEST MATISSE…ARE YOU FAVORABLE.” In fact, Rockefeller was in New York City at the time, and the cable, after reaching its initial destination, had to be rerouted to the Rockefeller townhouse on West Fifty-fourth Street. When it was delivered, though, she immediately concurred: If anything, she was more comfortable with Matisse at this point than Picasso.[9]
It was an improbable rescue. Within days of being rejected by Picasso, Barr had lined up the other towering figure of the Paris avant-garde to take his place. The museum would get its first great one-man exhibition after all, a chance to present a full-scale appraisal of an artist whom Barr regarded with virtually the same reverence as Picasso. As early as 1925, he had identified the two artists as leading two opposing strands of modernism; now he could attack the Matissean strand with the same clarifying authority he had envisioned for Picasso. So deft was his countermaneuver that decades later, Matisse’s own biographers were apparently unaware that the landmark show had materialized only as a hasty, last-minute substitute.[10]
As the summer progressed, the show came together with remarkable speed. Unlike Picasso, Matisse was businesslike and organized, and exceptional paintings were not difficult to get. They had far more works than they needed from the Georges Petit show, and they were supplemented by crucial works from Matisse himself, and from other collectors in the United States, Germany, Britain, and elsewhere. Barr didn’t even mind that the Dales refused to lend three of the four Matisses that they had included in the Paris show.
While restricting the presentation to just seventy-eight exceptional paintings—about half the number included in Paris—he sought to offer a far more convincing view of Matisse’s evolving art. Unlike the dealers’ show, he would give prominent emphasis to early Fauvist works and the austere wartime paintings, including the disconcerting Blue Nude (1907)—one of the Matisses that had provoked art students to riot in Chicago nearly two decades earlier—and the boldly abstract Moroccans (1916), which Barr considered among Matisse’s “most magnificent achievements.” He also traced the artist’s experiments in other media, including eleven striking bronzes spanning multiple phases of his career.[11]
By the time the exhibition opened in New York that fall, hardly anyone seemed to be thinking about Picasso anymore. Elegant, carefully distilled, and provocative, it was a formidable demonstration of Barr’s show-making talents, and it met with mostly rapturous praise. As usual, Marga assisted in crucial ways: Along with Alfred’s incisive introductory essay, the show’s catalog, bound in simple pale-red cloth, included her fluid translation, the first in English, of Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter.” (“I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it,” he wrote.) The contrast with the Georges Petit retrospective was not lost on astute observers. “When you see this show, you get a far greater shock than you did in Paris,” McBride wrote, in his New York Sun column. Matisse was not there to see it, but his art dealer son Pierre seemed to agree. “Barr has done his best and succeeded beyond my hopes,” he reported to his father.[12]
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If the Matisse exhibition had redeemed the museum for the time being, however, Barr could not let go of the events of the summer. He was determined to resume his Picasso campaign, and it was now clear to him that it would be far more difficult than he had anticipated. The artist’s abrupt withdrawal had given him a new understanding of the dealers’ influence, and—combined with their rival Matisse exhibitions—he began to sense that he was engaged in a larger struggle with the Paris market over modern art and its international public. As he had explained to Reber, Bignou had earlier been prepared to support the museum’s Picasso show, because he thought the museum had Picasso and Reber on its side, and he had lacked time to “organize his forces.” Once Picasso postponed, however, he was prepared to form a “temporary coalition” with Rosenberg—perhaps “on neutral ground,” Barr speculated—in order to “secure the balance of power.” The museum, with meager resources and no collection of its own, was at a distinct disadvantage from the Georges Petit Corporation and its powerful alliances. But Alfred had recently read Liddell Hart’s Decisive Wars of History, with its theory of nimble, indirect warfare, which he debated at length with Philip Johnson. (“Strategy and battles interest them both,” Marga observed.) He believed the museum had strategic advantages that could work in its favor.[13]
In mid-December, about a week after the Matisse exhibition closed, he drafted a formal invitation to Picasso to take part in a large-scale show at the Museum of Modern Art. In a calculated play at the artists’ rivalry, Barr called attention to the Matisse exhibition, noting that the museum had organized it only after Picasso had postponed, but that nonetheless the show had been a succès distingué, a “distinguished success,” impressing critics and drawing more than thirty-six thousand visitors. Even so, he continued, this was only a prelude to the succès éclatant, “explosive success,” that the museum was certain now of bringing Picasso. Finally, he stressed that Picasso’s work was far too little known in the United States and had never been properly presented. Clearly, he hoped that the one-upmanship between Picasso and Matisse might work as well in New York as in Paris. If Picasso declined, he implied, Matisse would be allowed to dominate the American field.[14]
But the letter was never sent. While Barr awaited Goodyear’s approval, the museum received confirmation that Bignou was going ahead with a huge Picasso show in Paris that spring, presumably backed by Rosenberg and Dale: a timeline that would preclude the museum doing a show first. For Barr this left the museum in an impossible situation: If it followed the Georges Petit show for a second year in row, it would give the impression that the Paris dealers were controlling the museum. Sharing Barr’s concerns, Goodyear called Dale and told him that if the Georges Petit Corporation went ahead with its Picasso show in the spring, the Museum of Modern Art would regard it as an “unfriendly act.” Dale responded by resigning from the board. To Barr, it was clear that the dealers had won. Despite all of his efforts, the Georges Petit group was preempting the museum with its Picasso show, and there was nothing that he or Goodyear or anyone else could do to stop it.[15]
Barr’s views were not universally shared, however. In fact, except for Goodyear, the trustees did not see significant problems with doing Picasso in New York after the Georges Petit show. After speaking to Sachs and Rockefeller, Goodyear told Barr that “they both feel that…this would not really matter to us.” Evidently, as collectors, they did not share Barr’s curatorial purism and his skepticism of the art market; they also were far less sensitive to the extraordinary power that men like Bignou and Rosenberg had accrued over Europe’s leading artists. By now, Barr himself, beleaguered by the negotiations, was willing to concede that they might have to give in to the dealers and let them go first.[16]
But in the end, even that proved impossible. What finally turned the trustees against the Picasso project was not the Paris dealers but something far closer to home: the global financial crisis. Faced with an increasingly dire economic outlook, the trustees were desperate to shore up the museum’s finances and avoid unnecessary risks. Despite the success of the Matisse retrospective, the prospect of another show that relied overwhelmingly on loans from Europe and would be expensive to produce began to seem ill-considered. Finally, in late January, they delivered their stark decision. As Barr dutifully explained in a formal letter to Picasso, “The president and officers of the Museum of Modern Art asked me to inform you, with regret, that it would be scarcely advisable and practical to organize this exhibition in New York, whether at the museum or anywhere else, during the financial crisis, which has become much more severe over the past year.”[17]
He hoped the museum would be able to resurrect the show “in the future,” he added, but the overall message was unmistakable. The project was indefinitely shelved. Privately, Barr was shattered. After nearly three years of struggle, his effort to stage a landmark Picasso show had come to nothing. Bignou had outflanked him, Dale had sabotaged him, Reber had proven unreliable, and Picasso was indifferent. Then his own trustees had given up on him. It would go down as yet another in a now long list of failed attempts to bring Picasso’s art to the United States. Meanwhile, Barr had alienated his trusted Paris intermediary, Jacques Mauny, who felt personally disgraced by the affair. “I have even avoided to see Picasso ever since,” Mauny wrote him that spring, “and I understand that you should be relieved in not having to continue the very unpleasant intrigues of last year.” Barr was not at all relieved. Nor were Mauny’s closing words reassuring. “You cannot be entirely free from the influence of French dealers,” he said.[18]
25
DEFEAT
In the weeks and months after the collapse of the Picasso show, Barr was not himself. He had always been physically delicate, but now his cheeks were sunken and his eyes were stinging and red. Unable to sleep, he was overcome with exhaustion; he complained to Goodyear that he was finding it difficult to work. By late spring, he was barely able to get through lunch with his old mentor, Paul Sachs. In a private note to Goodyear, Sachs warned that Alfred looked like he was “on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”[1]
By early June 1932, Abby Rockefeller was so alarmed by his appearance that she sent him to her personal physician. After a thorough examination, the doctor found nothing wrong with him “organically”—the language at the time for a physical ailment. Observing his symptoms, however, he could not rule out other issues and referred him to a nerve specialist. Following his own analysis, the specialist delivered a sobering, if vague, diagnosis: Alfred was suffering from acute nervous exhaustion. He ordered him to stop working immediately and put him on Sandoptal, a recently introduced barbiturate. He also recommended that he take a full year of rest. Alfred was shaken but did not dispute the findings. “I think probably he is right,” he told Rockefeller.[2]
For the trustees, it was a fraught situation. Since the museum’s founding two and a half years earlier, Barr had been the guiding force behind almost everything they did. He had come up with the shows, found the art, mounted it, distilled it for the public. It was overwhelmingly owing to his uncompromising standards and his genius for presentation that the museum had stood out from almost any other gallery at the time, even when it was showing Daumiers and Cézannes. Working on the fly, without art or an endowment, he had produced an astonishing sixteen loan exhibitions, nearly all of them well received, a number of them considered groundbreaking. It was hard to imagine going on without him. As Rockefeller herself said, “Alfred is the museum.”[3]
The Depression was also in full swing and the financial pressures on the museum continued to grow. That spring, they had left the Heckscher Building and moved into a vacant five-story Rockefeller mansion on West Fifty-third Street, which provided both more space and a considerably cheaper annual rent of $8,000. (With the property not earning any income, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was glad to offer his wife a heavily discounted lease, though he would not make it available for free.) Nonetheless, the operation was as precarious as ever. Abby Rockefeller was shocked to learn that Barr could pay his assistant just $20 a week; many of the staff, like Philip Johnson, worked without a salary at all. The prospect of paying Barr to be on leave would be a major commitment; they would also have to gamble that he would be fit to return to work once the year was up. With misgivings, they finally decided to send him home at half salary, in the hope that the remaining half would be enough to pay for a temporary replacement.[4]
* * *
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The causes of Alfred’s precipitous decline were complex. Partly, he was overcome by a nagging sense of professional failure. Despite the acclaim the museum had received, his own view of its future was bleak. Until now, he had often felt himself catering to his trustees, and very little of his own larger vision for the museum had been put into place. In painting and sculpture, they had yet to examine Cubism, let alone such recent tendencies as Surrealism or Constructivism. They had also ignored film, industrial and graphic design, theater, and photography—areas of explosive innovation that he had already introduced to Wellesley undergraduates in the late twenties. More daring art could be seen in many New York galleries.
Even more disheartening was the question of a permanent collection. With the dispersal of John Quinn’s paintings and sculptures looming over the museum’s founding, Alfred had long assumed that reassembling a defining sequence of modern masterworks would be one of his most important tasks. Tantalizingly, the initial makings of such a collection had finally come into view. The previous winter, Lillie Bliss had died, leaving her twenty-six Cézannes, along with paintings by Degas, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, and a small number of works by Derain, Matisse, and Picasso, to the museum. Although there were few avant-garde paintings among them, Bliss allowed that they could be traded for others, and the collection would provide a distinguished foundation. Yet the museum was unable to claim the paintings, because of a seemingly insurmountable condition Bliss had placed on them: The trustees first had to raise a $1 million endowment. Bliss had rightfully judged that the museum needed to get on sound financial footing, and she viewed her paintings as a spur. But she had not anticipated the gravity of the Depression. As it was, the museum could barely afford its current operations.
Above all was his failure to bring off the Picasso show. Bringing together, for the first time anywhere, the high points of Picasso’s thirty-year career, the show would have been a defining statement of the museum’s ambition to bring the story of contemporary modern art to the world. Even without Picassos of its own, the museum would have been able to assert itself as the leading interpreter of the most consequential artist of the twentieth century. Instead, Alfred had been played by the dealers and then routed by the museum’s own financial weakness. And with their new austerity, it was unclear when he would be able to attempt such a show again. So much did the Picasso business weigh on him that spring that Marga was fearful of bringing it up.
And yet Alfred’s debilitating depression was also driven by a more personal crisis. A few weeks after the Picasso show was canceled, Jere Abbott was offered a job at another museum, and the trustees, anxious to save money, encouraged him to take it. In fact, Abbott was leaving to become director of the Smith College Museum—the same position that Marga had turned down eighteen months earlier. The irony could not have been lost on any of them. Even if pushed by the trustees, here was Abbott jettisoning Alfred to have a career of his own, while Marga had given up that very path in order to support him and his museum. For Abbott, Alfred’s marriage seems to have become a growing obstacle in their relationship, and he evidently decided it was time to go his own way.[5]
