Picasso's War, page 29
Caught by surprise, Alfred was devastated. For nearly six years, Abbott had been an essential part of his existence. They had roomed together at Harvard; taught classes together at Wellesley; traveled all over Europe together; and jointly brought the Museum of Modern Art to life. It was Alfred who had persuaded Sachs to admit Abbott to Harvard’s graduate program in 1926, Alfred who had persuaded Abby Rockefeller to hire Abbott as his deputy at the museum three years later. For his part, Abbott had had an almost reverential attachment to his brilliant friend. At one point, when Alfred was struggling financially and Abbott was supporting him, Abbott had written to his father, “I look upon paying his share of the rent as a sort of monetary compensation for his company, we get along very well together, his ability, much greater than meager mine, which I draw on continually, and his kindnesses in introducing me where the entre [sic] might have been difficult.”[6] It was a personal and intellectual bond that in crucial ways seemed to capture an unresolved tension in Alfred’s own life.
Until his marriage, some of Alfred’s Harvard friends found his sexual identity ambiguous. At Wellesley, where he was only a few years older than his students, many of the coeds swooned over him, yet his own social circle was overwhelmingly male and gay. Philip Johnson was particularly close; he addressed Alfred as “Alfo” and signed his letters “love Pippi.” Other gay friends included Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the architectural historian; Cary Ross, who had quickly become an indispensable extra hand at the museum; the composer Virgil Thomson; and Lincoln Kirstein, the brilliant editor of Hound & Horn and co-director of the Harvard Contemporary Art Society. For his part, Abbott was not openly gay, but he showed no interest in women; he and Barr also seemed to be more than friends. Hitchcock, observing the two men, referred to what he called “cette étrange ménage”; Johnson regarded Abbott as Barr’s fidus Achates, his faithful disciple. There is no indication that the relationship was anything but platonic, though it clearly carried special significance to both.[7]
Marga’s own partnership with Alfred was hardly ordinary. They were deeply devoted to each other, and at the museum, he quickly came to depend on her social instincts and multilingual diplomacy. But there seemed to be little room for intimacy in their life, and they often spent significant time apart. Just weeks after their wedding, Alfred sent Marga to Rome to visit her mother while he made his scouting trip to Germany, for the German modernism show, in the gregarious all-male company of Johnson, Hitchcock, and Ross. (“Cary’s marvelous to me and so is Phil and Russell like a big affectionate elephant! But oh gosh!” he wrote Marga from Berlin.[8]) If nothing else, it was a curious way to spend one’s honeymoon. While these men were not anything more than close friends, they suggest an underlying dissonance in Alfred’s emotional life that continued well into his marriage. Now, eighteen months later, as the Picasso show unraveled and Abbott left the museum, Barr seems to have found conjugal relations something of an ordeal.
A year after his health crisis began, Alfred alluded to his troubles in a long letter to Marga, who had, for the second summer in a row, gone to Europe on her own. At the time, he was convalescing at his parents’ cabin in Greensboro, Vermont, where he socialized frequently with an attractive young woman they knew named Virginia, who was staying nearby. “I see…a great deal of [her] in one sense for we bathe naked at night often,” Alfred wrote. “She has as you say a nice torso and very pretty breasts.” Virginia was insistent on their swims, and he suspected that Marga had encouraged her. “Did you tell her to seduce me you serpent?” he wrote. Still, he wrote that he was unable to respond, or even to feel any desire to do so. Tormented by his inadequacy, with Marga or any other woman, he released Marga from any obligation of constancy. “I do not acquit myself so nobly as during those sweet nights on Madison Avenue,” he told her. “This is partly due to a state of general fatigue which I may never conquer—and partly due to incidental circumstances.”
If Alfred was trying to restore his energies in nightly exhibitionist swims with Virginia, he seemed immune to the satyr-like urges that were, in those same years, spurring Picasso to new heights in his remarkable bather paintings, inspired by his secret trysts with Marie-Thérèse on the beaches of Dinard. The sensual world that Barr found so powerful in the art of Picasso seems to have been, in his own experience, more of a test of manhood in which he sensed his own shortcomings and emotional detachment. “If I could achieve the unfaltering vigor of Priapus himself,” he wrote Marga poignantly, “it would not be for my own sanity or pleasure, but because your ecstasy in my arms is sweet to me beyond anything.”[9]
* * *
—
Whatever the causes of Alfred’s ravaged psyche, he could not escape Picasso. As he began his leave of absence in June 1932, he had resolved to go to Greensboro to get away from the stresses of New York while he adjusted to his new regime of sleeping pills and rest. But on June 16, almost at the same moment he stopped working, Bignou and Rosenberg opened their huge Picasso retrospective at the Georges Petit gallery in Paris—the show that had defeated his New York plans. Like the Matisse show, the dealers had launched it with maximum éclat, and the European press had exulted over the show’s immensity and sweep. (Seeking to outdo Matisse, Picasso had characteristically made his show even larger—with 225 paintings in all—and taken a far more direct involvement in its installation.) For Alfred, it was a fresh reminder of his struggles of the previous year, but it also was an event he knew he should be witnessing. Quite apart from the opportunity to gauge the enemy’s capabilities, it would provide crucial insights into Picasso’s most recent work. He also knew that it would be vital, for any future campaign, for the museum to assert its presence and connect with the various players in Picasso’s orbit. Somehow he needed to be there, but any trip, under the circumstances, was out of the question. Then he had an idea: Marga. She could go. They were already talking about spending some of his leave in Europe, when he was strong enough to travel, and if she went immediately, she could catch the final days of the show while he rested in Vermont.
With almost no time to plan, Marga locked up their apartment and embarked for France. It would be up to her to represent the museum in the Paris art world, alone and without any official title. In part, she was thrilled by the opportunity. She was always much happier in Europe, and liberated from Alfred, she would be able to deploy her considerable charm and exercise her own judgment. Crossing on a large French liner, she reverted to her old social self, talking her way into the first-class lounge, where she caught up on art gossip with wealthy Americans and had long conversations with a cultivated French shoe merchant about Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. She also played deck tennis with a group of strapping young Parisians who were on their way home. (“How anxious these 3 tennis partners are to pay for my drinks which amount to 1 lemonade a day,” she reported to Alfred.[10])
Yet her work in Paris required subtle diplomacy, and she had left in such a hurry that she had not had time to discuss strategy. Somehow, she would have to cover for Alfred, avoiding talk of his illness and the museum’s precarious finances, while exploring future possibilities with the dealers. Moreover, the museum was not paying for her trip, and she would have to cut corners as much as possible. To save money, she was staying in the apartment of their friend Virgil Thomson, and when she decided to buy Alfred the first volume of Christian Zervos’s Complete Works of Picasso, which had just been released, she wrote that she was avoiding all other luxuries to pay for it. “Please forgive me for having bought this,” she wrote him, “I am getting no clothes at all.” Above all, she needed to absorb as much as she could from the show itself. “I shall just send you my eyes in an envelope,” she promised Alfred.[11]
As soon as she reached Paris, Marga went to the Georges Petit gallery. The show had already attracted enormous attention, and the building was thronged with visitors. As she entered the crowded rooms, though, she was perplexed. There was no apparent organizing principle, and the installation was just the kind of cluttered jumble Alfred hated. The pictures, too many of them, were vertically stacked on the walls; one room had distracting wallpaper that Marga described as “poisonous red.” Many of the paintings were in oversized gilt frames. “The hanging is abominable,” she wrote.
But then, in the largest gallery, she saw them: some twenty large canvases, all of them painted since the winter. Neither Cubist nor realist, they were filled with an overpowering physicality; again and again, they depicted an anonymous young woman with bright, shoulder-length golden hair, often in various states of slumber. In many of them, the face and limbs of the woman seemed to merge with the curved armchair and flattened walls of the background with dreamlike power. To Marga, they had a sense of spontaneity that she had never detected in any of Picasso’s earlier work. She found them intoxicating. “The effect is lyrical and voluptuous,” she wrote. “The colors (soft ones and violent ones in immediate contrast) absolutely new to Picasso.”[12]
As we now know, the inspiration for this astonishing new series was Marie-Thérèse Walter. For more than five years, Picasso had kept his lover carefully hidden from the world, and even in the show, her identity remained unknown. Yet for the first time, the public was able to see her image and the exuberant work it had inspired. Holed up in his studio that winter and spring, he had turned out a fresh large-scale painting of Marie-Thérèse day after day, for weeks on end; one of them, titled Sleep, he had executed in three hours on a single January afternoon, while she napped in front of him.[13] Though hardly anyone knew about her, Marie-Thérèse’s pervasive presence gave the Georges Petit exhibition much of its incandescent power. “He seems to be animated by one of the most creative impulses of his life,” Marga wrote.[14]
For nearly a week, Marga went to the Petit gallery every morning, and then again in the afternoon. In the exhibition rooms, Bignou was everywhere, enthusiastically engaging visitors in English and French, in apparent hopes of sales. “Very gattamelata,” Marga reported to Alfred—like a honeyed cat. Drawing the dealer out, she learned that it had taken him, Rosenberg, and Picasso a whole week to install the paintings. She ran into Reber, who, despite his promises to Alfred, had loaned numerous paintings to Bignou. She also met Matisse, who had few illusions about the show’s true motivations. (“I do not have to respond to Picasso’s exhibition,” he later told his son Pierre, “since it has been made in response to mine.”) Yet on all the days Marga visited, she never saw Picasso himself. “Pic. is away in his chateau,” she speculated.[15]
Then, at the end of the run, Bignou invited her to the décrochage, the taking down of the show. When she arrived, the gallery was mostly empty, and some of the pictures were already on the floor leaning against the walls. Eventually she spotted Bignou talking to someone at the other end of the gallery; she recognized the eyes. Waving her across the room, the dealer introduced her to Picasso and then left them alone. “They tell me you are Italian?” Picasso asked her. After a few minutes, he agreed to walk through the show with her. As they entered the main gallery, Marga pointed to one of the new pictures she found most intriguing: Girl before a Mirror, a hugely complex image of a woman standing and embracing her own reflection in a full-length mirror. He acknowledged it was one of his favorite pictures but as usual was maddeningly vague about his intentions. She didn’t get much further with other paintings. Finally, she told him that his 1932 paintings reminded her of Giorgione, and that she was struck by the “recurrent voluptuousness” of the series, which seemed to please him far more than her other questions.
As they continued through the galleries, she casually brought up the United States. Did he have reservations about America, and would he ever consider visiting? He told her he had nothing against the country but didn’t travel much. “I’ve never been to Germany,” he said. Picasso got on well with Marga, an Irish Italian woman with whom he could communicate in French. But she could sense his wariness about the American art world. While they were talking, a woman from the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, known at the time for its forward-looking stance on modern art, approached Bignou. She wanted to know if she could borrow some of Picasso’s new paintings for a show she was planning. Bignou pulled Picasso aside, and at a certain point, Picasso looked at him coldly and said, “I will lend her nothing, do you hear? Nothing!” Bignou threw up his hands.[16]
As the décrochage wound down, there was still one other person Marga had not yet seen: Paul Rosenberg. As Alfred had predicted, Rosenberg had readily formed an alliance with Bignou and the other dealers of the Georges Petit Corporation, sensing a rare opportunity to show his leading artist on a larger stage. Not only had Rosenberg played a crucial part in the show’s organization and contributed more paintings than anyone other than Picasso; he would also soon end up in control of many of the new paintings in it. Yet he was staying away. In fact, he was not even in Paris. “I’m leaving for the mountains,” he had written Picasso in an unusually terse message in the third week of July. Then, a few days later, he wrote to the artist again, saying that he was going to Switzerland, expressing regret that he could not see him before his departure, and providing him the name of the hotel that he called “my address for the time being, perhaps for a long time.”[17] The two-paragraph letter was somber and precise; there was not a hint of the playful banter and hyperbole that had for years filled his communications with the artist. Rosenberg also made no mention of his family and dropped the characteristic “we” of his other letters; he referred only to himself.
In 1932, the tensions in the Rosenberg household finally snapped. The dealer belatedly discovered that there was something else that had driven his wife’s obsession with the Wildensteins and their race horses: Margot had been having an affair with Georges Wildenstein. It was unclear when it started, but Rosenberg seems to have concluded that they had been carrying on for years. “Life became torture for me in 1923,” he later wrote, in a handwritten, ten-page letter to his wife he intended her to read after his death. “I loved you with all my heart and felt I was losing you.” If Rosenberg was correct, the liaison may have begun as early as his first trip to the United States, the two disastrous months he had spent in the fall of 1923 in New York and Chicago, when the dealer was collaborating closely with Wildenstein. While Rosenberg had been having his unsuccessful Picasso show at Wildenstein’s New York gallery, Wildenstein was in Paris seducing his wife. As the relationship developed, Wildenstein apparently promised Margot he would marry her if she left her husband.[18]
Now, amid Picasso’s greatest public triumph in Paris, Rosenberg had fled the city shaken and distraught. He immediately broke off his business alliance with Wildenstein and vowed never to speak to him again. Margot wanted a divorce, and the Rosenberg children were sent away to stay with relatives. Yet Rosenberg knew he could not walk away entirely: There were powerful social and family considerations in play, and even his own future in the art world was at risk. Under French marriage law, all property was shared equally; a divorce would tear apart not only his family but also his gallery and his personal art collection, on which his fortune, and his whole identity, rested. It would threaten everything he had built, including his costly stock of Monets and Renoirs and Van Goghs, as well as his Picassos, Braques, Légers, Matisses, and other works. (In one dark interpretation of the affair, such a division of assets may have been exactly what Wildenstein intended: If he could get Margot’s share of the Rosenberg gallery, it would dramatically expand his reach into modern art.)[19]
In the end, the Rosenbergs reached an icy détente. Margot gave up Wildenstein but refused, from that point on, to have any part in her husband’s life in the art world; they would live apart together. Even without a divorce, though, there were far-reaching consequences for Rosenberg. In particular peril were his efforts in the United States, where he had founded a joint partnership with Wildenstein—the company that John Quinn had incorporated for him in 1923. After the exposure of the affair, the former business partners divided up their paintings and Rosenberg eventually bought out Wildenstein’s share in the company for $200,000. But the rupture with Wildenstein also meant that he no longer had use of the Wildenstein Gallery in New York, which had been the cornerstone of his American strategy.[20]
Now Rosenberg would have to find new ways to reach the American market. Meanwhile, the Depression was belatedly reaching France, and he was selling hardly any paintings. Forced to cut back on the extravagant lifestyle he had led in the late twenties, he gave up his thoroughbreds; for the time being, it was all he could do to protect his inventory. The dream of an écurie Rosenberg had died almost as quickly as it started, without a Picasso ever getting to the starting gate.
In Paris, Marga knew as little about Rosenberg’s troubles as she did about the identity of Picasso’s mysterious muse. But as she quickly learned, the first great museum show of Picasso’s work was not going to happen in New York, or anywhere else in the United States. It was taking place in Switzerland. While the Paris show was running, Bignou arranged to take it to the Kunsthaus Zürich, one of Europe’s leading modern museums, that fall. Evidently, the Swiss shared none of Barr’s qualms about ceding creative control to art dealers. As soon as she heard about it, Marga begged Alfred to come see it. “If you would only go to Zurich you could write the one fundamental article on Pic of the year,” she wrote. “But what can I say? You must rest.”[21]
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