Picasso's War, page 31
About a month after the closing of the Schlemmer show, Alfred and Marga attended a presentation on Nazi cultural policies in one of Stuttgart’s main public theaters. As they entered, they were given a pamphlet titled “Cultural Policy in the New Reich.” One of the speakers was the new regional Kultminister, the minister of education. “It is a mistake to think that the national revolution is only political and economic,” the official declared. “It is above all cultural.” Driven by “insidious foreign influences” and socialist ideas, he alleged, modernism was destroying the country. Indeed, as Alfred discovered, Schlemmer had been tainted above all by his association with the Bauhaus, which the Nazis considered a dangerous hotbed of utopian socialism and international modernism. Though it was apolitical, Schlemmer had created Bauhaus Stairway as a valediction to the school, which the local Nazi Party in Dessau had shut down the previous summer.[17] According to the Kultminister, even artistic freedom had to be rejected if it resulted in modern art. “There is no freedom for those who would weaken and destroy German art,” he shouted. The new regime, he added, would do everything in its power to “make art in Germany German again.”[18]
In fact, the Barrs were witnessing the beginnings of an all-out attack on modern art and architecture that would culminate in the infamous “Degenerate Art Exhibition” in Munich four years later. Going far beyond artworks themselves, the policies were aimed at the entire civic culture that had supported them. In tandem with its systematic efforts to “purify” the German race by persecuting, dehumanizing, and ultimately murdering Jews and other unwanted groups, the Hitler regime was seeking to purify German culture by attacking and eliminating all traces of modernism and modernist ideas. Even during its first weeks in power—long before the true horrors of Nazism were known—Alfred observed that “paintings were treated much as have been the persons who, politically or racially anathema to the new regime, are put in jail.” It was a startling indication of how directly modern art and modern artists had become associated with the liberal democratic forces Hitler had set out to defeat.[19]
As the spring wore on, Alfred and Marga began to witness the Nazis’ racial policies take hold. More and more of their acquaintances seemed to know someone who had been pressured by the new regime, and businesses with Jewish owners were now being targeted. “We saw the first Jewish persecutions. We saw the first yellow buttons. We saw the first department stores closed,” Marga recalled. “And we became very ferociously anti-Fascist.” Having come to Stuttgart for a quiet convalescence in modernist surroundings, they instead found themselves living through a wholesale Nazi takeover.[20]
By the end of April, the Barrs had had enough. Although Alfred was making progress, he still tired very easily, and at Dr. Garthe’s urging, they left Stuttgart for Ascona, Switzerland, a favored retreat for artists and writers on the shores of Lake Maggiore. At last, they would get a taste of the restorative sanatorium culture that had until now eluded them.[21] Yet even here, they were unable to escape National Socialism. Shortly after they arrived, Philip Johnson, who had been traveling around Germany, came to visit. Johnson idolized Barr, who had turned him into a first-rate architecture curator, and the two had long been close friends. A few weeks earlier, when Barr had been enraged by the closure of the Schlemmer show, he had cabled Johnson and persuaded him to purchase Bauhaus Stairway, sight unseen, in an effort to rescue it from Nazi oblivion. But Johnson was also impetuous and utterly lacked Barr’s strong moral compass, preferring to be guided by his acute design sense and his attraction to power. Wealthy, good-looking, and image-obsessed, he seemed unaware, or uninterested in, the darker implications of Nazi ideology, and for the past few months, he had become increasingly enthralled by Hitler. In Ascona, Johnson was filled with excited talk about the new regime and the so-called Nationale Erhebung, or national rising. “He thought it would be the salvation of Germany,” Marga wrote.[22]
Alfred was repelled by Johnson’s infatuation, and they spent much of his visit arguing violently about Nazi politics. Barr must have recounted what he and Marga had witnessed: the attack on the Schlemmer show, the ban on the architect’s flat-roof house design, the condemnation of international modernism—let alone the alarming political and racial persecutions. After all, Johnson knew and loved the Bauhaus as much as he did, and the Weissenhof Estate featured prominently in Johnson’s “Modern Architecture” exhibition. Clearly, the Nazi cultural program posed an existential threat to modern artists and modernist values. But Johnson remained unmoved.
They even seemed to disagree about Bauhaus Stairway. Barr considered Johnson’s purchase of the painting as a way to, as he put it, “spite the sons of bitches,” but that was not how Johnson saw it.[23] While he admired Schlemmer as much as Barr did, he refused to believe that the Hitler regime posed a danger to European civilization, or even that it was against modern art. In a letter to Marga from Berlin a few weeks later, he insisted, “There is no Verbot of flat roofs here & the Schlemmers still hang in the Kronprinzenpalais”—the modern wing of Berlin’s Nationalgalerie.[24]
Amid the Nazi takeover, Barr and Johnson were beginning to articulate two very contrasting views of modernism—one imbued with underlying principles of freedom and truth, the other purely aesthetic. As Johnson observed decades later, with unusual self-awareness, where Barr was driven by a kind of “moral socialism…with me it was pure style.” For the time being, they did not let their diverging views destroy their friendship. Soon, however, Johnson’s Nazi obsession would cause him to leave the museum altogether.[25]
After Johnson left, Alfred was in no mood for rest. “Instead of sunbathing, A. writes for many hours a day,” Marga wrote. “He is fuming.” Determined to record what they had seen in Stuttgart, Alfred began drafting a series of articles about the Nazi cultural program. He envisioned an article on each branch of the programs, including art, architecture, film, music, and literature. He planned to publish them as soon as he could. Americans needed to be warned.[26]
As Alfred chronicled the destruction of modern culture in Germany, though, he also worried about its future in the United States. If modern art were disappearing from German museums, which had long been the most active in the world in collecting new art, it would be even harder in the future to rely on Europe for his own shows. Along with his articles on the Nazi art campaigns, he began writing an urgent internal memorandum for the trustees. After some introductory comments about the museum’s mission, he came to his point: “The Museum Has Not Fulfilled One of Its Fundamental Purposes.” The museum had never formed a “representative collection of modern pictures.”
But it was in the way the collection should be organized that Alfred presented his most radical idea. With his usual fondness for military strategy, he came up with a dramatic analogy. “The permanent collection,” he wrote, “may be thought of as a torpedo moving through time, its nose the ever-advancing present, its tail the ever receding past.” To illustrate what he meant, he included several diagrams of his idealized missile, in which the crucial ancestors of advanced modernism were at the back, in the engine compartment, and the newest, most radical work—the art of Picasso and Matisse and their followers in Paris—in the warhead at the front.
It was a disconcerting, even violent, way to think about modern art, but the speeding missile captured many of the qualities that Barr viewed as essential. To stay relevant, not only did the museum need to tell the story of modern art from its origins up to the present. It had to tell it in a propulsive way that could absorb—and project—potent new developments as it went. As the torpedo rushed forward in time, its narrowing stern could leave all but the most important classic modern artworks in its wake, while its warhead could absorb ever newer innovations. Soon nicknamed the “torpedo report,” Barr’s memorandum, when it was finished that fall, would become legendary at the museum. It would also come to be viewed as one of his most memorable contributions to the conception of twentieth-century modern art.[27]
Far less noted, however, were the circumstances in which Barr had written the report. In devising his art torpedo, he could not have avoided thinking about the new threat to modern art he had witnessed in Nazi Germany. Barr did not specify where the torpedo was heading, but it was clear that its intended target was the American public. By showing that even the most radical new art was propelled by forces that had been unleashed in both European and non-European art going back centuries, the museum’s art torpedo would, as Barr put it, “destroy or weaken the prejudice of the uneducated visitor against non-naturalistic kinds of art.” By the summer of 1933, modern art had become a war for Barr.
Even while he was still in Switzerland, Barr began sending his articles on the Nazi cultural program to The New Republic, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Nation, and other publications. In the four years since he had begun leading the museum, he had frequently written articles in newspapers and magazines about modern art and never had difficulty getting published, and he assumed there would be great interest in the extraordinary events he had witnessed in Germany. But one after another, newspapers and magazines turned him down. During his and Marga’s year away, the United States had gone through a revolution of its own. Coming into office amid economic chaos that spring, Franklin D. Roosevelt had briefly shut down the banking system. Then he had announced a special three-month session of Congress to pass as much relief legislation as he could, the beginnings of the First Hundred Days and the New Deal.
Amid such upheaval, America wasn’t particularly interested in the fate of modern art in Hitler’s Germany. Not yet. The torpedo still needed to be built.
27
CONNECTICUT CHIC
By the time the Barrs left Europe, the worldwide economic crisis had reached France, too. Among the leading Paris galleries, the heady scene of the late 1920s was a distant memory. Daniel Kahnweiler sometimes went months without selling a painting; Paul Rosenberg’s brother, Léonce, having held on through the twenties, had gone bankrupt. Even Bignou’s Georges Petit Corporation, which seemed so powerful only a year earlier, had folded. For all its high profile and international connections, the consortium had failed to generate any profit with its huge Picasso and Matisse shows. “Berlin is broken, London is down, Paris is nearly desperate,” Bignou had reported to an American contact.[1] Like everyone else, collectors were skittish.
While its international repercussions had yet to be felt, the Nazi regime was also beginning to raise concerns in the Paris art world. For men like Kahnweiler, who had close ties to the country, Hitler’s crackdown on modern art hit particularly close. Already, dealer friends of his in Berlin had been forced to close, and exiled German artists were turning up at his gallery. “I don’t believe these events will be restricted to Germany,” he told the painter Vlaminck.[2] But even for those who did, it was hard not to be unsettled by what was happening across the Rhine. By one estimate, four-fifths of the Paris art trade was Jewish.[3]
For Rosenberg, the international situation added to the profound personal and business turmoil he had weathered in 1932. The Paris-centered activity that had brought him such success in the late twenties had come to an end, and business in Europe was evaporating. Despite overwhelming publicity, very few of the Picassos he had lent to the Georges Petit exhibition had found buyers. By early 1933, the Picasso market had become so difficult that he had traded the artist’s large 1928 masterpiece Painter and Model, an intricate, playfully abstracted late Cubist work, for a small, fairly conventional Matisse interior, despite its decidedly lesser importance. “The Matisse I can sell immediately, the Picasso I wouldn’t be able to sell for thirty years,” he explained.[4]
But while the market was bad everywhere, there was one country that continued to intrigue him: the United States. In the early thirties, he had done a brisk business with Chester Dale, and despite the Depression, new art museums were continuing to open in several American cities. Rosenberg was convinced that there still might be chances to place paintings. Despite his previous failures, he also had never given up on the idea that he could build a broad American audience for Picasso with the right kind of museum backing.
Then an opportunity came his way. The Louvre was planning a large Daumier exhibition in the spring of 1934, and the curators asked Rosenberg, as a specialist in nineteenth-century French art with a wide international network, to assist in arranging loans from American collections. For the dealer, it would be a chance to rebuild ties in the United States, with backing from France’s most prestigious institution. In late November, exactly a decade after his ill-fated 1923 trip, he set out for New York.
Rosenberg found the U.S. market almost moribund. Many collectors had stopped buying and a new austerity was setting in at many institutions. A few weeks earlier, Barr had submitted to his trustees the final draft of his “torpedo report,” with its extraordinary argument for a heat-seeking, world-beating collection of modern art. But at that very moment, the Museum of Modern Art was on the verge of giving up on a permanent collection at all. In early November, Stephen Clark, the steely art collector and Singer sewing machine heir who was one of the museum’s most influential trustees, proposed that they forgo the paintings in the Bliss bequest, because the museum was still, after close to three years, hundreds of thousands of dollars short of the required endowment. Other trustees seemed to support him. Barr was so alarmed he wrote Mrs. Rockefeller a confidential, ten-point letter. “I know I am not supposed to concern myself with money raising,” he told her. “But this is an emergency.”[5]
While Rosenberg found little opportunity in New York, other parts of the country surprised him. “I was in Kansas City,” he wrote Picasso, after flying out with a group of dealers for the opening of the $15 million Nelson-Atkins Museum, an improbably monumental Midwestern acropolis built from Indiana limestone and Pyrenean marble. “The situation here is no better than anywhere else, but…the country remains very rich.”[6] His most interesting discovery, however, came from a smaller city much closer to New York. He knew that the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, had a Daumier he hoped to borrow for the Louvre show, but when he got in touch with the museum, he discovered that the director urgently wanted to see him for another reason—one that directly pertained to Picasso. Rosenberg was immediately intrigued, and a few days before Christmas, he took the train up from New York.
* * *
—
By history and scale, Hartford was an unlikely center for modern art. Few Europeans had been there; Picasso had never heard of it. With a population of less than 170,000—a fifth of Boston’s and a tiny fraction of New York’s—the blandly prosperous city was primarily known as the insurance capital of the United States. The city’s social scene was characterized by traditional New England tastes and a certain starchy insularity; the modern-art-hating J. P. Morgan came from an old Hartford family. Though it was one of the country’s oldest public art galleries, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the city’s main museum, had until the late 1920s been known mainly for its colonial furniture, American landscapes, and rare gun collection, donated by the wife of local firearm pioneer Samuel Colt. In many respects, Hartford was a bastion of the East Coast provincialism that John Quinn had fought against a generation earlier.
But that was before the arrival of Chick Austin, the dazzling young museum man who had taken over the Wadsworth in 1927. Arthur Everett “Chick” Austin, Jr., was a tall, dark-haired Bostonian with silent-film-star looks, infectious energy, and a wide-ranging exposure to historic and modern art. He also was a natural entertainer, and seemingly within months of his arrival, he had managed to turn the sleepy museum into one of the liveliest centers for new art in the country. By 1929, when the Museum of Modern Art was cautiously introducing itself with a group of long-dead post-Impressionists, the Wadsworth was screening Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and holding musical performances of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. And while Austin often looked to Barr for ideas, the Wadsworth was far better equipped than the Museum of Modern Art to implement them. The same year Austin was hired, the Wadsworth had received a rare $1 million bequest for acquisitions, allowing him to spend $60,000 or more per year on paintings ranging from Tintoretto’s Hercules and Antaeus to Pierre Roy’s Surrealist masterpiece The Electrification of the Countryside.
Almost exact contemporaries, Barr and Austin had followed remarkably similar trajectories. Like Barr, Austin had been a protégé of Paul Sachs at Harvard and, with Sachs’s help, had been given the reins of a museum at an astonishingly early age: He had been offered the Wadsworth job at twenty-six. Like Barr, he had an unusual interest in modern art—an interest that extended beyond painting to include film, music, theater, and design—and he viewed his job as a chance to reinvent the way art was brought to the public. Austin also shared Barr’s ambiguous sexuality, with many members of their shared Harvard circle finding him spellbindingly attractive. “You’d fall in love with him the minute you’d meet him,” Johnson said.[7]
In almost every other way, though, Barr and Austin were opposites. Where the one was restrained and considered, the other was high-spirited and headlong. Where Barr had a quiet magnetism, awing friends and acquaintances with his clarity and insight, Austin was an electrifying figure, managing always to be at the center of the most exciting new thing. Their differences were also informed by their backgrounds: A product of exceptional privilege, Austin had an innate sense of possibility; for Barr, everything had to be earned. Where Barr complemented his studies with a single threadbare year of travel abroad, Austin was easily bored by scholarship but had grown up in several European countries. With family money and connections, he had supplemented his studies with stints digging up Kushite temples in the Sudan and apprenticing with a master forger in Siena.
