Picasso's War, page 32
These contrasts showed plainly in the way the two men ran their museums. Where Barr was determined to maintain the highest standards of aesthetic merit and lucid presentation, Austin skated headlong from one subject to the next, more concerned about keeping his audience entertained and getting there before anyone else. Usually he succeeded. At the Wadsworth, Austin also benefited from a generally compliant board. A savvy opportunist, he saw that his aggressive acquisitions of stellar Old Masters could assuage more conservative members, even as he continually pushed the museum in far more daring directions. It helped that he had married a cousin of J. P. Morgan who was also a niece of the Wadsworth’s president. (Like Barr, Austin had had a Paris wedding shortly after he began his job, except in his case the festivities included a glittering champagne banquet at the Plaza Athénée and a several-month honeymoon in Belgium and the Veneto, where they studied Renaissance villas on which to base their future house.)
Unlike Barr, Austin had no qualms about involving dealers directly in his museum’s activities. In 1931, Austin presented a pioneering show of Surrealist art that was assembled in significant part by the dealer Julien Levy, who had been planning the show for his own New York gallery. At another point, facing a sudden gap in his exhibition schedule, Austin called up Joseph Duveen, the legendary Old Master dealer, and arranged to borrow some 120 Italian Renaissance works from his inventory. The dealers had a strong incentive to help: The Wadsworth was an important client. “With Chick,” observed Levy, who sold numerous works to the museum, “business and friendship were outrageously, happily, and rewardingly mixed.”[8]
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At the time of Rosenberg’s visit to the United States, Austin had gotten himself into another last-minute jam, and more than usual was riding on the outcome. He was about to inaugurate a $700,000 museum annex called the Avery Memorial. It was by far the biggest undertaking of his career and was going to feature the country’s first high-modernist exhibition spaces. Behind a severe stone façade, the new building was white, hard-edged, and sleek, with a Bauhaus-like central court surrounded by cantilevered upper-floor galleries and a small theater in the basement. For seating, there were Marcel Breuer stools and beige pigskin benches with chrome legs. Austin’s own office featured Mies-inspired door handles, a white rubber floor, and a Le Corbusier chaise longue. He had even consulted with Philip Johnson on the bathroom fittings. Whereas Barr and his friends introduced International Style architecture through photographs and small tabletop models, Austin could now present his own museum as a working prototype.
So consumed was he with the Avery, however, that he had failed to secure art for the opening show. For the main inaugural event, he had planned the world premiere of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s avant-garde opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. Created more than five years earlier to an almost impenetrable Stein libretto, the work had initially seemed unlikely to reach the stage. But in 1933, Stein had suddenly become a national celebrity with the publication of her breakout bestseller, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Austin, with his usual exquisite sense of timing, saw that a staging of this witty and ostentatiously strange work would draw outsized attention. To make the production as sensational as possible, he brought Thomson over from Paris and the British choreographer Frederick Ashton from London; Thomson asked Manhattan modernist Florine Stettheimer to design the costumes and sets. From Philadelphia, Leopold Stokowski’s deputy was asked to lead the orchestra; from Harlem, an all-Black chorus was assembled to perform the vocal parts.
Still, Austin needed a suitably provocative exhibition to fill the new galleries, and a few weeks earlier, he had belatedly decided on Picasso. After all, Gertrude Stein had a special connection to the artist, and his controversial paintings would provide a particularly apt way to showcase the ultramodern Avery galleries. Austin also was keenly aware that no American museum had staged a Picasso retrospective: It would give him another chance to be first. But he had not laid any groundwork for such a show, and soon found himself in well over his head.
At first he planned to center the show around Stein’s own collection. Surely, with the extraordinary talent they were lavishing on Four Saints, she would agree to send over her paintings. But Austin had failed to take account of Stein’s fierce rivalry with Picasso. For years, as the artist’s reputation soared, she had struggled to get her modernist writing published; now that she was finally getting recognition, she was not about to let a Picasso show upstage her. “I cannot find it in my heart to part with all my pictures,” she wrote Austin. “But you will understand.”[9]
Soon after, Austin approached the Wildensteins. He had done business with their New York branch and thought they would be able to help him. But he was blithely unaware that the Wildenstein-Rosenberg partnership had ruptured, and that Wildenstein no longer had any sway with Picasso. In Paris, Georges Wildenstein promised to do what he could, but it was largely meaningless. Casting around for possibilities, Austin asked the State Department to help him borrow works from the Shchukin collection in Moscow. Though the paintings had never left the Soviet Union and hardly any Westerner had seen them since Barr and Abbott in the winter of 1927–28, Austin thought that FDR’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union might pry them loose. He was mistaken.
But then, with his usual luck, Austin learned that Rosenberg—the man with apparently the greatest Picasso inventory in the world—happened to be in the United States. Rosenberg was thrilled to learn of the show, and Austin immediately invited him up to Connecticut to discuss it. By now, the opening of the new Wadsworth building was just seven weeks away; even by the last-minute standards of the day, it was an absurdly short time frame to select and arrange a complicated show of paintings from overseas. Moreover, Rosenberg would need to wrap up his Daumier work for the Louvre and get back to Paris before he could gather his Picassos.
In Hartford, Austin gave Rosenberg a royal welcome. The dealer’s visit was covered in the local papers, and Austin gave him a preview of the new building and its International Style galleries. He also explained about the Four Saints opening. Rosenberg was seduced. Not only did the Wadsworth have a rapidly growing collection of Old Master and modern paintings. It also was unusually innovative in the ways it attracted the public. It was remarkable, he wrote Austin afterward, “to see a curator of a museum capable of infusing so much life into his institute.”[10]
As they discussed Picasso, Austin also made clear that the show would be centered around Rosenberg’s paintings. Here, then, was the American opportunity the dealer had been seeking for more than a decade: a landmark Picasso exhibition at a top U.S. museum, over which he would have significant control. Throwing caution to the wind, he decided to go much further than lending his most important Picassos. He told Austin he would not only personally deliver his best pictures to Hartford; he would also arrange important loans from private collectors in Europe and the United States, as well as from Picasso’s own collection. Even before he had visited Hartford, he had written Picasso urging him to take part. “Interest in the arts is enormous, and there’s a great market for you to conquer,” he wrote.[11]
By the time Rosenberg returned to Paris a few weeks later, however, the situation in France had changed dramatically. During his travels, the French government had been swept up in a corruption scandal, and opposition groups were taking to the streets; there was talk of a coup. Meanwhile, Picasso had no interest in Hartford and categorically refused to send any works from his own collection. Two weeks before the new museum was scheduled to open, Rosenberg cabled Austin: “SORRY PICASSO RETRACTS PAINTINGS.” Then, that same afternoon, widespread violence broke out in Paris, with followers of the right-wing Action Française skirmishing with police in front of the Chamber of Deputies and thousands of Communists rioting at the Bastille. By the end of the night, some 750 people had been arrested.
In Hartford, Austin and his assistants began to panic. If Picasso wouldn’t lend and political unrest prevented Rosenberg from getting his own paintings out of Paris, the show would collapse. But they had underestimated the dealer. “SOYEZ TRANQUILLE JOURNAUX EXAGÉRÉS,” he cabled the next day—“Don’t worry newspapers exaggerating.” He had already crated up the paintings that hung in his dining room, and the Action Française was not rioting on rue La Boétie. As for Picasso, Rosenberg quickly exercised his dealer’s prerogative and bought three additional paintings from the artist to compensate for his refusal to lend. One of them was the 1932 masterpiece that Alfred and Marga had so admired, Girl before a Mirror.[12]
Two days after the riots, Rosenberg departed for New York on the Île de France, bringing with him nearly thirty Picassos, including nineteen of his own, seven from collectors he knew in Paris, and the three new ones from Picasso. He got off just in time. In early February, Paris descended into full-blown chaos, with far-right groups rioting in Place de la Concorde. In the end, fifteen people were killed and two thousand injured before order could be restored.
In Hartford, Chick Austin was too preoccupied with the Stein opera and the new building to give much attention to the Picasso show. Instead, he left much of the work to his brilliant deputy, James Thrall Soby, a genial and restlessly curious young man who had quickly become a secret weapon in Austin’s modern art ambitions at the Wadsworth. The son of a pay-phone and cigar magnate, Soby came from an affluent Hartford family and was a few years younger than Austin and Barr. Had he not stumbled upon Matisse and Derain at a New York gallery in the late 1920s, he might have settled into a quiet suburban life of country clubs and state fairs. But he was quickly bitten by the new art, and to the horror of his neighbors, began buying avant-garde paintings with abandon. In 1932, at the height of the Depression, he spent the enormous sum of $16,000 on Picasso’s Seated Woman, an almost frighteningly potent, curvilinear study of a figure and its shadow. “It scared me to death and I loved it,” Soby wrote. A banker friend of his father’s ordered him to return it, no matter how much he lost on the purchase price. He paid no attention.[13] He also became an avid student of modern art, and soon began assisting Austin at the museum. For the Picasso show, he did what he could to secure other important works and make it into a full-scale retrospective.
By the time Rosenberg and his paintings arrived in Connecticut, though, there was barely enough time for Soby and Austin to mount the show. Calling up as many museum friends from neighboring towns as they could—among them Jere Abbott from Smith College and Henry-Russell Hitchcock—they spent the day before the opening hanging more than seventy paintings and parrying Austin’s continual banter. They finished around midnight.
As the inauguration began, the Stein opera commanded overwhelming attention. To ensure maximum publicity, Austin had filled the opening night audience with people he knew from the art world, mostly from New York. In January, he had written to all his Harvard friends to support the production, which had run over budget, and to buy expensive tickets to the opening. Among them was Alfred Barr, who agreed to bring Marga, but who could scarcely hide his dismay that Austin was plowing ahead with Picasso—on top of a Stein opera. “Either one would be enough for any ordinary mortal museum director,” Barr wrote Austin, incredulously.[14] Austin also invited a large contingent of national critics and society columnists. Though many were baffled by the opera’s nonlinear structure and nonsense lyrics, nearly all of them were were enthralled by the soulful Harlem chorus, Stein’s percussive language, and Stettheimer’s extravagant sets, with their giant orange-and-yellow cloth lions under trees made of cellophane and ostrich plumes. “Since the Whiskey Rebellion and the Harvard butter riots there has never been anything like it,” one columnist wrote; Joseph Alsop, the future Washington insider, found it “at once complicated, amusing and lovely.”[15] For the “picked auditors,” as Alsop called them, who filled the 299-seat theater, the premiere took on a legendary quality, a kind of rapturous American Rite of Spring.
Nearly forgotten in the excited response to the Stein pageant were the Picassos hanging in the galleries upstairs. Immediately following the premiere, Austin invited the out-of-town guests to a champagne party at his house; there was little time to linger in front of paintings. For many who came, the paintings were no more than a curious side show. In the end, the exhibition went unmentioned in any of the national magazines and was confined to a single paragraph in the Times’s account of the new building. Gertrude Stein had gotten her way.[16]
For Barr, it must have been hard not to greet the exhibition with a mixture of envy and schadenfreude. Given the constraints at the time, it was impressive that Austin had pulled off the show at all. But the result was a pale imitation of the sweeping, comprehensive project Barr had envisioned. Missing was not only a sense of the different stages of Cubism and such threshold works as the Demoiselles, but also paintings from Picasso’s personal collection, the sequential high points of his art that Barr had identified. Among the local public, the show did not stir much interest either. After the out-of-town guests went home, the exhibition depended entirely on ordinary people, the bankers and lawyers and insurance executives, the housewives and doctors and schoolteachers, who made up the Hartford middle classes, and enthusiasm was decidedly muted. Many avoided the show entirely. “There were days and days when only a handful of people came to see it,” Soby wrote.[17]
If Four Saints had shown Chick Austin at the height of his magic, his Picasso foray had demonstrated that he was mortal after all. For all his success at impressing his Harvard friends, Austin was not particularly sensitive to mainstream taste in Depression-era America. Even in his own city. Many of Hartford’s insurance executives and society ladies, while they didn’t object to the pathos of Picasso’s early circus pictures, were deeply alarmed by much of his recent work, which struck them as distorted or vulgar or both.[18] And for ordinary people reading about the Wadsworth’s over-the-top opening party, it was difficult not to find confirmation for the view that European modernism was the province of an out-of-touch East Coast elite. That same spring, Thomas Craven, the popular American art critic, published Modern Art, his bestselling take-down of the European avant garde, which would be highly praised in The Hartford Courant. There was “not a single connecting bond,” Craven argued, between Picasso and what he called “the realities of American life.”[19]
Though Rosenberg did his best to put a good face on the venture, it was hardly more successful than his earlier American efforts. Notably, the Wadsworth itself passed up the opportunity to buy a single painting, though it could have had its pick, including Girl before a Mirror. Following the show, Rosenberg briefly presented many of his Picassos, together with an impressive series of works by Braque and Matisse from his stock, at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York. Writing in the Sun, Henry McBride called it “the finest collection of modern art yet to be seen in America.”[20] But hardly anyone else seemed to notice, and Rosenberg soon found himself once again packing up his paintings and taking them back to Paris. For Soby, who had worked even harder on the Hartford show than Austin had, it was one of the more memorable failures of his career. “It seems almost incredible to think that a large, retrospective Picasso show could have been such a flop in 1934,” he wrote. “Those were bitter days for contemporary art.”[21]
28
“RISKING MY LIFE FOR MY WORK”
If the Hartford exhibition showed how little Picasso’s art seemed to speak to ordinary Americans, for Barr it also underscored something else. To build a national audience for modern art at a time of extraordinary crisis, the museum could no longer rely on the tastes and enthusiasms of its trustees and of the worldly Harvard crowd who worked for them. The new art had to relate to the struggles of ordinary people and their hunger for escape. The Roosevelt administration had already grasped the social value of art in a time of rampant joblessness and widespread hardship. In 1933, the government had launched the Public Works of Art Project, a forerunner of the WPA that paid thousands of unemployed artists to decorate libraries, schools, post offices, and other public buildings. The art was dominated by American scene painting—realist depictions of ordinary workers, regional industries, and episodes of U.S. history—and had been immediately embraced by the public. For a privately funded museum that was housed in a former Rockefeller mansion and devoted to European high modernism, however, the task was far more difficult.
Then, in the spring of 1935, Barr stumbled upon an unlikely answer: Vincent van Gogh. Today, it is hard to imagine a time when the Dutchman’s irises and sunflowers did not adorn iPhone cases and umbrellas, when his night skies were not used in “immersive” theme-park projection experiences set to mood music. Indeed, for decades, it has been difficult to identify a cultural figure from the modern era—or any era—with broader worldwide currency. Yet in the United States at the start of the Depression, the artist remained comparatively little known, and even among supporters of modern art, he was not universally admired.
At least since the Armory Show, when John Quinn’s Van Gogh Self-Portrait was displayed alongside a handful of Van Gogh landscapes and still lifes borrowed from European dealers, the late-nineteenth-century artist had been a favorite target of opponents of modern art. Confronted with his whorled conifers, salmon-tinted roomscapes, and green-and-orange-flecked faces, many viewers could see only a shocking abandonment of rational perception. In 1920, when the Montross Gallery in New York organized a rare U.S. show devoted to Van Gogh, not a single painting found a buyer. Even in the late twenties, as international prices for his paintings soared and a few discerning Americans—including several Museum of Modern Art trustees—began collecting them, his art could scarcely be found in American museums.[1]
