Picasso's War, page 33
At least in part, the resistance related to the artist’s own story. Here, after all, was a painter who had sliced his own ear, spent an anguished year in the asylum of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and apparently killed himself. Indeed, there had long been a small cottage industry in trying to identify Van Gogh’s apparently severe abnormalities. As one correspondent of Barr’s noted, the artist had been variously diagnosed with “acute mania with general delirium,” “epilectic hallucinations,” “solar intoxication,” “meningo encephalitis,” “paralysis after syphilis,” “Oedipus complex—libido—homosexuality—narcissism,” and “alcoholic epilepsy” among other conditions.[2] For critics of modern art, Van Gogh’s mental illness provided a convenient demonstration of the concept of cultural degeneracy popularized by Max Nordau and others, seemingly providing irrefutable proof that modern art was closely related to mental derangement and psychopathology. In the 1921 controversy over the post-Impressionist exhibition at the Met, Quinn’s adversaries alleged that Van Gogh had produced many of his paintings as “an inmate of a madhouse”; as the British critic C. J. Holmes observed, “The insanity of Van Gogh’s last years has furnished the enemies of the post-Impressionists with a cheap cudgel.” For arbiters of traditional American values, Van Gogh was dangerous.[3]
By the time the Museum of Modern Art opened, these controversies had mostly died down. Still, it was not until the midthirties that an unusual book sparked broader interest in the artist. In the late 1920s, an aspiring American writer named Irving Stone had moved to Paris, where he stumbled upon a Van Gogh show at Paul Rosenberg’s gallery. Stone knew nothing about Van Gogh, but he was powerfully seized. “It was the single most compelling emotional experience of my life,” he later said.[4] He set out to write a novelization of the artist’s story, and after years of rejections, Lust for Life was finally published in the autumn of 1934. In Stone’s rhapsodic account, the Dutchman became a tragic, saintlike hero who had sacrificed everything for his art. Having toiled in obscurity under enormous mental stress, he sold hardly a single work in his lifetime, only to die an early, self-inflicted death. Crucially, Stone’s Van Gogh was also a man of the people, who had suffered the same privations as the potato eaters he painted—laborers, farmers, and simple country folk. “He now lived in the same kind of house as the miners, ate the identical food, slept in the identical bed,” Stone wrote. “He was one of them.”[5] Even without access to the paintings, American readers found the story irresistible. An almost overnight sensation, the novel hit the bestseller list within four days of publication and went on to become one of the most successful books of the twentieth century. (Later it would inspire an enormously popular movie starring Kirk Douglas.)[6]
It was amid this groundswell of interest that Barr decided to pursue a long-held ambition. In the fall of 1927, during his study year in Europe, he had toured the collection of Helene Kröller-Müller, a formidable German-Dutch woman who had amassed the world’s greatest collection of Van Goghs—including some ninety paintings and nearly two hundred drawings—at her house in The Hague.[7] He also knew that Van Gogh’s nephew owned a great number of paintings of his own in Amsterdam. If Barr could borrow the most important works from these two collections, together with works from other sources, he would be able to stage an utterly groundbreaking exhibition. In March 1935, he proposed the project to the Museum of Modern Art trustees, and they readily endorsed the idea.
As soon as the plan was approved, however, the museum’s Advisory Committee issued a formal protest. Made up of a younger group that included many of Barr’s old Harvard circle, the committee had long served as a counterweight to the conservative board; generally, they had urged on Barr’s own, more radical ideas. This time, however, they were vehemently against him. Ever since the founding, they pointed out, Barr had struggled to counter the view that the museum was not sufficiently up to date; a Van Gogh show would reinforce the museum’s backward reputation. “Van Gogh died 45 years ago and his influence on contemporary painting has waned,” they wrote. They also worried about the monotony of a large show of his work. “There is such a similarity of impulse behind van Gogh’s painting,” the Advisory Committee continued, “that a one man show would prove less interesting than can now be imagined.” Finally, they worried that the show would be ruinously costly. In a blistering resolution, the committee requested to the board “that the van Gogh exhibition be abandoned.”[8]
Barr was sensitive to the criticism. After five years, he had made notable progress in pushing the museum into architecture, industrial design, and even film, yet in the core area of painting and sculpture, he had still barely touched upon the defining movements of the twentieth century. In a devastating assessment the previous summer, the New Yorker critic Lewis Mumford wrote that the museum had largely failed to give the country a “clear lead” in modern art. Noting that the Picasso show had gone to Hartford instead of New York, Mumford argued that “the Modern Museum has been drifting into the same sort of discreetly ambiguous attitude toward contemporary work that has been taken by the Metropolitan Museum.”[9] For an enterprise that had been conjured into being precisely to do what the Metropolitan could not, it was hard to think of a more stinging rebuke.
The Advisory Committee had no formal powers and could make recommendations only. But in the face of such doubts, Barr had reason to be wary of pursuing Van Gogh rather than a more contemporary subject. At the time, no other American museum had attempted a Van Gogh show, and his most important canvases remained in Europe. If the committee had gotten its way, the history of modern art in America might have looked very different.
Yet Barr strongly disagreed with the committee about the artist’s importance. And as he considered the larger struggle the museum faced with the country, he also saw a rare opening. In Van Gogh’s fiery paintings and his moving struggle with mental illness, there was untapped potential to change the way ordinary Americans thought about modern art. Already in the museum’s inaugural show in 1929, when they had paired Van Gogh with the three other “founders,” Cézanne, Seurat, and Gauguin, Barr had intuited the unusual way his canvases could speak to ordinary viewers. “The muscles of the tree trunks bulge as they dig their roots into the earth,” he wrote of one painting. “He diagrams the crackling energy radiating from a bunch of grapes. He sees with such intolerable intensity that painting alone can give him release from his torment.”[10] Presented in the right setting, Van Gogh could make you feel, as few other modern artists could, the raw power that new approaches to color and form had unleashed.
And though it was little noted in the United States at the time, Barr also saw a chance to push back on the antimodern forces that he had witnessed take hold in Nazi Germany. As a close student of German art, he knew that Van Gogh had served for decades as a guiding light for Germany’s modernists. He had also seen numerous important Van Goghs in German museums, such as the Portrait of Dr. Gachet in Frankfurt and Daubigny’s Garden at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. In the early years of the century, when much of the English-speaking world remained baffled by Van Gogh, an entire generation of German artists, writers, and critics were inspired by his fiery paintings. Georg Heym, who evoked Van Gogh in his poems, said that “he sees all colors as I see them.” Well before the Great War, German museums began amassing his works; by the Weimar years, there was something like Van Gogh mania, with proliferating exhibitions, books, and even a stage play based on his life. (Notably, it was a German-born director, Wilhelm Valentiner, who pushed the Detroit Institute of Arts to acquire a Van Gogh in the early 1920s, well before any other American museum.)[11]
Significantly, at the center of the German Van Gogh cult was the artist’s tragic biography. In direct contrast to their American and British counterparts, Germans tended to view Van Gogh’s psychological struggle as one of the sources of his genius. Already before the war, Expressionist painters like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel had become fascinated by the artist’s madness; many of them sought to emulate his unfiltered emotions in their own work. Commenting on the great 1912 Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne, which featured an astonishing 108 Van Gogh paintings, alongside numerous works by his German followers, the philosopher Karl Jaspers noted that Van Gogh was the “only unwilling madman” in the group, while the Expressionists “wished to be insane but were, in fact, all too healthy.”[12]
By the 1920s, the study of art and psychosis was flourishing at German universities. At almost the same moment that Americans were being warned that the post-Impressionists were “degenerates” plagued by “visual derangement,” the Heidelberg psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn was informing the German public, to the contrary, that mental illness could open up new pathways for art itself. In his highly influential 1922 book, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, Prinzhorn drew on his pioneering collection of some five thousand artworks created by psychotic patients to show that artworks of the insane were worthy of aesthetic appraisal; he also argued that they provided new insight into human perception and creativity. “Nobody disputes that van Gogh’s productive potency increased during his illness and raised his work to previously unattainable standards,” Prinzhorn wrote.[13]
For Barr, who had read and admired Prinzhorn’s work, the study of madness yielded important insights about the creative process. Not only the German Expressionists but also the Paris Surrealists were deeply interested in the ways that people suffering from mental disorders were able to break the bounds of conventional perception. As Van Gogh’s letters suggested, the artist’s battle with his own psyche was a potent source for his art. But it also made him an immensely inspiring figure to which ordinary people could relate, the figure that Stone had exploited in Lust for Life. If Barr could persuade Americans to embrace Van Gogh’s paintings the way they had embraced his story, it might change the standing of modern art in American culture. As with so many other shows, though, everything would depend on the loans he was able to obtain from Europe.
At first, Barr was confident of his chances. He knew Kröller-Müller was generally well disposed to lending, and he and Goodyear had also arranged for the show to go on tour, allowing the Museum of Modern Art to split the cost with other U.S. museums. But he failed to anticipate a more complicated problem: Kröller-Müller no longer owned her Van Goghs. For years, she and her husband had been trying to build a museum in a large nature preserve in an inland part of the country. By the mid-1930s, however, they had been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy, and just weeks after Barr began planning the show, they had formally ceded ownership of the entire collection to the Dutch state in exchange for the government paying for their museum. “I now find that only three weeks ago the Kröller collection was bought by the Dutch government,” Barr wrote Goodyear from Amsterdam in mid-June.[14]
Luckily, the museum was not yet built and the Van Goghs were still in the Kröller-Müller house, giving Barr a narrow window of opportunity. He and Goodyear asked the U.S. State Department for help—Goodyear made a direct appeal to Secretary of State Cordell Hull—and in the end, diplomatic intervention, along with a highly unusual payment of $7,500 to the foundation that now controlled the Kröller collection, closed the deal. (Barr insisted on the fee being kept secret so that it would not set a precedent of lenders forcing museums to pay to borrow art.) But the real drama came with the selection of paintings.[15]
* * *
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The Barrs arrived in The Hague a few days after Alfred’s letter to Goodyear. Taking a taxi to the Kröller-Müller house, they were greeted by a dignified middle-aged woman. She began to give them a slow tour of her very large drawing room, which was filled with Van Goghs, but Alfred found it too dark to examine them properly. He asked her if he could see some of them in natural light. Immediately, she summoned Bernard, her butler, who began taking them down, one by one, and carrying them out to the garden. Soon they were all propped against the clipped hedges in an enormous line: perhaps the only time several dozen Van Goghs have been shown together en plein air. In the strong morning sun, the colors were dazzling; even the less dramatic pictures came startlingly to life. After that, Alfred realized how big a project it would be to narrow down his choices. He and Marga ended up staying for several days.
In Amsterdam, they met V. W. van Gogh, known in the family as the Engineer, the son of Theo and the artist’s nephew, who had inherited the other great collection of his work. Arriving at the Engineer’s home, they found a forty-five-year-old man who resembled one of Van Gogh’s self-portraits; luckily for Alfred, he also spoke beautiful English. Together, they went over the oils and drawings in his collection, and Alfred, by now immersed in Van Gogh scholarship, drew him out about his uncle. The Engineer was full of information, sharing his mother’s vivid memories of the artist, his development, and what Marga called “the drama of his faltering mind and suicide.”[16]
As he studied the paintings of Mrs. Kröller-Müller and the Engineer, Alfred was also thinking about the catalog he needed to write. To prepare himself, he read and reread Van Gogh’s letters to Theo. Watching Alfred immerse himself in the paintings and the letters, Marga was struck by the Dutchman’s hold on him. “It is stirring to penetrate the artist’s mind at work,” she wrote. “To feel the intensity of his emotions translated into a deliberate violation of correct draftsmanship and conventional colors.” Having weathered his own crisis, Alfred was rapt by this son of a Dutch pastor who experienced such inner turmoil. As he later put it, Van Gogh was an artist whose work was “a battleground between fact and feeling.”[17]
In the end, he made a radical decision: He would forgo the usual introduction and let the letters to Theo speak for themselves. The catalog would simply quote the artist’s own words on his art, life, illness, and poverty, but also on his own sense of his genius: “I feel, Theo, that there is a power within me, and I do what I can to bring it out and free it.” Van Gogh would tell his own story. It was a highly unorthodox approach, but it allowed the artist to speak directly to viewers. Alfred was sufficiently moved by the relationship of the two brothers that he dedicated the catalog to the memory of Theo: a curiously personal gesture from a curator known for his cool rigor.[18]
After days of careful scrutiny, Barr finally selected thirty of the best Kröller-Müller paintings, as well as dozens of drawings and watercolors. Then he chose thirteen more paintings and a number of drawings from the Engineer. Together with paintings from a number of private U.S. collections, Barr would be able to bring together many of the greatest Van Goghs in existence. Meanwhile, museums in Boston, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Philadelphia signed on to take the show after New York. For the first time, the Museum of Modern Art would be producing an exhibition with national impact. All that was missing were the many Van Goghs in German collections, which were now off limits. Owing to new restrictions by the Nazi government, the director of the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt told Barr, he was unable to send Dr. Gachet to New York.[19]
In mid-October, The New York Times covered the paintings’ arrival in Hoboken, New Jersey, on the Statendam, a Dutch ocean liner. Underscoring the prestige of the art, the report noted that the paintings were estimated to be worth $1 million, an astonishing sum for a painter whose works had been virtually worthless at the time of his death. But the Times also leaned heavily on the artist’s popular image, noting that “all periods” of his career would be represented, including “six paintings done in insane asylum.” The article ended by quoting the final note that Vincent had written to Theo before he shot himself in July 1890: “I am risking my life for my work and for it my sanity has half-foundered.” By the time the show opened a few weeks later, New Yorkers were clamoring to see the paintings of the “mad Dutch artist.”[20]
In view of the overwhelming interest, Goodyear and the trustees decided for the first time to charge admission. Even so, on West Fifty-third Street, the museum had to summon police to control the throng; it was also a different crowd than Barr had seen at previous shows. “Thousands of people are coming to the museum who I think have never been to an exhibition of paintings before,” he wrote to V. W. van Gogh.[21] A month into the run, the Times reported that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had already visited the show on five different occasions. For all of the show’s popular appeal, though, there was no dumbing down of the art. Viewers were asked to follow the multiple stages of Van Gogh’s complicated development—the almost monochromatic early studies of Dutch miners and laborers, to his encounters with Impressionists in Paris and exposure to Japanese prints, to his final years where he was “intoxicated by Provençal color and sunlight.” Listing the astonishing range of books that Van Gogh consumed, and carefully documented, year by year, Alfred made a case for his literary imagination. (The names might have impressed John Quinn: Zola, Balzac, Dickens, Poe, the Brontës, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Carlyle, Flaubert, Turgenev, and Heine, among many others.) Swallowing his earlier scolding of the museum for being stuck in the nineteenth century, Mumford, in The New Yorker, called it “the most thorough, the most exemplary, and the most stimulating exhibition of modern painting [the museum] has yet put on.”[22]
As the show made its way across the country, its legend grew. By the time it reached the West Coast, the mere delivery of the paintings, under heavily armed guard, was an event in itself. “[The shipment] was met at the pier by six motorcycle officers and two prowler cars from which protruded sawed-off shotguns,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “They were there to kill anybody who tried to steal what the emaciated Dutch painter was never able to dispose of for gain.” In all, nearly 900,000 people saw the Van Goghs during the fourteen-month tour, including 227,000 in San Francisco alone; faced with overwhelming demand, the Museum of Modern Art negotiated an additional six months for the loans and extended the itinerary to Kansas City, Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, and Toronto, before ending with a repeat showing in New York. Even so, it was forced to turn down requests from fifteen additional cities. Along with a popular edition of Vincent’s letters to Theo, the exhibition spurred two further reprintings of Lust for Life and even a Reader’s Digest abridgment of the novel. “It is unlikely—indeed, inconceivable—that any other art exhibition has ever had such an immediate impact on the public taste as the van Gogh show,” the midcentury critic Russell Lynes observed. At the time, there was not yet a name for such a phenomenon, but in later years—using the term that the British Royal Air Force’s bomber squadrons coined for the high-capacity bombs they dropped on Nazi cities—the show would go down as the first “blockbuster” of the twentieth century.[23]
