Picasso's War, page 34
Clearly, as Barr had intuited, there was something about Van Gogh that had tapped the national mood. Amid the worst economic crisis in U.S. history, these paintings, with their spiritual ardor and sun-drenched squalor, in the sensate force with which they seemed to express the artist’s torments, had gotten through to America. For a country that had turned inward—and which had increasingly posed a virile, American regionalist style against the “arbitrary distortions and screaming colors” of European modernism—it was an extraordinary shift. As recently as December 1934, Time magazine had done a cover story on the triumph of “earthy Midwestern” painters like the Kansan John Curry, the Iowan Grant Wood, and the Missourian Thomas Hart Benton, who had rejected European influences in favor of “what could be seen in their own land.”[24] Yet ordinary people from across the country were responding to the radical canvases of a leading post-Impressionist, imported from Holland. At last, modern art had entered the larger stream of American culture. It had also happened in the nick of time: After the opening of the Kröller-Müller Museum, the Netherlands would be highly unlikely to allow such an extraordinary group of paintings to leave the country ever again.
In fact the show also marked a far darker turning point in Europe. Just a month before the Van Goghs arrived in New York, Hitler, the failed artist, had used the 1935 Nuremberg rallies to launch an all-out war on modern art and its supporters. “Every personal dispute with them must therefore have ended in bringing them either into prison or the mad-house,” he declared, “as they really believed that these creations of a diseased imagination represented their own inner experiences.”[25] In the coming years, along with some twenty thousand other modern artworks that had hung in German museums, Daubigny’s Garden and Dr. Gachet would be confiscated and sold abroad. As one German art historian, who had been chased into exile by the hardening Nazi regime, put it, “The Nordic painter only paints with uncut ears.”[26]
The volte-face since the twenties had been dramatic. Now it was Germany that was declaring modern art “degenerate” for its pathological influences, while Van Gogh triumphed in the United States. As Americans were discovering the artist who had inspired several generations of German modernists, the modern movement in Germany was all but dead. But would Americans also warm to the far more disorienting art of Van Gogh’s successors? The cypresses of Saint-Rémy were still a long way from the damsels of Avignon.[27] And many European artists, as Barr knew well, were already in danger. Just days before he and Marga had arrived in Holland the previous summer, they had spent a week in Nazi Germany, where they met the artist Kurt Schwitters and several museum directors who were desperate to get out of the country. As they would later learn, they had been tailed by the Gestapo throughout their stay.[28]
29
THE YEAR WITHOUT PAINTING
Alfred Barr did not accompany the Van Goghs on their giddy, yearlong procession around the country. When the exhibition finished its debut in New York in January 1936, he was already holed up in his and Marga’s apartment, trying to finish a far more difficult project. The Barrs had moved into the new Art Deco building at 2 Beekman Place following his leave. Beekman Place had not yet acquired the exclusive cachet of later years, but it was only a few blocks from the museum and offered beautiful light and views of the East River.
In keeping with Alfred’s rigorous design principles, they had arranged the apartment in an austere Bauhaus style. Furniture was limited to a few chairs and tables with tubular steel legs—the American designer Donald Deskey’s knockoffs of Marcel Breuer’s prototypes, which they could not afford. There was also a small, almost bench-like couch with no arms, and some narrow built-in shelves that Philip Johnson designed for them. Alfred generally needed a large, uncluttered space to lay out his ideas, and the well-lit living room floor became his preferred laboratory.
Now he was crouched over hundreds of photographs of artworks that were scattered across the floor: empty de Chirico streetscapes; luminous Kandinsky watercolors; amoeba-like reliefs by Hans Arp; spindly Calder mobiles; “rubbish” constructions by Kurt Schwitters; Duchamp’s insect-like machines; Natalia Goncharova’s iridescent stage sets; Frederick Kiesler’s aluminum lamp; Schlemmer’s geometric ballet costumes. While Marga tried to keep their cat from walking on them, Alfred arranged and rearranged the images, determined to wrestle them into a coherent narrative.
It was a tremendous undertaking. In six weeks, the museum was going to open a show called Cubism and Abstract Art. With nearly four hundred objects in every medium, the exhibition would be the largest of Barr’s career; it was also his most intellectually challenging. Since the museum’s founding, he had engaged with single artists, particular countries or regions, or specific kinds of work, like mural painting or architecture or industrial design. But he had never tried to present the main plot lines of twentieth-century modern art itself, the successive schools and movements and the underlying forces that shaped them. No museum had ever attempted such a feat of cartography, and certainly not in the scope of a single exhibition.
For Barr, it was also a project that had acquired special urgency. One result of the failure to do a Picasso show in 1931 and 1932 was that the museum had never engaged with the birth and development of Cubist art, despite what he regarded as its central importance to the course of twentieth-century painting. (Paraphrasing Picasso, he would later describe Cubism as a new language, one that was “dealing primarily with forms.”[1]) The museum had also neglected Russian Constructivists, Italian Futurists, and French Surrealists, among other movements. For most Americans, Juan Gris’s newsprint collages and Kazimir Malevich’s floating white squares were no more approachable in 1935 than they had been in 1929. Despite the influence of Cubist ideas on many American painters, even knowledgeable critics regarded Cubism as a “discarded aberration” that had little bearing on the art of recent years.[2] To the broader public, it was almost as if one of the most essential achievements of modern art had never happened. Drawing on his own thinking going back to his lectures at Wellesley, Barr wanted to reclaim Cubism’s importance in a story that began well before it and continued out of it.[3]
But something else, too, was driving him as he bent over the images on his living room floor: the threat of politics. In Germany and Russia, he had witnessed two of the world’s most advanced art and design cultures be crushed by authoritarian regimes. In both countries, the movements and artists that the show was tracing had been silenced before his eyes. Now the far right was beginning to menace Western Europe as well. In Paris, Kahnweiler was warning his artist friends that “Fascism…will stop us all from working, or showing our work.”[4] And even in the United States, notwithstanding the breakout success of Van Gogh, modern art was still viewed with suspicion and even seen as anti-American. Increasingly, it was hard to find a place where avant-garde painters were not under pressure. Despite his formalist approach, viewing modern art as a development of style apart from the world, Barr increasingly recognized that the movements he was tracing had their own part in the gathering battle between democracy and totalitarianism. As Lewis Mumford—one of the few American writers alert to the Nazi art purges—observed, “in certain circumstances, a bowl of fruit by Braque might feel like the Statue of Liberty.”[5]
In an effort to awaken the public to the larger story of modern art in the twentieth century, Barr had conceived of a pair of huge, wildly ambitious shows. The first, Cubism and Abstract Art, would present the Cubist movement not as an aberration but as an evolving force at the center of one of the two main currents in modern art. The second, to follow in the fall of 1936, would be devoted to the other, opposing current, Surrealism, Dada, and what Barr liked to call Fantastic Art. Taken together, the shows would offer a clear, sequential narrative—a demystifying cause and effect relationship—to explain the course of advanced art and why it mattered.
From the outset, Barr knew that the shows would be controversial, since much of the material was difficult and since they would be writing a history where none had existed. He also knew that both shows would depend on the work of one artist in particular: Picasso. What he hadn’t anticipated was that he would face an entirely new obstacle to getting access to Picasso’s work, one that had nothing to do with the art market at all.
* * *
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Alfred’s new troubles with Picasso began in the summer of 1935, when he and Marga arrived in Paris after their Van Gogh work in Amsterdam and The Hague. Their plans were to spend an intensive six weeks gathering loans for the Cubism show, and at first, everything seemed to go smoothly. “By now the existence of the museum is no longer unknown, and artists are mostly expectant,” Marga observed when they got there. After six years, Alfred’s innovative shows had begun to acquire growing notoriety in Paris, and both the pioneering generation of artists and their younger followers—artists like Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti and André Masson—were keen to participate in the show. For the first time, Alfred and Marga began to enjoy the kind of access to artists that John Quinn had had a generation earlier.[6]
In Montparnasse, they met the well-tailored Dutch abstractionist Piet Mondrian, who had turned his spare geometric painting into a way of life. Like one of his artworks, his studio was carefully whitewashed, devoid of all extraneous objects, and accented only by a few primary colors; he also followed the Hay diet, which compartmentalized all food into several basic categories. (“One eats meat with vegetables, or starch with vegetables, but never the three at once,” Marga noted.) For Barr, Mondrian’s rigorous art traced a crucial shift from ideas taken from observable reality to what he called “pure” abstraction. “The cows and seascapes and dancers which lurk behind the earlier abstract compositions…have no significance save as points of departure from the world of nature to the world of geometry,” he wrote.[7]
Their visit with Alberto Giacometti, the Swiss sculptor, was equally potent, but in a different way. Rumpled, with an unruly shock of thick dark hair, Giacometti showed them his cramped, messy studio, lit by a single light bulb dangling from the ceiling and filled with splattered plaster and clay. Affiliated with the Surrealists, Giacometti took impulses both from his imagination and from life and had begun to make crucial breakthroughs in what Barr called “biomorphic abstractions.” For the show, he offered them his aptly titled plaster Head-Landscape.
Occasionally, the darkening political situation in Europe crept into view. The long-exiled Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, aware of Barr’s direct knowledge of Soviet Russia, were deeply moved by his efforts to trace the fate of the Russian avant-garde. They were doubtful they would be able to return to their country.
For the most part, however, artists were simply content to show their art. At his studio, Miró let them watch him work on a new canvas. (“He paints as if he were embroidering in black silk on a pale blue ground, putting one ornament after another into the outline of his half-length figure,” Marga noted.) When they ran into Jacques Lipchitz, the French Lithuanian abstract sculptor, on a Paris street, he offered to drive them to his studio himself.
The older generation was no less welcoming. They found Braque at his townhouse and studio near the Parc Montsouris—the elegant modern retreat he had financed with Rosenberg’s robust sales in the late 1920s. He maintained his usual Norman reserve, but he agreed to lend Guitar, an early masterpiece showing his journey from the lessons of Cézanne into Cubism. By contrast, Fernand Léger was jovial and exuberant. After showing them his work, he invited them to a noted bistro near his studio. “He loves to eat and drink,” Marga observed. “He speaks loud and clear, unhindered by the language barrier.”
Then they went to see Picasso and Rosenberg. At the time, Alfred had every reason to assume the artist and his dealer would support his plans. After all, such a show had never been attempted, and by presenting the first step-by-step account of Cubism and its influence on subsequent art, Alfred would be positioning Picasso’s work—and that of Rosenberg’s other artist Braque—at the headwaters of one of the primary streams of twentieth-century modernism. He sought, among other things, some of Picasso’s little-known collages and sculptures, together with Cubist paintings from his personal collection.
In reconnecting with the artist, he also hoped to resurrect the long-postponed Picasso show, which the museum had put on its list of prospective exhibitions for the coming year. In many ways, Cubism and Abstract Art—as well as its twin, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism—would provide ideal preludes to such a show, giving viewers the background that had been missing in earlier attempts to present Picasso’s art in the United States. Here, then, was an excellent moment to take stock of his most recent work, with a view to a larger collaboration to come.
At his gallery, Rosenberg greeted them cordially. By now, despite Barr’s qualms about dealers and Rosenberg’s skepticism about the museum, the two had a growing respect for each other. And Rosenberg had become an increasingly indispensable source of loans. For Cubism and Abstract Art, he agreed to share his great Léger masterpiece, Le Grand Déjeuner, as well as an important prewar Braque still life. Yet the dealer was unusually keyed up. Finally, Barr asked about Picasso. Rosenberg looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “Imagine,” he said. “He has stopped painting!”
Then, while they were talking, Picasso walked in. It was true, Marga thought, something was not right. He seemed nervous; he was a pale imitation of the genial, flirtatious Iberian who had led her through the Galeries Georges Petit a few years earlier. Afterward, she wrote that he appeared to be in a “disturbed state of mind.”[8] Nonetheless, he was eager for them to see his studio next door, and they followed him out.
First he took them to his apartment. From previous visits to Paris, they knew that Picasso and Olga had long led an elegant existence on rue La Boétie, with a housekeeper and nanny for their son; having visited Picasso’s studio in his first summer as director, Alfred had some sense of the haut-bourgeois setting. But nothing had prepared them for what they found when Picasso unlocked the door. The apartment was completely deserted and the furniture was in disarray, as if someone had searched it. Then they noticed the string. In every room, closets, cupboards, and drawers were tied shut; nothing could be opened or moved. The strings were stamped with official seals, in large clots of red wax. It almost looked like a crime scene. “Look what they’ve done to me!” Picasso exclaimed, as he led them from room to room.[9]
Unwittingly, the Barrs had arrived in Paris at the peak of Picasso’s divorce crisis. Pressure had been building since the spring. Six months earlier, Marie-Thérèse had told him she was pregnant. Unable to bear the prospect that the child would be illegitimate, Picasso promised her he would divorce Olga and marry her. In the spring, he had obtained a lawyer and begun formal proceedings. But he had failed to account for Olga’s wrath. For years, she had learned to look past his philandering, his absences, his abusive silences, the chaos that had always engulfed him. She was prone to violent outbursts, strange illnesses, chronic depression. But she had endured. Now, overcome with anger, she obtained her own lawyers, determined to make any settlement as difficult for Picasso as possible.
Days before the Barrs’ arrival, the case had finally gone to court. In the preliminary hearing, Olga’s lawyers asked the court to inventory their joint assets, but Olga was not prepared for what she had unleashed. When the bailiff appeared at their front door to inspect their apartment, she fainted, and Picasso had to send him away. Shortly afterward, she took Paulo to the Hôtel Californie, a few blocks away. She never returned. Meanwhile, the court moved to restrict all of the contents of the apartment until a settlement was reached.
But that wasn’t all. There was the house in Boisgeloup and other personal assets. But for Picasso, the greatest threat hanging over him was the fate of all the paintings that remained in his possession. According to French law, half of them could be turned over to Olga when the divorce—initiated by Picasso—went through. Picasso was distraught. Going back to the days when Roché had come over to examine the “piles of paintings” in a corner of his studio, he had always held on to many of his favorite pictures. In laying claim to them, the court was depriving him of a crucial part of his identity: “Look what they’ve done to me!” was also his way of telling the Barrs that he was being robbed of his art.
No one understood what was at stake better than Rosenberg. After all, the dealer had preferred to remain in an unhappy marriage rather than contemplate the destruction of his own vast stock of paintings. Nor could he help getting drawn into Picasso’s mess. “As a dealer, he is involved in the personal affairs of his artists,” Marga noted. With his unparalleled knowledge of Picasso’s work, Rosenberg had agreed to make the inventory of Picasso’s paintings required by the court. Despite his own displeasure, he felt he had to go through with it. “You understand very well that I had no more desire than you did to accomplish this work,” he told Picasso, as he came to the end of the report.[10]
