Picasso's War, page 35
Soon the case would become bogged down in court. But even without a final settlement, in many ways Olga had already won. After Picasso showed Alfred and Marga the apartment, he took them to his studio upstairs. The windows were unwashed and there were clouds of dust everywhere; the big, unfurnished rooms were filled with old canvases, lined up with their faces to the wall. Clearly, the place hadn’t been used in months. Rosenberg was right: He had stopped painting.
For an artist who, for more than thirty-five years, had never stopped, it was a startling break. But he had no idea what he was getting himself into. Seeking escape, he had instead found himself in a trap of his own making: separated but not yet divorced, his son taken from him, his home under court supervision. And he still lacked the freedom to wed Marie-Thérèse—or even to formally recognize her—before she gave birth. His own lawyer had warned him that as long as the case was in court, he shouldn’t live with Marie-Thérèse. How could anyone paint under those circumstances? It must have been a peculiar sort of vindication for Olga, whose face and body had often been cruelly disfigured in Picasso’s work. Picasso later described it as “the worst time of my life.”
As news of Picasso’s marriage crisis spread in Paris, there was growing speculation about why he had stopped painting. Picasso claimed that he had decided to become a poet. But it was also clear that he couldn’t tolerate the idea that anything he painted might be claimed by the court. “He is in a state of absolute depression, in between fits of euphoria more painful to witness than the depression,” Kahnweiler wrote to Gertrude Stein, a few weeks after Alfred and Marga’s visit to rue La Boétie.[11] In fact, Picasso hadn’t quite given up making art. He continued to work on his great, roiling psychodrama of an etching, the Minotauromachie. It was, in its tortured way, an expression of everything that he was going through. Later, he would give a rare signed proof of the etching to Barr as a token of his appreciation. For the moment, though, he was not working, and his existing paintings and sculptures—at least those in his personal possession—were off limits to the Museum of Modern Art or anyone else. In the end, Alfred and Marga were forced to depart Paris without Picasso’s help for the Cubism show.
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Back in New York that winter, Barr spent long evenings on the living room floor. In an astonishing six-week effort, he assembled the entire show and the 249-page catalog, a work that would present a sweeping new vision of the past half century of modern art, a through line that went from the sources of Picasso’s earliest Cubist experiments up to the Merzbau construction of Schwitters, the spontaneous forms of Miró, and the mingling shapes of Calder. For all the chaotic diversity of the show’s content, he offered an almost positivist vision of formal development that could somehow account for it all. He also came up with a theory to explain it. The entire course of modern art, he posited, or at least this crucial central strand, could be traced to a fundamental problem that artists had confronted at the beginning of the century. “The pictorial conquest of the external visual world had been completed,” he wrote. “The more adventurous and original artists had grown bored with painting facts.”[12] The result was Cubism and a broader movement toward abstract art. Not content merely to describe his theory in words, he decided to diagram it in an enormous flow chart, which he put on the cover of the catalog. Beginning with the four foundational artists, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Seurat, the chart split into two pathways as it moved forward in time, both ending in abstraction: On the right-hand side was “Geometrical Abstract Art,” which started with Cézanne and Seurat and evolved through Cubism, Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and many other movements; on the left, “Non-Geometrical Abstract Art,” which started with Gauguin and Van Gogh and developed through Fauvism, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism.
Barr’s vision was seductive. It also was highly controversial. In later decades, the effort to impose such order out of the inherent chaos of modernism would appear an act of extraordinary hubris. Even at the time, critics took issue with his deterministic formalism, and Barr seemed to be aware of the impossibility of what he set out to do. As he acknowledged in the catalog, “often, of course, these two currents intermingle, and they may both appear in one man.”[13] He might have been referring to Picasso, whose works he sorely needed, not only for the Cubism show but for the Surrealism show that would follow it.
Despite the scientific framing of the show, Barr could not help acknowledging the international situation in which it was playing out. As he wrote in the catalog, there was a concerted campaign under way against modern art and modernist culture in both Russia and Germany, the two countries where modern art forms had most widely flourished; in assembling the show, he was also making an urgent defense of abstract art as a form of political liberty. Not least was the fact that nine artists in the show had been forced to leave Germany since Hitler rose to power—a number that he raised to twelve by the time of the catalog’s second edition. “This essay and exhibition might well be dedicated to those painters of squares and circles…who have suffered at the hands of philistines with political power,” he wrote.
Cubism and Abstract Art had an extraordinary impact on both popular and critical understanding of modern art. It also gave new weight to abstract art at a time when it had been marginalized in the United States. What it did not do, though, was bring much new attention to Picasso. In the end, Barr managed to compensate for the artist’s nonparticipation with twenty-one Picassos from various private collections. Yet the show was unable to include the Demoiselles, whose Paris owner refused to lend it, and the only Picasso collage in the exhibition was shown in a photograph, because the original was unobtainable.
The Cubism show was not the only one that suffered from Picasso’s absence. For Barr, there remained the nagging problem of the larger Picasso show, which would have to be postponed yet again. Even as the Cubism show was opening, Barr had warned the trustees that doing a Picasso show was highly unlikely for the foreseeable future. As Goodyear summarized the situation to Rockefeller, “It is probably quite doubtful, that we could count on getting the Picasso pictures, which are tied up by his divorce proceedings, in time for an exhibition next season.”[14]
At a time of growing political and ideological conflict across Europe—a time when artists were fleeing into exile and their paintings were being removed from museums—what was keeping Picasso’s work from getting to the United States was not politics or censorship but affairs of the heart. “It was the divorce that kept him from painting,” Barr later wrote. “Not rheumatism, not melancholia, not the Spanish War, not fallowness—but the drive to keep his wife from laying hands on more of his creations.”[15]
Thanks to his pending divorce, Picasso could not take up the central part in the story of modern art that Barr had been laying out on his living room floor. What was not yet clear, though, was that the larger forces confronting Europe were about to dramatically redirect that story—and Picasso’s place in it.
30
SPANISH FURY
One afternoon in late September 1936, Marga and a young friend walked into the Café de Flore and found Picasso at a table alone. The encounter was not altogether unexpected: In the year since his marriage crisis, Picasso had reembraced the Left Bank scene, and the Flore—long a hangout of the Surrealists—had become a regular part of his routine. Often, he would sit on one of the red leather banquettes smoking Gauloises, an untouched glass of mineral water in front of him, while members of his circle came and went. “Do you prefer your solitude?” Marga greeted him ironically. He gestured the two women to join him.[1]
For Marga the meeting was a crucial opportunity. In December, Alfred was opening his huge Surrealism show—the equally ambitious sequel to Cubism and Abstract Art—and he had left her in Paris to settle the final loans. In particular, he wanted her to get an important group of disquieting bronze figurines, as well as several paintings, out of Picasso. But Marga had another motive as well. The war in Spain had begun two months earlier; already, Hitler and Mussolini were backing General Franco’s rebels with planes and artillery. Artists and writers were clamoring to join the International Brigades to defend the Republican government, and Spanish officials, in an effort to call world attention to the war, had just taken the unusual step of naming Picasso as director of the Prado, Spain’s national museum. The Prado announcement was an important turn in the alliance between modern artists and the anti-Fascist front, and Marga wondered if Picasso would be going to Madrid to take up the cause.
As they began talking, however, Picasso seemed strangely indifferent. “I guess we’re in the same business now,” he replied, archly, when she asked about the Prado. Just like everyone else, he’d heard about the appointment through the newspapers. He also had no intention of going to Madrid. Marga was incredulous. After all, there had been blood in the streets of Barcelona, where Picasso’s mother and sister lived in a flat near the city center. And a few weeks earlier, Franco’s forces had begun a vicious bombing campaign over Madrid. Even now, the Prado’s treasures—the Velázquezes, El Grecos, Zurbaráns, Murillos, Goyas, and hundreds of other masterworks—were at serious risk. “Can’t you use your authority just for an hour and see that the pictures get safely stored?” she asked. “Start writing, start wiring but get something done?” Picasso shrugged. The paintings were safe, he said, and if they got wrecked, “I can always paint new ones.”
Picasso’s blasé attitude was disconcerting given his friends’ constant talk of the war. At the Flore, they were soon joined by Miró’s dealer, Pierre Loeb, who told them that Miró was in Spain trying to get his family out. Then came Christian Zervos, the Cahiers d’Art publisher, and his wife, Yvonne, who were planning a trip to Barcelona and Madrid to document art and monuments threatened by the conflict and to investigate the situation of the Prado. Still Picasso showed little interest. Instead, after Marga and her friend left, he began telling the Zervoses about his nocturnal prowls that summer in the Midi. “The Zervos[es] were disgusted,” Marga reported to Alfred. “In Spain they’re killing each other & he wallows in brothels.”
By the summer of 1936, Picasso’s life had become increasingly unmoored. The previous fall, Marie-Thérèse had given birth to their daughter, Maya; with his paternity still officially unacknowledged, he had appeared at the baptism as her godfather. But around the time of Maya’s birth, he had been struck, at the Deux Magots, by a grave, dark-haired young woman with pale eyes and a fixed gaze. Dora Maar was a fiercely intelligent Croat French photographer and Surrealist, exactly half his age; when they were finally introduced that winter, she quickly became his latest amour fou.[2] Now he was dividing his time between Dora and Marie-Thérèse and his infant daughter. All the while, his costly legal battle with Olga continued, and his return to art making had been languid at best.
That spring, Rosenberg had astutely papered over Picasso’s fallow period by staging a high-profile show. There were huge crowds, and the event played to all of the dealer’s strengths. “Rosenberg, exuberant, danced about from group to group shaking hands, listening to questions, taking care of everybody and giving constant orders to his assistants,” Jaime Sabartés, Picasso’s faithful Spanish secretary, wrote. Even Kahnweiler seemed to acknowledge Rosenberg’s magic, calling Picasso’s new work “Michelangesque.” In reality, though, the twenty-nine works in the show had all been created before the marriage crisis. Picasso didn’t even attend, and before it was over, he had fled to Juan-les-Pins. Even as Rosenberg was trumpeting Picasso’s “new” canvases, the artist wrote Sabartés half jokingly, “I am giving up painting, sculpture, engraving, and poetry, to devote myself exclusively to singing.”[3]
When the fighting in Spain began that summer, Picasso had again gone away, this time to Mougins, in the south of France. He was with Dora Maar and a group of his Surrealist friends, and the war was constantly on their minds. Maar and Paul Éluard were committed anti-Fascists who fervently supported the popular front; Roland Penrose was planning his own trip to Barcelona to build British support for the struggle against Franco. In Mougins, they were also joined by the Zervoses, who were if anything even more militant. “No one can remain indifferent,” Dora’s mother wrote her during the holiday. “Poor poor poor people!”[4] Picasso’s main impulse, however, was to seek escape in beach swims, constant flirtation, and clownish humor. One day at lunch, while the group was discussing the latest events, he picked up a black toothbrush, held it to his upper lip, and raised his right arm, in a spoof of Hitler.[5]
But Picasso had never been politically engaged. Kahnweiler, who knew him as a young man, often said that he was the least political artist he had ever met; in the early 1930s, while some of his Surrealist friends were getting into trouble with the French government for their radical politics, Picasso was written off by the Soviet embassy in Paris as a bourgeois. In Spain, he had been courted by the right-wing Falangists before the war; as late as the spring of 1937, he felt it necessary to set the record straight that he was not, as sometimes rumored, pro-Franco. Indeed, there was little in his art that betrayed a political consciousness of any kind.
For Alfred and Marga, Picasso’s disengagement presented an awkward reality. In his own museum work, Barr instinctively shared Picasso’s apolitical outlook. Just as Picasso’s art seemed to exist outside the realm of current events, Barr had long viewed the story of modern painting as a continually evolving interplay of styles and forms that unfolded largely on its own terms. Yet Barr was acutely aware of the extent to which modern art had been drawn into the defining ideological battles of his time. Not only had he witnessed, firsthand, the ways that democratic freedoms and advanced modernism had been squelched in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. He was also immersed in the fraught debates of Depression-era America, including on such matters as social housing and even race relations. In 1935, Barr joined a group of prominent New Yorkers who sponsored an important anti-lynching exhibition organized by the NAACP; two years later, while traveling with Marga in the Jim Crow South, he insisted on sitting in the nonwhite section of the bus.[6]
Despite his formalist training, Barr’s thinking about art and politics was shifting. Though his initial approach to museum work had been shaped by the establishment inclinations of Harvard insider and former banker Paul Sachs, by the mid-1930s, he was having regular arguments with the brilliant young art historian Meyer Schapiro, who was deeply involved in radical politics. In a study group that sometimes met at Schapiro’s Greenwich Village apartment, Barr encountered many of the leading figures of New York’s anti-Stalinist, anti-Fascist left, who viewed art and culture as another weapon in the defense of progressive democracy. In an influential essay, Schapiro took issue with Barr’s notion of abstract art as a “purely aesthetic activity” driven by an internal evolution of style, arguing instead that modern art, no less than other art forms, was crucially shaped by the social and political forces around it. In response to Barr’s Cubism show, he wrote, “There is no ‘pure art,’ unconditioned by experience.”[7]
While Barr did not abandon his approach, he increasingly recognized that Hitler’s campaign to wipe out modern art provided a crucial opening to change American attitudes. Instead of subversive foreign influence, avant-garde art could be promoted as an embattled symbol of advanced democracy. “Why do totalitarian dictators hate modern art?” Barr later wrote. “Because the artist, perhaps more than any other member of society, stands for individual freedom.” But this argument could only go so far as long as Europe’s preeminent modern artist remained detached from the growing conflict with Fascism.[8]
Given what Marga had witnessed, Picasso seemed less an emblem of Spanish Republicanism than of Parisian decadence; at fifty-four, living on his earlier renown and sitting in Left Bank cafés while his own country was torn apart, he was at risk of becoming the self-indulgent bohemian of conservative American caricature. Hearing him joke about making new paintings for the Prado, Marga felt nauseated.
As so often in the past, it remained uncertain how much of Picasso’s work the Museum of Modern Art would be able to get. Having made no progress at the Flore, Marga was running out of time. Finally, on the eve of her departure for New York, she phoned Zervos’s wife, Yvonne, who told her they were expecting Picasso at the Cahiers d’Art offices that afternoon and urged her to join them. She rushed over, and soon after, Picasso turned up, wearing a bright tie and yellow socks. “Aren’t you handsome,” Marga said. “En effet,” he answered—“Indeed.” The room broke out in laughter. He sat down next to Marga on the Zervoses’ couch, and they began to talk. Eventually, she brought up the works Alfred was hoping to borrow. “Will you lend?” This time, with Zervos and others watching, Picasso couldn’t refuse, and suggested several important paintings he would be glad to offer her. But when she went to meet him the next morning to finalize the arrangements, he stood her up. She would have to return to New York empty-handed.[9]
Paradoxically, Picasso’s evasion meant that, for star power, Alfred would have to rely on the works of Salvador Dalí, whose Francoist sympathies were at odds with almost the entire modern art world. “Picasso’s breakdown…means that Dalí will have to lend & lend importantly,” Marga wrote Alfred.[10] Perhaps it was Picasso’s increasingly byzantine personal affairs and his unresolved divorce; perhaps it was his resistance to a huge group show. Whatever it was, Picasso seemed no more interested in taking part in Barr’s Surrealism show than in engaging with the war in Spain. The world would have to wait.
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Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, Barr’s most radical exhibition to date, would prove to be hugely controversial. Among the hundreds of works were Duchamp’s Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy?, a birdcage filled with marble “sugar” cubes, which was lent by John Quinn’s old friend Henri-Pierre Roché; Magritte’s The False Mirror, a painting of a giant eye whose pupil is a cloud-filled blue sky; Man Ray’s huge painting of the disembodied lips of his former lover Lee Miller, floating over a landscape; and, most sensationally, a fur-clad teacup and tea set by the young Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim.[11] Equally provocative was Barr’s inclusion of “comparative material”—nonartistic sources that ranged from Walt Disney’s Wolf Pacifier from The Three Little Wolves to children’s drawings and Rorschach inkblots. There even was a section of “art of the insane”—drawings by psychiatric patients that he felt were an important source for the Surrealists.
