Picasso's War, page 38
A few weeks after the Demoiselles deal, Alfred was sitting in his office when a spritely older woman with pince-nez glasses walked in. Though they had never met, she told him she came often to his shows. She also said she was hoping he might choose a painting that she could buy and give to the museum. It could be anything he wanted, she said, provided it was a “masterpiece.” Alfred was taken aback; as far as he knew, the woman had no personal ties to the museum. The unknown benefactor turned out to be Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, sister-in-law of museum founder Solomon Guggenheim and aunt of flamboyant art patron Peggy Guggenheim. It was the beginning of one of the most important patron relationships in museum history—Mrs. Guggenheim providing the cash and Alfred Barr choosing the art.
For almost anyone else in Barr’s place, having just secured the Demoiselles, it might have been an ideal opportunity to acquire an exceptional Matisse. Or the great Seurat or Van Gogh they still lacked. Or perhaps Max Beckmann’s astonishing triptych Departure, which captured, in unsettling allegory, the Nazi rise to power and which had just arrived at a gallery in New York. With such a landmark Picasso in hand, the museum could now concentrate on one of the other great pioneers whose work it sorely needed. Not Barr. Even now, he felt, Picasso was more important. Like Quinn before him, Barr had a driving sense that the collection needed to be anchored around the greatest works of Picasso, because of his central importance to the new art of the twentieth century. There also was a fresh opportunity.
Paul Rosenberg had recently sent Girl before a Mirror to Valentine Dudensing, the New York dealer with whom he sometimes worked. This was the painting that Alfred and Marga had admired above all others at the 1932 shows in Paris and Zurich. For Alfred, it was one of the artist’s four or five essential works. Just as Three Musicians was in relation to Picasso’s Cubism, Girl before a Mirror, he felt, was the highly complex end point of the curvilinear style the artist had developed in the early months of 1932. It was precisely the kind of eclipsing work he sought in his quest to map out the successive high points of modern art.
Not everyone agreed. To many viewers, the girl embracing her own reflection was a disturbing puzzle. Exquisitely designed in almost phosphorescent yellows and greens and orange-reds, the painting had a rich, almost Matissean patterning. Yet it was also rendered with a disorienting multiple vision in which geometric abstraction combined with unsettling psychological tension and sexual puns. As Barr observed, the woman was clothed, unclothed, and x-rayed at the same time. It was not exactly what Mrs. Guggenheim had in mind when she said “masterpiece.” Still, Rosenberg was willing to sell it for $10,000, and Mrs. Guggenheim dutifully obliged. The sale was quickly concluded.
Within the space of a few weeks, Alfred had managed to anchor his fledgling collection with two of Picasso’s most important paintings. After years of setbacks, he could finally signal to the European art world that the museum was more than just a staging ground for loan shows. But it was not time to celebrate yet. When he got home and told Marga about the purchase of Girl before a Mirror—a painting laden with personal meaning for both of them—she exclaimed, “Aren’t you happy? Isn’t it wonderful?” He was silent. Already there was another great, controversial painting that troubled him. And like the Demoiselles, it had long been hidden in a private collection in Europe.[14]
* * *
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Alfred and Marga arrived in Zurich five months after the purchase of Girl before a Mirror. At the train station, they were met by a Swiss museum friend of Alfred’s, who drove them to the small village of Küssnacht about forty kilometers away. An affluent enclave on the north shore of Lake Lucerne, Küssnacht was primarily known as the place where William Tell killed the Austrian tyrant Albrecht Gessler with a crossbow, paving the way for Swiss independence in the fourteenth century. But as Alfred had recently learned, it was also home to a mysterious painting that he had been thinking about since his early twenties.
Among the most disconcerting outcomes of the breakup of the John Quinn estate was the fate of Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy. Picked out for Quinn by Picasso, Roché, Brancusi, and his other friends in the final months of Quinn’s life, the nocturnal encounter of the huge lion and the dreaming woman had seemed to form the magical key to all of his paintings. Barr himself fell hard for the painting at the John Quinn memorial exhibition in 1926, and then, when it arrived back in Paris to be auctioned at the Hôtel Drouot, it had captivated the Parisian public. In his encomium to Quinn, Jean Cocteau called the painting “the heart of the wheel, the center of the center, the place where speed sleeps in place, the eye of the storm, the sleep of sleeps, the silence of silences.”[15]
But then the painting had abruptly fallen into disrepute. At the time of the sale, there was apparently a quarrel between the winning bidder, an art dealer named Henri Bing, and a rival dealer; then, in the months after the sale, there were murmurings in Paris that the picture was a fake. There were even rumors that Picasso or perhaps Derain had painted it as a joke. Since The Sleeping Gypsy had been entirely unknown at the time Quinn bought it—and even Kahnweiler, who sold it to him, seemed to know very little about its provenance—it was easy to give credence to these claims. Soon the painting was discredited, and it all but vanished. Almost as quickly as it had been discovered by Quinn’s friends, it seemed to recede back into the obscurity from which it had emerged.
Along with a handful of people who had seen it in New York, Alfred refused to believe the stories. He was certain that the painting was authentic. Like Quinn, he considered it one of the most important works of the modern era. After he had become director of the museum, and was traveling often to Europe, he began to ask about the painting; occasionally, he would encounter a fellow enthusiast who remembered it, from New York or Paris. Eventually, he learned that The Sleeping Gypsy had ended up in a private collection in Switzerland, though, as he noted, a cloud continued to hang over the picture on the one or two occasions it had been shown in a Swiss museum. Finally, during that spring of 1938, he had decided to track down the painting’s owner, a Madame Ruckstuhl-Siegwert, who apparently lived in Küssnacht. Shortly after he and Marga arrived in Europe that spring, he wrote to the woman, asking if he could come look at her painting. Then Alfred and Marga had set out for Switzerland.
When they arrived at the address in Küssnacht, they encountered a curious, absentminded woman who lived alone in a dark chalet and seemed to have emerged from an Edgar Allan Poe story. According to Marga, Madame Ruckstuhl-Siegwert was a “rather confused middle-aged widow.” Eventually she led them into the room where the painting was kept. Filling the center of the room was an elaborate crystal chandelier, something clearly designed for a ballroom or grand dining room with high ceilings. Here, it hung down to within a few feet of the floor, largely blocking the view of the wall behind it where the painting was hung. “The picture was very hard to see,” Alfred wrote.[16]
But there they were: the woman and the lion, the barren desert, the night sky. For Alfred, seeing the painting again, after twelve years, was a flash of thunder. The widow was reluctant to part with the painting, but she was also flattered by Alfred’s interest, and after some persuasion, she agreed to lend it to the museum for the opening of its new building the next spring. If all went well, Alfred hoped to persuade Mrs. Guggenheim to buy it from Madame Ruckstuhl. He knew that the trustees would have heard the stories and would likely regard it with suspicion. But while it was on loan, they would also have a chance to see it. Not long after the painting arrived at the museum, the trustees met to discuss its possible acquisition. Alfred himself was surprised by their reaction. “They were so impressed by it,” he wrote, “that…they were willing to approve its acquisition, even if in the end it should turn out not to be by Rousseau.” Thanks to Alfred’s yearslong fixation, this repudiated painting was going to get a second chance in the art world; at last, he was beginning to reassemble the collection that New York had forsaken at the death of John Quinn.[17]
32
THE LAST OF PARIS
The revelations roiled Washington for weeks. In late January 1939, The New York Times reported that the French government was buying more than six hundred American warplanes. Another five hundred were going to Britain. Curtiss Hawk single-engine fighters, Glenn Martin light bombers, Douglas DB-7 attack aircraft, Chance Vought dive-bombers. Isolationists in the Senate were furious; the Glenn Martins and Douglases were so new that the U.S. military hadn’t used them yet. With these huge arms deals, Roosevelt was all but taking sides in the growing standoff in Europe. Pressed to justify his actions, the president cited his own diplomats’ sobering assessment of Hitler’s airpower and the likelihood of war. The Luftwaffe had only grown stronger in the two years since an ancient Basque town was reduced to rubble, and Europe’s remaining democracies desperately needed an answer for it. Behind closed doors, FDR told a group of senators that America’s first line of defense was now in France.[1]
If the prospect of more Guernicas was increasingly real to military planners in Paris and Washington, however, it remained far from the minds of most Americans. With New Deal policies at last having some effect, a new optimism was sweeping the country. Hollywood was entering one of its most successful years in history, with films like The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, and Gone with the Wind, and despite high unemployment, productivity was up and industrial breakthroughs were making consumer products more affordable than ever. (In 1938, the Museum of Modern Art assembled a show called Useful Objects Under Five Dollars, aimed at showing that excellent modern design could be found in cheap household goods such as a sleek Pliofilm shower curtain and a dish rack cased in red rubber.) To signal America’s resurgence, investors were pouring well over $100 million into dueling world’s fairs, to take place that summer in New York and San Francisco. Ignoring Germany and Italy’s aggressive military buildup, Japan’s brutal war in China, and Franco’s blood-soaked takeover of Spain, the New York organizers were centering their huge pageant on a peaceful, technology-driven “World of Tomorrow.”
At the Museum of Modern Art, there was an unusual bullishness as well. Construction work was already far advanced on the museum’s long-awaited permanent home on West Fifty-third Street. Already the building was attracting attention for its smooth, factorylike façade and its million-dollar budget, which was being financed by an $800,000 loan and an aggressive fundraising effort by Abby Rockefeller’s son Nelson.[2] Apparently, when one group of trustees began to worry about the expense, they were reassured that the building could be used for other purposes if the museum failed.[3] (In stark contrast to avant-garde paintings, spending big on real estate was clearly uncontroversial for the Rockefellers, especially on a building whose sixth-floor members’ lounge would soon command prized views of Rockefeller Center, of which Nelson was now the president.[4]) With the opening set for early May, the trustees could also look forward to unveiling their white-marble-and-thermolux-glass art temple during the beginning of the fair, when the world would be watching. Though it was ultimately shelved as too extravagant, there had even been talk of a Modern Art Ball at the Waldorf, with prizes of actual works of art for the best costumes.[5]
Unlike many of his distracted colleagues, though, Barr was acutely aware of the threat of war. Having visited France and Germany constantly since the late 1920s, he had watched—and experienced—the Hitler revolution unfold since the days of the Reichstag fire. Through his many European contacts, he’d also taken an intense interest in the war in Spain. And despite his cool, formalist approach to modern art, he had begun to allow his anti-Fascist sympathies to color his shows. In the spring of 1938, at the urging of Ernest Hemingway, he had exhibited the Spanish war drawings of the ardent loyalist Luis Quintanilla. In Hemingway’s lyrical introduction to the show, Quintanilla was a man who had “fought in the pines and the grey rocks of the Guadarrama; on the yellow plain of the Tagus; in the streets of Toledo, and back to the suburbs of Madrid where men with rifles, hand grenades, and bundled sticks of dynamite faced tanks, artillery, and planes, and died so that their country might be free.”[6] It was a powerful reminder that artists were quite literally on the front lines of the battle between democracies and dictatorships.
Perversely, the Nazi crackdown on “degenerate, bolshevik” art helped Barr’s efforts to promote modernism. Not only did Hitler’s policies reinforce the connection between liberal government and advanced modern art, they were forcing growing numbers of modern artists, architects, and museum leaders—some of them with Alfred and Marga’s help—to seek refuge in the United States. Two months after Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich, Alfred organized the first international show devoted to the Bauhaus, drawing on a group of exiled German artists and designers. “With the help of the fatherland,” he observed acidly, “Bauhaus designs, Bauhaus men, Bauhaus ideas…have been spread throughout the world.”[7]
Even with Barr’s recent acquisitions, however, the museum continued to depend on borrowed art. Under normal circumstances, obtaining important loans had taken months of campaigning in European capitals. Now the repression of modern art and the possibility of a wider conflict threatened to make it much harder. Already the Bauhaus show had had to be truncated because of material that couldn’t be gotten out of Germany. Meanwhile, in France, collectors, and even some dealers, were becoming skittish about sending artworks across borders. The loans issue would be especially critical in 1939, with the opening of the new museum. While Roosevelt jousted with the U.S. Senate about sending experimental warplanes to France, Barr was embarking on a furious new round of diplomacy to bring avant-garde paintings to the United States.
Above all was the question of Picasso. After nearly a decade of false starts and dashed hopes, Barr had committed, that autumn, to filling all three floors of the museum’s pristine new galleries with hundreds of the artist’s most important works. Though the show would be hugely reliant on European loans, Barr had entered the year confident that it was finally in his grasp. For the first time, the museum had a pair of preeminent Picassos of its own, Demoiselles and Girl before a Mirror. Barr had enlisted a formidable co-sponsor, the Art Institute of Chicago (whose ambitious new director, Daniel Catton Rich, was a fellow protégé of Paul Sachs). And he had, or thought he had, the full support of Picasso and Rosenberg, whom he and Goodyear had met with in Paris the previous summer. He even hoped to include Guernica.
In contrast to previous years, ordinary Americans were also starting to seem less resistant to avant-garde art. Museums around the country were cautiously beginning to embrace post-Impressionist painting; in January, a dozen years after its board had been scandalized by Picasso, the Albright Art Gallery opened a special gallery for contemporary art. Amid the new atmosphere, Barr had taken the unusual step of announcing the Picasso show, still ten months away, to The New York Times, which reported that it was going to be “the most comprehensive ever held.”[8] A few weeks later, Henry Luce’s Time magazine, hardly a hotbed of radical taste, put Picasso on its cover, suggesting that the artist who had “confounded” ordinary people for decades was finally ready “to emerge from the smoke of controversy into the lucidity of history.”[9]
Even without the possibility of war, Barr knew that nothing was ever certain with Picasso. Somehow, he needed to engage with the artist directly. In late January, he had lunch with Mary Callery, an American sculptor and modern art collector who was on her way back to Paris, where she lived. A vivacious, twice-divorced socialite, Callery knew Picasso and Rosenberg; she also owned a number of Picassos herself. Alfred asked her if she might be willing to test the waters with both to ensure their continued support for the show. A few weeks later, Callery called on Rosenberg. At the time of her visit, he had just opened his own Picasso show, a selection of thirty-three brightly colored still lifes—candles, pitchers, birdcages, ox skulls, simple utensils—many of them completed since Guernica. Callery didn’t like the new style, which she found too easy on the eye, but the show had attracted extraordinary interest. At the gallery, Rosenberg was in his element, dancing around the room, greeting visitors and talking about the artist’s latest self-reinvention. Accosting his American friend, he excitedly told her he was getting more than six hundred people a day.
When Callery asked him about the Museum of Modern Art plans, however, he darkened. In theory, Rosenberg should have been delighted that museums in America’s two largest cities were finally prepared to showcase the work of his premier artist. After all, he had been trying to bring Picasso to New York and Chicago for nearly two decades. But he also knew from long experience how difficult the United States was, and the advance report in The New York Times alarmed him. Confronted with such an enormous show, people might come away liking Picasso less than when they started. As he put it to Callery, no one wanted to see “100,000 oil paintings”—no matter who painted them. And if the ultimate prize was the vast U.S. market, a misfire on this scale might be fatal.[10]
Underlying Rosenberg’s opposition was another anxiety as well: control. By now, he was Picasso’s undisputed kingmaker. He had been personally involved in nearly all of the artist’s major shows since the twenties, and that included museums. He’d largely dictated the shape of the 1934 show in Hartford, and in recent years, he had organized museum shows in Amsterdam, Brussels, Stockholm, Helsinki, Norway, and Belgrade. Even now, he was being courted by a museum in Basel. No other modern art dealer enjoyed such cultural power. Notably, it was Rosenberg’s Paris show, not Barr’s museum plans, that had landed Picasso on the cover of Time. (Though the artist’s complicated private life clearly intrigued the magazine as well: “Last week Dora Maar had her second exhibition of photographs,” the article noted, adding that she also “had her nose punched outside the Café de Flore by the ex-Mme Picasso.”[11]) By letting Barr write Picasso’s American story, Rosenberg seemed to fear he might be losing his own hold on the artist.
