Picasso's War, page 39
Whatever the dealer’s motivations, his support for the show was critical. If he was out, they would almost certainly lose Picasso as well. “Somehow it will be very difficult for you if Rosenberg is against you,” Callery wrote Barr after her visit to rue La Boétie. “He has a way of knowing how to poison Picasso’s mind. I have seen him at it many times.” Callery’s warning came too late. A few days later, Rosenberg sent him an ultimatum. The dealer said he had talked to Picasso, and they both had “great objections” to the show. “We are afraid to tired [sic] the public,” he wrote. If the museum would agree instead to a smaller, more selective presentation, following his and Picasso’s suggestions, he would lend his best paintings. “Otherwise,” he said, “I will…not be able to contribute.”[12] The poisoning had already happened.
As he absorbed Rosenberg’s letter, Barr was incensed. By now, there was a great deal more than a single exhibition in play. Over the dozen years since he had seen the John Quinn memorial show in New York, Picasso had become a sort of talisman for him. In building the museum, not only had he set out to tell the story that Quinn had first embraced—the story that began with the Paris avant-garde. For all his wide view of modern art, taking in design, film, and photography, he had also sought to build the core of the story around many of the same artists that Quinn had pursued. Picasso, whose paintings had once filled the lawyer’s apartment, had been the elusive center of these efforts. Repeatedly, he had watched Picasso get swept up in the games of his dealers. He had also been stymied, in his Picasso plans, by everything from marital strife to artist’s block to his own health.
Barr hoped this time was different: He would be bringing together an unparalleled constellation of masterpieces, including the Demoiselles and Guernica, and he had not one but two prominent American museums. He even had an extraordinary new building in New York, perhaps the most up-to-date museum in the world, in which to show the paintings. And with the growing threat of war, there might not be another chance at such a show for the foreseeable future. Yet despite all this, Rosenberg was threatening to walk away. Unable to maintain his usual composure, Barr drafted a blistering reply. Rebuking the dealer for going back on his word, he wrote that he would be letting down “many thousands of people” in America’s “two greatest cities.” He also accused the dealer of turning Picasso against the show. “It would be a really serious affair,” he wrote, “if you and Monsieur Picasso were to withdraw your cooperation at this late hour.”[13]
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Luckily, the letter was never sent. Alarmed by Barr’s anger, Goodyear and Rich persuaded him to revise it, and four drafts later, he arrived at a far more subtle reply.[14] It had all been a misunderstanding, he now suggested to Rosenberg: They had never intended to show 300 paintings, but a far more limited 150, which Barr planned to choose “with the greatest care.” Yet they also were concerned “not to restrict too much” a show that was meant to represent “the magnificently fecund genius of Picasso,” including works in other media. Finally, he suggested that they would depend on Rosenberg’s “expert knowledge” of Picasso’s work. “You more than anyone else, during the past 20 years, have been the most influential friend and supporter of Picasso,” he wrote. He carefully omitted any mention of the dealer pressuring Picasso.[15]
If the letter was painful to write, it was tactically brilliant. Appealing to Rosenberg’s vanity, Barr appeared to be conceding the dealer’s unparalleled connoisseurship, even as he preserved his own, extremely ambitious vision for the show. At the end of March—six tense weeks after the crisis began—Rosenberg offered his full assent to an exhibition of 150 paintings. “This of course changes the situation,” he wrote. Underscoring his influence over Picasso, he added, “I am already quite sure that he will support you.”[16] He let the matter of curatorial control quietly drop, and he made no restrictions on works in other media, which would in fact bring the show to more than 300 artworks in total. As Alfred and Marga’s departure for Europe loomed, it looked like the Picasso show was on after all.
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While Alfred was resolving the standoff with Rosenberg, however, the political situation in Europe continued to deteriorate. In mid-March, German troops marched into Czechoslovakia, proving the failure of the Allies’ appeasement policy. “Hitler in Prague,” Marga wrote.[17] In Washington, the invasion gave new fuel to Roosevelt’s controversial efforts to arm France and Britain and prepare the country for war. For Alfred and Marga, it also hit uncomfortably close to home: Just the previous summer, in preparation for the Picasso show, they had gone to the Czech capital in pursuit of a rare group of the artist’s prewar canvases. In the years before 1914, the Czech connoisseur Vincenc Kramá˘r had acquired several dozen of Picasso’s and Braque’s most important analytical Cubist paintings, which he kept in his modest house on a bluff overlooking Prague.[18] Unfortunately, Kramá˘r had been away at the time, and now, with the Nazi occupation, it would be impossible to get any of his paintings out. Like its teetering democracies, Europe’s modern art collections were increasingly encircled.
Meanwhile, a different reminder of the Fascist advance came with the arrival of Guernica in New York harbor. Following the painting’s dismal showing in Paris two years earlier, it had undergone a remarkable reassessment. First, in the early months of 1938, Rosenberg had arranged to borrow it for a large traveling show of work by Picasso, Braque, Matisse, and the sculptor Henri Laurens, which he took to museums in Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Gothenburg. As one of the first major presentations of these artists in Scandinavia, the show attracted great interest, with Guernica generally embraced as a powerful, if difficult, addition to an already astounding assembly. Then, in the months after the Munich crisis, Picasso’s friends had arranged to take the painting on a tour in Great Britain to raise funds for Spanish aid. Though the tour was not a financial success, the publicity it drew had begun to turn the controversial painting into a potent symbol of Spanish resistance.
For Barr Guernica was a vital new step for modern art, and he desperately wanted it for his exhibition. As he later wrote, it was a work that spoke “of world catastrophe in a language not immediately intelligible to the ordinary man.” At the same time, however, the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign, a group that had been formed in 1936 to provide humanitarian aid to the Spanish Republic, wanted the painting for its own fundraising tour of several U.S. cities, a proposal favored by Picasso, who had become increasingly militant about the Spanish tragedy. In the end, Barr reached a compromise by which the museum would cover the cost of bringing the painting to the United States, provided that the Relief Campaign finish its propaganda tour in time for Barr’s Picasso show.
By the time Guernica crossed the Atlantic at the end of April, however, the Spanish war had already been lost. During the first two months of the year, the Nationalists waged a vicious assault on Catalonia, capturing Picasso’s beloved Barcelona; by the end of March, they had also taken Valencia and Madrid, the last Republican holdouts, leading to a final surrender soon after. Even as Guernica reached New York, the notorious Condor Legion, which was responsible for the atrocity and many that followed, was already preparing its triumphant return to Germany.[19] It was one of the bitter ironies surrounding the painting that it would not gain true international celebrity until Franco had completed his conquest.
Even the celebrations for the new Museum of Modern Art were overhung by world events. On the surface, the building’s grand opening, which unfolded during the second week of May, was all glamour and froth: The culminating event was a black-tie soiree for seven thousand guests, an eclectically prominent crowd that spanned Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt and Mrs. Charles Lindbergh, Lillian Gish and Salvador Dalí, the Norwegian and Swedish ambassadors, and Juan Negrín, the recently exiled prime minister of Republican Spain. For the occasion, Barr had filled the galleries with a kind of greatest hits show that aimed to provide as popular an introduction to modern art as possible. Equally divided between American and European art, it included a number of late-nineteenth-century masterpieces as well as a select group of more contemporary works and ranged widely across different media. Though it was hardly groundbreaking, its significance was not lost on the aging critic Henry McBride, who considered it a sonorous tribute to John Quinn and the organizers of the Armory Show a quarter century earlier. “It was especially startling to remeet The Sleeping Gypsy,” he wrote in his New York Sun column. “It remains one of the most amazing pictures of modern times.”[20]
Rather than the art, however, the high point of the evening was a fifteen-minute radio speech by President Roosevelt, which was piped in from the White House. The symbolism was hard to miss. Though FDR was not known to have a particular interest in modernism, Eleanor Roosevelt had been a patron of the museum and may have convinced him of its importance.[21] He also was closely engaged with U.S. culture at the time, having just inaugurated the New York World’s Fair. Whatever his motivations, for the first time, the federal government was giving a full-throated endorsement of a tendency in art that had long been regarded with suspicion by wide swaths of the American public.
Equally important, though, were the geopolitical overtones. Less than two weeks earlier, Hitler had all but dismissed Roosevelt’s plea for peace in a speech to the German Reichstag. It now seemed clear that a wider war was inevitable. Dedicating the new museum to “the cause of peace,” FDR took up the theme that Barr had been pushing ever since his initial encounters with Nazism: the essential connection between modern art and liberal government. “The arts cannot thrive except where men are free to be themselves and to be in charge of the discipline of their own energies and ardors,” Roosevelt said. “The conditions for democracy and for art are one and the same.”[22]
The speech sent an unmistakable message: America was prepared to provide a new refuge for the threatened arts of the twentieth century. It was hard to think of a better mise-en-scène for the Picasso show that fall. All that remained was for Alfred to meet with Rosenberg, Picasso, and other lenders, make his final choices, and get the paintings to New York in time for the opening. In her diary, Marga wrote, “How many years A. has hoped and worked and schemed for this!”
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Arriving in Paris in June 1939, Alfred and Marga found an art world subdued. Everyone seemed to be talking about war; many collectors and dealers had already stored their paintings in bank vaults for safety. Since there was very little art that was easily accessible, they found themselves spending most days holed up at Rosenberg’s gallery, poring over his own paintings and his extensive photographic files of Picassos elsewhere in France. Soon they had spread out all the photographs in a large room in Rosenberg’s house: If it wasn’t quite like lining up paintings in Mrs. Kröller-Müller’s garden in The Hague, it was a decent approximation of Alfred’s living room floor. Rosenberg was clearly flattered to have become the command center of the exhibition and left them largely to themselves.
Within the Rosenberg household, however, the Barrs’ intense labors—and their plans to bring his premier Picassos to New York—exposed new tensions. By now, Rosenberg was anxious to get as many paintings as he could out of Paris. One day, he presented Barr with a far more radical proposal: What if he sent his entire collection to the Museum of Modern Art at his own expense? It would be a drastic step, given that the United States was thousands of miles away and his business and family were deeply rooted in France. But Rosenberg could see how vulnerable he would be if the Germans invaded; somehow, he needed to secure his inventory. For the museum, of course, receiving hundreds of additional Rosenberg paintings would present a significant logistical challenge, but would offer access to dozens of other modern masterworks. Immediately, Barr sent a flurry of cables to New York to try to make arrangements.
Margot Rosenberg, on the other hand, took a different view. Parisian to the core, she refused to believe that their comfortable existence on rue La Boétie might be in jeopardy. And while, in their cool truce, she had tolerated her husband’s continual show making abroad, many of the paintings in their own collection she regarded as off limits. There were the Massons and Légers that lined the walls of the quadrangular stairway that led up to their private apartment; there were the inlaid mosaic benches that Braque had designed and personally installed in their dining room. And there were the Picassos. When Rosenberg agreed to lend Barr the five great Picasso still lifes that hung in their formal dining room—an extraordinary large-scale series from the midtwenties executed in a restrained, decorative late Cubist style—Margot exploded. She adored these canvases and couldn’t imagine getting through the winter without them.
There was a heated fight, and in the end, Rosenberg mostly gave in. After all of Barr’s arrangements, he withdrew his plans to send his entire collection to New York, deciding instead to send many of his paintings to a series of storerooms in the provinces. And he placed new restrictions on the dining room pictures. Pulling Barr aside, he said he thought his wife would calm down, but he also insisted that he retain the right to have the museum return the still lifes to Paris immediately after the New York show rather than sending them with the other loans on to the Art Institute. Barr, mindful of the dealer’s inclinations and the ominous international situation, was doubtful that Rosenberg would risk recalling any of his paintings. “I did my best for Chicago,” he reported to Rich. “Hitler may provide the solution.”[23]
Even as the Barrs were trying to get Picassos out of France, the Nazi campaign against modern art was creating a new dilemma in neighboring Switzerland. In late June, agents for the Third Reich consigned 126 of the most important “degenerate” paintings confiscated from German museums to a controversial auction in Lucerne. Among them were important works by Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Derain, and Gauguin, as well as dozens of works by leading German Expressionists like Otto Dix, Paul Klee, August Macke, Emil Nolde, and others; many of them had belonged to museums whose progressive policies Barr himself had emulated in the early 1930s. In Paris, Rosenberg thought it was immoral to bid in the auction, warning his colleagues that the Nazi government would “certainly convert this money into bombs and machine guns.”[24] But Barr and many other museum professionals took the opposite view. As they saw it, here were works that had been ruthlessly orphaned from German public collections, and rather than have them destroyed or disappeared, here was a rare opportunity to get them out.
By now, the Museum of Modern Art had at last set up a decent purchase fund for art, and in a decision for which he would be heavily criticized in later decades, Barr instructed a gallery he worked with in New York to bid on several of the Lucerne paintings. One of them was Matisse’s incomparable 1913 masterpiece Blue Window, from the Essen Museum. For Barr, there was little question he was doing the right thing: Better to have this crucial Matisse safely in the public trust in New York than in the private clutches of some Nazi potentate. As he later put it, Blue Window was “ransomed privately, that is virtually bootlegged, out of the cellar of Goering’s Luftministerium to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”[25] Even as the museum was defending modern art as a bulwark of democracy, Barr was doing what he could to get it out of the hands of the dictatorship that now threatened much of Western Europe.
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Perhaps in defiance of what was soon to come, Bastille Day in Paris in 1939 was unusually exuberant. There were extravagant balls and parties; there was dancing in the streets. On the Champs-Élysées, close to Rosenberg’s gallery, the Foreign Legion paraded by, playing Moroccan marching songs on their fifes. Having already gotten far in their negotiations with Rosenberg and Picasso, Alfred and Marga decided to join Brancusi for dinner at his studio in the Impasse Ronsin, much as John Quinn and Jeanne Foster had done eighteen years earlier. Now in his early sixties, the Romanian sculptor had changed little, still spending most of his days working on blocks of marble and polishing brass forms, still spending evenings cooking meals on his woodstove.
That evening, he invited the Barrs over, together with Henri Matisse’s son Pierre and his wife. Then, after feasting on roast gigot, the group walked over to the Île Saint-Louis in red and pink party hats. A swing band was playing, and Brancusi, carried away by the music, danced with Marga to the hit tune “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön.” Though no one seemed to notice, it was a particularly fitting song for these waning hours of European cosmopolitanism: Written by a Yiddish composer and popularized by African American singers in Harlem, it had become a pan-European hit in the late thirties, including, in a Germanized version, in the Third Reich, where its Jewish origins remained unknown. (In the English lyrics, one of the refrains is “I could say ‘bella, bella,’ even ‘sehr wunderbar’ / Each language only helps me tell you how grand you are.”)[26] It was the last they would see of Brancusi for a very long time.
Soon after the holiday, Paris emptied out, and there was little more that Alfred and Marga could do. Most of the Picasso loans were now lined up; what remained was getting them to the United States that fall. Already, though, everyone seemed to be expecting war. Having moved Marie-Thérèse and Maya to Royan, on the Atlantic Coast, for safety, Picasso had escaped with Dora to Antibes, where he would spend much of August making ominous studies of night fishermen. To be out of harm’s way, Rosenberg was moving his own family to Tours, in the Loire Valley, where he had also begun to transfer some of his inventory. Near the end of July, Alfred returned to the United States on the Normandie to write the Picasso catalog and begin the frantic preparations for the show; Marga stayed on to tie up loose ends in Paris and to visit her mother in Rome.[27] While many questions about the show remained, Alfred’s labors had been fruitful: Together, artist and dealer had agreed to send more than seventy works of art to New York, of which some two dozen, by his count, were among the most important of Picasso’s career.
