Picasso's War, page 4
Then, a few months later, a German friend told him about a young painter who had been working for months on an exceedingly strange canvas. Early one July morning, he decided to go see it.[10] The painter lived in a ramshackle artists’ building that sat atop a steep hill in Montmartre. It was bone-chilling in winter, skin-melting in summer, and had a single water source that all the tenants shared. It was generally referred to as the bateau-lavoir (Laundry Barge) because it looked like one of the dozens of washhouse boats that were moored in the Seine and that, until the late nineteenth century, had handled much of the city’s dirty linen.
When he reached the studio, Kahnweiler knocked, and, after a pause, the door opened. Standing in front of him was a disheveled young man, short and svelte, with raven-black hair and magnificent large eyes. Picasso was in his underwear, and had clearly just gotten out of bed. Inviting the dealer in, he went to put on his pants. As Kahnweiler entered, he met a lively redheaded woman, taller than Picasso was, named Fernande Olivier, and a huge German shepherd half-breed they called Fricka. They seemed to live in remarkable squalor: Wallpaper was hanging in shreds from the unfinished walls, there was household junk scattered around, and hardly any furniture, save for a woodstove covered with tobacco ashes and a filthy, caved-in couch. The whole place smelled of dog and paint. “It was unspeakable,” Kahnweiler said.[11]
But there was also a huge amount of art. There were canvases everywhere, rolled up and on stretchers, along with a number of severe-looking African figures.[12] And then, dominating the room, Kahnweiler saw the enormous painting. Ostensibly, it was a group portrait of five giant nudes. But the outrageous, shard-like bodies, limbs, and drapery, the jagged intersection of figures and background, the bright, raw skin tones and menacing gazes of the nudes themselves, affronted the senses so violently that the subject matter seemed secondary. On the painting’s right-hand side in particular, something almost demonic seemed to be taking place: The faces of the two figures were savage and masklike, and their limbs and body parts, reduced to angles and sharp-edged forms, were merging with the picture plane.
This was the work that would come to be known, euphemistically, as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the Damsels of Avignon. (Only years later would Kahnweiler understand that it depicted, as he delicately put it, “a scene of carnal pleasure”—a parade of prostitutes in a brothel.) The huge work, which Picasso had spent months and months on, had pleased no one, including the artists closest to him in spirit. Derain said that this kind of painting would lead to suicide; Braque said that looking at it was like drinking gasoline and spitting fire. In making the picture, Picasso found himself, for the first time, isolated from his own circle. “Not one of his painter friends had followed him,” Kahnweiler said.[13]
Kahnweiler was repelled as much as everyone else.[14] He also thought the canvas was unfinished. Nonetheless, he sensed something important taking place, as monstrous as the work was: Picasso seemed to be making a frontal attack on painting itself. “He wants to solve all problems at once,” Kahnweiler wrote.[15] He also could see that Picasso was nearly broke. On a return visit, Kahnweiler asked to see some of the other canvases that filled the studio. At first Picasso was skeptical; he’d been ruthlessly exploited by most of the small-time dealers he had worked with. (One early dealer was quite literally a horse trader; another, preying on Picasso’s desperation, demanded he paint flower pictures that would be easy to sell, then walked away with extra drawings he hadn’t paid for.[16]) While Kahnweiler was no different when it came to haggling over rock-bottom prices, he was deeply interested in Picasso’s new work, and gradually his enthusiasm, and extensive purchases, won Picasso over.[17] Eventually he became Picasso’s dealer.
Along with his advanced taste and astute negotiating tactics, Kahnweiler had a curious marketing strategy. As he did with his other artists, he asked Picasso to sign an exclusive contract and built up a huge inventory of his work. Yet he made no effort to promote it. “There was nothing—no publicity campaigns, no cocktail parties, nothing at all,” Kahnweiler said.[18] He also shared Picasso’s disdain for exhibitions. In all the years that he represented Picasso before the war, Kahnweiler did not mount a single show of Picasso’s paintings in Paris. The French public was easily confused by modern art, the dealer believed, and no good came of calling attention to his business. In any case, he was convinced that the greatest audience for Picasso and his fellow Cubists was abroad—and he was not thinking of Great Britain or the United States. Kahnweiler had spent time in London at the very start of his career and found it conservative and backward. “Nobody knew anything about contemporary French painting,” he said.[19] By contrast, there were two countries to the east of Paris that, in his view, seemed to have extraordinary potential for modern art: Russia and his own native Germany.
When Picasso was making his first forays into Cubism, the Russian Empire had barely embarked on the Industrial Revolution. With its huge, impoverished peasantry, protectionist economy, and deeply antiquated social hierarchy, the czarist state was in many ways out of step with Western Europe and the United States. Yet in the country’s major cities, a new mercantile elite had begun to amass enormous wealth; at the same time, the lively Russian tradition of intellectual debate and historical connection to French culture made the country’s educated elite unusually receptive to French modernism. In turn-of-the-century Moscow, these forces helped push a new generation of merchant princes to embrace the Paris avant-garde with an intensity that was unmatched almost anywhere else in the world.
A few years after Kahnweiler opened his gallery, a small, pale man with a stutter turned up at rue Vignon wanting to see his Picassos. It was Sergei Shchukin, Moscow’s leading textile baron and one of its most adventurous collectors. He had already acquired a substantial collection of Monets, Van Goghs, Gauguins, and Cézannes, and for several years he had been buying up Matisses with abandon. Now he was interested in Picasso, whose studio he had already visited. At first he had the same revulsion to the Cubist work that Quinn would experience in New York. “It felt like stuffing pieces of broken glass into my mouth,” Shchukin told a Russian friend. But he was determined to understand Picasso’s art, and he wanted to bring as much of it to Moscow as he could. Before long, he had become Kahnweiler’s most important client, averaging ten Picassos a year. For Kahnweiler, Shchukin opened up a crucial Paris-Moscow axis.[20]
Shchukin’s purchases had a dramatic effect on Russian culture. In Moscow, he converted the baroque palace where he lived into a house-museum, which he opened to the public on Sundays; by the eve of World War I, there were so many Picassos and Matisses, including examples of their newest work, that each artist was given his own gallery. While many of these paintings were far more radical than the post-Impressionist works that had shocked Quinn’s friends in London, they were soon widely embraced by the Moscow public. In the fall of 1911, Shchukin brought Matisse himself to Moscow, where he was feted all over the city as a “grand maître.” Meanwhile, a new generation of Russian artists, from Kazimir Malevich to Vladimir Tatlin to Aleksandr Rodchenko, were inspired by the Picassos and Matisses they saw at Shchukin’s to launch their own art rebellion. In the fall of 1913, when a group of eight German and Danish museum directors decided they needed to learn more about the French avant-garde, they didn’t go to nearby Paris, where the works were created but rarely seen; they traveled all the way to Moscow to visit Shchukin’s museum.[21]
For America’s own art-obsessed elite, Shchukin’s activities might have provided a model for how to bring a society to the forefront of twentieth-century culture. But as Kahnweiler quickly grasped, the nation that was most eager to follow Russia’s lead was not the United States but his own rapidly modernizing country. In many ways, the German Empire was very different from its Russian counterpart. By the eve of World War I, Germany was one of the most industrialized nations in Europe. It also had numerous cities, a highly educated urban middle class, a large Jewish population, and in the sciences and other subjects, some of the most advanced universities in the world. And while the Kaiserreich did not have any avant-garde collections like Shchukin’s, it boasted numerous public museums that had already embraced Van Gogh and other post-Impressionists. By 1913, having set up a flourishing trade with Moscow, Kahnweiler began to collaborate with leading German dealers to market his artists. Judging that Germans were far more ready for the new art than their French counterparts, he also supported an active program of exhibitions.
Kahnweiler’s first Picasso show, which ran at the Thannhauser Gallery in Munich in 1913, proved so successful that it traveled on to Stuttgart. Soon after, he also sent a group of Picassos to Berlin, for an even more ambitious show called Picasso and Tribal Sculpture, which featured more than fifty paintings from Picasso’s early Cubist years paired with the kinds of indigenous artifacts that seemed in part to have inspired them. During France’s colonial expansion in Africa, a large quantity of artworks, ranging from Grebo masks from the Ivory Coast to Congolese wood figures, had been brought back to Paris, and exposure to them had exerted a powerful effect on Picasso, particularly during his initial development of Cubism in the years following Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Today, the early-twentieth-century fascination with “primitive” ethnographic material—driven by unenlightened notions of Western cultural superiority—has rightfully come under scrutiny. But for Picasso and his fellow rebels, non-Western art was also a crucial source of innovation, giving them new tools with which to challenge the prevailing order. For the German-speaking public, the provocative show struck a chord. Versions of Picasso and Tribal Sculpture traveled to Dresden, Vienna, Zurich, and Basel, and many of the Picassos found eager buyers.[22]
In his international strategy, Kahnweiler developed a keen understanding of the countries where the new art seemed to have the greatest potential. Selling Cubist paintings to Russian capitalists who were more than fifteen hundred miles away, he was building some of the most extraordinary modern art collections in the world. Encouraging gallery shows all over German-speaking Central Europe, he was also creating a new audience for advanced art. So popular were the German shows that Kahnweiler began to make prints of some of his artists’ work to sell to people who could not afford paintings. It made for a stark contrast with Stieglitz’s experience in New York. But Kahnweiler’s growing success in the east also carried risks.
In France, not everyone was pleased with the dealer’s German connections. Some conservative newspapers began to spell Cubism with a German K and denounce it as a German plot. The insinuations seemed aimed in part at Kahnweiler himself, a German Jewish dealer who had created an apparently lucrative business marketing Picasso and his fellow Cubists abroad, at the expense of traditional French art. The tensions reached a new height in the spring of 1914, when some of Kahnweiler’s German partners bid up Picassos to then-record prices. In an article titled “Before the Invasion,” one Paris-Midi columnist likened the aggressive German buying to a declaration of war. Soon, he wrote, the Germans “will stop buying Picassos. Instead they will loot the Louvre.”[23]
In a sense, the columnist was right. When war broke out a few months later, the Kaiser’s army would march into France and quickly threaten Paris—provoking a rare evacuation of the Louvre. But it would not be until a generation later, during the run-up to a different war, that the columnist’s words would prove eerily prescient. Under Hitler, the Germans would stop “buying Picassos”—and all modern art—in favor of the Old Masters and the “Aryan” realism sanctioned by the Nazi regime. And in Stalin’s Russia, avant-garde art would be rejected and shunned in favor of a new Socialist Realism. Then, both countries would notoriously loot museums all over Europe.
It was one of the more striking paradoxes of early-twentieth-century culture: The countries that were the leading champions of modern art and modern artists in the years before World War I would become, two decades later, their most violent antagonists. In both Russia and Germany, artists once embraced as apostles of the future would be punished and driven into exile. Not a single one of the Picasso collections that Kahnweiler helped form in Germany would survive the Nazi period; in Russia, Shchukin’s Picassos and Matisses would disappear into government storerooms. By then, it would be largely up to the United States, a nation that had begun the century indifferent, if not outright hostile, to modern art, to protect the work of Picasso and his contemporaries—if it still could.[24]
But all that would come later. In 1913, France was the overwhelming source of the new art and Germany and Russia its dominant consumers. The United States was not in the game. While civic leaders in the young American republic devoted huge sums to building treasure houses of the past, their counterparts in two of Europe’s dynastic empires were busy amassing the art of the new century. If the art world of today looked anything like it did then, the world’s greatest Picasso collection—and its premier museum of modern art—would likely be in Moscow or Berlin, not New York.
* * *
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Following his summer in Céret, Picasso was no longer thinking much about the United States. Under the careful tending of Kahnweiler—who came to see him nearly every day—his star was rising quickly in Europe. There were new buyers like Shchukin, who were prepared to go wherever his Cubist experiments took him. And regardless of sales, Kahnweiler was steadily investing in his work. Meanwhile, there were few signs that other Yankee connoisseurs were following the Steins’ early lead. Fernande Olivier, who kept almost as careful track of Picasso’s new patrons as she did of his interactions with other women, sensed the American absence better than anyone. Alongside the Russian Shchukin, there was now a stream of Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, and Swedes, and even a few Japanese and Chinese, coming to his studio. But as Fernande watched the new band of enthusiasts, she noticed that one nationality was conspicuously absent. “Picasso,” she concluded, “was neither successful nor well-known enough for Americans.”[25]
4
FRENCH LESSONS
Quinn’s first journey to Paris began with a desperate woman and a revolver. It was the beginning of September 1911, and he was waiting for Augustus John, the prominent Welsh painter, at Charing Cross Station. Having arrived in London a week earlier, Quinn had persuaded John to cross the Channel with him and introduce him to some galleries and artists in the French capital. According to their plan, they would spend four or five days in Paris; then they would drive to the south of France, to take in the Provençal landscapes and light that had inspired Van Gogh and Cézanne.
In theory, John should have been an ideal guide. Though his own, fairly conventional portraiture did not quite live up to his extravagant reputation—Virginia Woolf had named a new era in British culture after him—he was knowledgeable about the new art and had been going regularly to Provence to paint. He also had connections in Paris: Four years earlier, he had met Picasso at his studio, and probably saw Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. (Picasso was clearly amused by the velvet-clad, earringed Welshman, whom he called “the best bad painter in Britain.”[1]) But John was a complicated character with a decidedly raffish streak. While courting attention and patronage from the Bloomsbury intellectuals, he led a dissolute, nomadic existence with various women and wives and unintended children. He also had a habit of leaving a trail of chaos wherever he went.
On the day of their departure from London, the particular chaos in question was Frida Strindberg, the neurotic Austrian second wife of Swedish playwright August Strindberg. A spurned paramour of John’s, Madame Strindberg had a vivid sense of drama, and as Quinn and John met on the platform, they found her waiting for them, firearm in hand. She insisted on going with them to France, or, she said, she would take her own life. Apparently, it was not the first time she had made such a threat, and after a struggle, they managed to escape her. But Quinn was terrified. (“Carnage,” he scrawled in his journal.) Then, when they reached the ferry, they discovered that she not only was very much alive but had somehow managed to rejoin them. It was a harbinger of what was to come.[2]
In Paris, Quinn hoped they could escape Strindberg and plunge into art. But he was immediately detained by one of his most important legal clients, a large, elderly southerner named Thomas Fortune Ryan, an insurance magnate who needed him on an important business errand. Like many other American millionaires, Ryan enjoyed Paris but had no taste for modern art. Instead of going to see the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Quinn and John ended up taking Ryan to the Bal Tabarin cabaret, whose dancers Lautrec had once painted. (Ryan chewed on an unlit cigar in mild amusement as he took in the entertainment, while John promptly picked up an Algerian woman.) In the end, they managed only hurried visits to a couple of art galleries. And although Quinn was fascinated to hear about Gertrude and Leo Stein and their art-filled home—he wrote in his diary that they collected “nothing but new men”—he and John made no attempt to visit.[3]
An even greater missed opportunity was Picasso himself. After all, Quinn had been asking John about Picasso throughout the spring, even as he tried to make sense of the perplexing drawings he’d seen at 291. It’s tempting to imagine what Quinn might have made of an encounter with Picasso at a point when he had yet to buy a single avant-garde painting: Nearly all of his previous art buying had involved English, Irish, and American painters he had a personal connection with. Apparently, though, John, who by now relied on Quinn’s heavy purchases of his paintings, was not particularly inclined to steer the lawyer to work that was far more advanced than his own. In fact, it would take another decade before Quinn finally met the artist whose work would one day occupy the center of his vision of modern art.
But Paris was not a total loss. One day, John took him to see Ambroise Vollard, the shrewd, inscrutable post-Impressionist dealer, who was a towering presence in the Paris art world. To Quinn, he must have seemed formidable. A few years older than the lawyer, Vollard was tall and somewhat lumbering, and had a curious way of shutting one eye. He had been a mentor to several generations of artists and had been an early supporter of Picasso. He was also notoriously cagey, especially with people he didn’t know. Though he had an extraordinary collection of Cézannes and early Picassos, they didn’t, during their visit, get much beyond Renoir and Monet. Still, Quinn was intrigued, and left with a sense of unfinished possibility.
