Picasso's War, page 41
Picasso was up to his usual vanishing act, but this time it was driven as much by international events as by caprice. In the final days of August, after Hitler and Stalin’s nonaggression pact was reached and France ordered a general mobilization, the town square of Antibes had filled with troops. Picasso hated war and was spooked by the prospect of a German air campaign. He also had bitter memories of the seizure of his paintings from Kahnweiler’s gallery back in 1914. Racing back to Paris, he tried to secure his scattered possessions. “He was a worried man, seeming helpless, not knowing what to do,” recalled the photographer Brassaï, who had known him since the early thirties and ran into him in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.[20]
In the end, he gave up trying to pack up his things and abruptly left the city with Dora, Sabartés, and his dog, Kasbek, by car. This time, they did not head back to the Mediterranean. Instead, they drove all night to Royan, the small town north of Bordeaux, on the Atlantic coast, where he had already sent Marie-Thérèse and Maya in July. In choosing the town, flight had clearly been on Picasso’s mind: Bordeaux was a major seaport for Atlantic crossings that could offer some possibility of escape. Sabartés later talked about Picasso’s “tragic mood” about the “events that drove him from Paris.”[21] For the time being, however, he was not contemplating escape so much as a kind of internal exile, and, with his two mistresses and young daughter, he quickly settled in to a new, reclusive wartime existence.
As a result, during the entire, frantic ten-week stretch in which the most important show of his four-decade career was being assembled, Picasso was completely unreachable. “Picasso has disappeared,” Mary Callery reported in late September.[22] A month later, Zervos wrote to Barr that he had been to the foundry and seen the casts of Picasso’s new sculptures but had lost touch with the artist himself.[23] “I truly regret that Picasso left these sculptures at the foundry instead of sending them to you,” Zervos wrote. “They are magnificent pieces.” By now the exhibition in New York was less than three weeks away, and all hopes of contacting Picasso before the opening had to be abandoned. Neither the sculptures nor Picasso himself would make it across the Atlantic. In fact, not even Rosenberg, who ordinarily would have come immediately for such an event, was able to attend, fearing that his son might be drafted in his absence. “If I had no son, which [sic] might be called if war lasted too long, I certainly would sail to the States,” he wrote Barr shortly before the opening.[24]
* * *
—
Picasso: Forty Years of His Art opened at the Museum of Modern Art on a cool Tuesday evening in mid-November. The previous day, one French and four British ships were sunk by German mines and torpedoes; that same week, The New York Times reported that “the bulk of the German Army…is in the West ready to take the initiative.”[25] In Manhattan, though, events in Europe seemed far away in a season filled with other distractions. “When we tune off the war broadcasts,” a contributor to Harper’s Bazaar wrote,
we tune in on Alex Templeton, the blind pianist, with his malicious musical take-offs…Féfé’s Monte Carlo is open again. There’s the new Martinique, with two crack Latin bands, voodoo gyrations, and drum pounders….Carmen Miranda is ay-ay-aying at the Waldorf. Downstairs in the St. Regis, all is Hawaiian now….The Met promises the most glamorous opera singer that New York has seen in years—the Czech soprano, Jarmila Novotna. And the balletomanes are discussing furiously Dalí’s “Bacchanale,” the new Massine symphonic ballet, “Rouge et Noir,” to the Shostakovich First, and Dick Rodgers’s “Ghost Town.”[26]
* * *
—
And yet, for the some seven thousand guests who attended the show’s opening night, the shadow of world conflict hung over much of what they experienced, starting with the museum itself. Designed by American architects, the new building boldly proclaimed the arrival of the International Style in Midtown Manhattan. Yet the horizontal factorylike structure—a vivid departure from the city’s upthrusting Art Deco towers—had been directly inspired by the Bauhaus, long since proscribed by the Nazi regime. Indeed, the two most prominent Bauhaus architects, Gropius and Mies, had recently arrived in the United States after fleeing the Third Reich. (If Barr had gotten his way, one of them would have designed the museum.) As much as the building suggested an emerging new style, it also reflected a Europe that was rapidly disappearing.
But it was the museum’s contents that captured this tension most strongly. After passing through the building’s signature revolving doors, the guests were greeted by three floors of some of the most astonishing paintings created since the century began, a great many of them brought over from France just weeks earlier: giant standing nudes reinterpreted through the burly, squat volumes of West African sculpture; violins and guitars that seemed to disappear entirely into a profusion of intersecting lines and planes; comic stock characters from Baroque opera rendered with the exquisite realism of Velázquez—or the mind-bending geometries of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle; corpulent bathers transposed into a fugue of curves, eyes, and breasts; shrieking, contorted shapes of animals, women, and children filling a huge wall with primal expressions of terror. Here was modern art at its most concentrated and clamorous, rescued in the nick of time from impending doom.
Barr had made a point of stressing the show’s comprehensiveness, and faced with more than 360 works of stupefying variety, many viewers found the presentation overpowering. (So much for the smaller show Rosenberg thought he was getting.) Yet the exhibition was not merely a novelty show or a grab bag of avant-garde tricks. With his usual taxonomic zeal, Barr had arranged the art in an improbably lucid progression of styles and idioms, initiating viewers in stepwise fashion into the new and difficult. Beginning with Picasso’s earliest paintings, the show continued chronologically, culminating, at regular intervals, in a series of defining moments: the early Moulin de la Galette; the Blue period Old Guitarist and Rose period La Toilette; Two Nudes, and, bringing to culmination the first floor, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Later floors took viewers through the “hermetic,” “analytical,” and “synthetic” stages of Cubism, through the monumental women of the early 1920s, Three Dancers, and the rapturously colored Marie-Thérèse paintings; and finally, through the tortured Minotaur period to the apocalyptic horror of Guernica. On every wall was a continuing struggle between form and the way to express it, but also an exhilarating search for beauty.
The show was not without gaps. Apparently not yet over his old falling-out with the museum, Chester Dale had refused to loan The Saltimbanques, perhaps the very greatest of Picasso’s early circus paintings. Gertrude Stein’s portrait, though Barr had optimistically put it in the catalog, was no more present here than it had been in Chick Austin’s show in 1934. There were all the sculptures that Picasso had failed to send, thus omitting a crucial dimension of his art. And then there was Rosenberg’s Three Musicians, still missing on a boat somewhere en route from Buenos Aires. Even now, the painting continued to elude Barr. (It finally turned up in New York a month into the show’s run, and would be hailed as the last picture to be hung.)
But few viewers noticed. In Barr’s clarifying sequences, even a work as difficult as Guernica could gain powerful new coherence as the end point of many works before it. Because of its immense size, the painting was given a long gray room of its own, where it could be taken in from a proper distance, lit by hidden ceiling fixtures; adjacent galleries contained dozens of sketches, drawings, and study paintings as well as Dora Maar’s thrilling photographs of the work itself in eight successive stages, offering rare insight into how Picasso created it. If nothing else, few viewers in this setting could walk away indifferent, or in reflexive disgust.
Here was Guernica’s true debut. Though the war that provoked it had already been lost, it was all too prescient of the one that had just begun. It would be Barr’s 1939 show—rather than the Paris Expo in 1937 or any of the Spanish relief shows that had come after it—that would finally sear Guernica into the public consciousness and definitively establish it as one of the century’s most enduring statements.
Having worried to the last if the show would come off okay, Barr himself was surprised by how feverishly it was embraced. Going into the exhibition, he had reason to fear a mixed reception: There was the longstanding fickleness of the American public with avant-garde art, and the checkered experience of previous Picasso shows, from Stieglitz in 1911 on up to Hartford in 1934. There was the hostile reaction that had greeted Guernica as recently as that same summer. And yet amid the backdrop of war, and the publicity about all the paintings the museum had gotten out of Europe, the show had electrified the city. People were lining up to get in to the museum in numbers that surpassed all previous records. Suddenly Picasso seemed to be everywhere—in newspaper headlines, on the cover of magazine supplements, even in shopwindows. Almost overnight, it seemed, the artist had been transformed from controversial Paris provocateur into New York fashion icon.
Indeed, some of the most immediate echoes of the show came in the realm of couture. In Vogue, Frank Crowninshield, the longtime Condé Nast editor and founding Modern trustee, argued that Picasso’s art captured the “strange and wholly new order” of feminine beauty in contemporary society. In Fifth Avenue window displays, the advent of Picasso-themed clothing was already taking place. To show off its winter 1939 collection, Bonwit Teller matched Cubist-faced mannequins with replicas of paintings from different phases of Picasso’s career: The Blue period Absinthe Drinker was paired with a Persian blue coat and furs; in another window, the multihued Girl before a Mirror inspired a “stained glass” patterned evening dress. Bergdorf Goodman went further, borrowing seven actual Picassos from Walter Chrysler, Jr.—lesser paintings from the artist’s Blue, Rose, and neoclassical periods—to hang next to ermine and sable coats. Whether Picasso’s work was understood or not, the onetime enfant terrible of the bateau-lavoir had, apparently overnight, become a mainstay of department store chic.
As the show continued its run, however, there were also signs that the paintings were tapping into deeper currents in American life. “It is his vital will to change…which reflects the most profoundly characteristic urge of our time,” the young critic Andrew C. Ritchie wrote in Burlington Magazine. Titling his take in the Partisan Review “Picasso: 4000 Years of His Art,” George L. K. Morris argued that the show “demonstrates how the accelerated tempo of today has compressed a whole cultural cycle into a single life-time.” In an unsigned editorial, even The New York Times weighed in, with clumsy discomfort, on what Picasso meant to twentieth-century culture. “Modern art, with all its baffling affirmations, its sloughs into chaos and unintelligibility…is the logical, again the inevitable, product of our time,” the Times’s editors wrote. “And so Picasso—although we are certainly not called upon to approve everything he does, and may well turn in dismay or frank disgust from some of his art’s grotesque phases—Picasso should be given his due.”[27]
For viewers prepared to take on the full measure of Picasso’s work, the show seemed to hold out the prospect of a new turn in American culture. In a letter published in the New York Herald Tribune, one reader called it “the most important art event in America since the armory show,” chiding the paper’s own critic for not grasping its significance. “This stage of art is merely a step toward abstract art,” the reader added with uncanny prescience.[28] In fact, several of the future leaders of the Abstract Expressionist movement found the exhibition overpowering. Willem de Kooning called the presentation “staggering”; Roy Lichtenstein, who was still in high school when the show opened, would keep going back to Barr’s exhibition catalog for years after. Louise Bourgeois, at the time a recent arrival from Europe herself, found the show so entrancing that she was unable to paint for a month: “Complete shut down,” she wrote.[29]
For many of these artists, the show seemed to throw down a challenge. For years, a handful of American painters, including Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, and John Graham, had been arguing that Picasso needed to be contended with. “All painting after Picasso is after and can not be before,” Graham had said in the early thirties.[30] But they were in a minority, and for much of the thirties, as the American art world went elsewhere, few had paid much attention. Now it was clear for all to see: Artists in the United States would have to take account of what Picasso had done and find a new direction. “Another artist cannot begin at the point at which Picasso ends,” concluded the art historian Robert Goldwater, who was also Bourgeois’s husband, in a widely read review of the show.[31] Goldwater’s insight would, in various ways, come to haunt the painters who came to maturity at midcentury. Years later, Jackson Pollock’s partner, Lee Krasner, recalled how Pollock once picked up his dog-eared copy of Picasso: Forty Years of His Art and threw it across the floor of his studio in frustration. “God damn it! That guy missed nothing!” he shouted.[32]
But it was not in New York that most ordinary Americans would feel the show’s impact. That happened when the Picassos left West Fifty-third Street and, as Barr had foreseen, were unable to return to Europe.
34
ESCAPE
Picasso returned to Paris on the evening of November 12, 1939, two days before the opening party in New York.[1] Having spent the fall holed up in Royan, he had missed—or ignored—all of Barr’s efforts to get in touch with him during the run-up to the show. Shortly after the war began, he had made a single, hurried overnight visit to Paris with Dora and Sabartés to update his residency papers, but the few hours they had spent there had been interrupted by an air raid siren, which had sent them briefly into a bomb shelter. “At ten in the morning we arrived at rue La Boétie, just in time to hear the sirens,” Sabartés wrote. Still, Picasso had had time for Brassaï to take pictures of him having lunch at the Brasserie Lipp.
Now, however, the situation was calm and he was spending a longer stretch at rue La Boétie. And he was there when the first cables from New York arrived later that week, all saying essentially the same thing: “PICASSO EXHIBITION IMMENSE SUCCESS. NEW YORK AND ALL OF AMERICA IS PAYING HOMAGE TO YOU.”[2]
Soon news about the show began to spread in France. After the initial weeks, the museum released attendance figures, and even Matisse was envious. “I know that art in New York is flourishing,” he wrote his son Pierre. “More people attended the Picasso exhibition than the Van Gogh one.”[3] Picasso, though, made no response to the museum. To gauge his reaction, Barr had to rely on Callery, who was seeing him often. “He is in good form and very happy about the exhibition,” she wrote, five days after the opening.[4]
But Picasso had not come to Paris to get news of the show. He had come to continue the unwelcome work he had abandoned when the war started. He and Sabartés needed to secure all the art he had left behind. It was difficult and time-consuming, since there were huge numbers of paintings, drawings, and other pieces of art scattered among his different studios and living spaces—the apartment and studio on rue La Boétie, his rue des Grands-Augustins studio, the big house at Boisgeloup, and the farmhouse in Le Tremblay. Rising early each day, he and Sabartés were racing around the city, stashing everything they could gather in a series of safe rooms he had rented in the Banque de France under the Boulevard des Italiens.[5]
One day, Callery came with him to the bank vaults to watch him work. “He had a great corridor to himself, with rooms leading off of it,” she later wrote. “And in those rooms the paintings and drawings were stacked in their familiar order.”[6] Sometimes, he pulled out something to show her, a work that, for one reason or another, he had never exhibited. Now, it would be even further out of sight. It was hard not to taste the irony: While in New York his paintings were being celebrated by tens of thousands of people, in Paris, Picasso was hiding them deep underground.
As France awaited the Nazi invasion, uncertainty hung over Paris. No one was ready to give up on the city, yet few thought that it was safe, either. Kahnweiler kept his gallery open and tried to do whatever business he could. But he was also determined to avoid a repeat of 1914, and he sent 154 paintings from his stock to his brother-in-law near Limoges.[7] Later that fall, Fernand Léger came back after three months on his farm in Normandy, intent on working in Paris again. But as he told Rosenberg, the atmosphere was so subdued it seemed like a “provincial town.” Amid his art gathering, Picasso found time for a regular afternoon pause at the Flore. “The days passed as always,” Sabartés wrote. But the tension was pervasive.[8]
Few felt it more than Rosenberg. He had watched the progressive stages of Nazism in Germany, the growing persecutions, the dramatic purging of modern art. He had also seen what happened to Kahnweiler in the previous war, and as a man of Jewish background who dealt in modern art, he was acutely aware of the dangers he faced. Already during the summer, amid his negotiations with Alfred and Marga, he had begun preparing for a German attack, hiding paintings in vaults and in the country, and sending as many of them as he could abroad. Not only did he have nearly all of his best Picassos now in the United States; he had also sent other works, like Three Musicians, to exhibitions in South America and even Australia. Having spent the early fall near Tours, he now moved his family again, to a big house in Floirac, a small town across the river from Bordeaux that was well positioned for a possible escape.
And yet the dealer was as committed as anyone to staying in France and continuing his business. After all, none of his artists were going anywhere, and they needed him. In October, he arranged new one-year “war” contracts with Matisse and Braque, confirming his right of first refusal on their work and the prices he would pay.[9] Then there was Margot, who couldn’t imagine living anywhere else but France, and Alexandre, who was eighteen and would likely soon be drafted. Under the circumstances, leaving seemed impossible.
