Picasso's War, page 43
The dealer also couldn’t help but see the absurdity of the situation. While he waited in endless visa lines in Lisbon, halfway around the world, a huge mass of people were lining up to see his Picassos—along with Guernica and the other paintings from Europe—at the opening of the Picasso show in San Francisco. His paintings were now touring around the United States, having already attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Boston. For the first time in his career, after years of trying, the works of the artist whom he had backed for more than twenty years were reaching a huge American public. Yet he himself was in Portuguese limbo, reduced at times to taking handouts from a British refugee relief agency.[26] He would need a new strategy.
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At the Museum of Modern Art, the effects of the fall of France were felt almost immediately. After a decade of nearly constant transatlantic activity, Alfred Barr was known in Europe as one of the main conduits of modern art in the United States. In the summer of 1940, he began receiving requests from dozens of art world refugees asking him to assist them in getting U.S. visas. It was a difficult and costly task, involving not only extensive documentation but also some kind of personal sponsorship to show that the applicant could be gainfully employed. Alfred, consumed by the museum as always, had no time to deal with these requests, and he turned over the work to Marga. Eventually, Marga was able to help a number of artists get to the United States, including Yves Tanguy, André Masson, Piet Mondrian, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Ernst, and Marc Chagall. At the same time, though, Alfred had decided from the outset that they would have to strictly limit whom they would try to rescue. As Marga noted, “Only artists, not critics, scholars, or dealers.”[27]
While Marga was launching the museum’s refugee effort in New York, Rosenberg was shifting strategy in Lisbon. Alarmed by his cold reception at the consulate, he realized that he would need to show that his expertise in modern art transcended the realm of the international art trade. In effect, he needed to demonstrate that he was a person of exceptional value to American culture—that he could make unique contributions to the American art world and that it was therefore in the national interest of the United States to allow him to immigrate. It was a difficult argument to make, since his own activity in the United States had been largely commercial. As a result of the Picasso tour, however, which had already gone to five different museums and counting, he now had a distinguished roster of museum directors who were, during this same season, benefiting enormously from his loans.
Quickly, Rosenberg cabled as many museum directors as he could about his predicament. He asked if they would be willing to write to the consul general in Lisbon on his behalf. In Lisbon, the telegrams began arriving almost immediately. Walter Heil of the De Young Museum in San Francisco referred to the dealer’s “unmatched reputation” in the field and invited him to give a series of lectures on French art in the fall, which he said would draw “immense interest.” The president of the St. Louis Museum, which had hosted the Picasso show that spring, invited Rosenberg to come to St. Louis. Henry McIlhenny of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who had just bought a big Picasso still life from Rosenberg that he had seen in the show in New York, wrote that the dealer’s presence in America would be “of inestimable value for American museums.” In his cable, McIlhenny asked the consul how he might assist in getting “visas for him and his family immediately.” From Chicago, Daniel Catton Rich, Alfred’s co-sponsor of the Picasso show, had already invited Rosenberg to come lecture at the Art Institute the following winter. He wrote that the dealer’s admission to the United States would be “excellent for the art of this country.”[28]
To these voices was added, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Barr’s old mentor Paul Sachs, who had known Rosenberg for many years. Sachs telegraphed that he was hoping to bring Rosenberg to Harvard to speak to his museum class. Finally came Barr’s own cable from New York, in many ways the most impressive. Addressing the consul general himself, he wrote, “DELIGHTED PAUL ROSENBERG, THE EMINENT FRENCH CONNOISSEUR AND DEALER OF MODERN ART COME TO THIS COUNTRY IN ORDER TO BE ADVISOR TO OUR MUSEUM.—ALFRED BARR DIRECTOR MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK.”
Barr was effectively calling him an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art. Despite his vow to limit his European rescue efforts to artists; despite his decade-long struggle with the big Paris dealers and his concerns about involving them in the museum’s affairs; despite years of tensions with Rosenberg himself, tensions that had, as recently as the spring of 1939, nearly derailed the Picasso show—despite all of this, Barr was intervening decisively to get Rosenberg out of Europe.
The cables had a dramatic effect. When Rosenberg returned to the consulate a few days later, he was no longer a mere art dealer who had done business in the United States. He was now an “eminent French connoisseur” whose expertise was in demand from museums across the country as well as from Harvard University. His application still needed to pass some final vetting, but the consul general indicated that an answer would be forthcoming. Two days later, he awarded visas to the dealer and his extended family. Rosenberg was stunned—by the generous and immediate help he had received from his American colleagues, and by the consul’s response to it. After nearly twenty years of trying to bring Americans around to Picasso’s work, he had finally done it—without being there himself. In a final, jubilant letter to Fowles, he looked forward to his arrival in New York and to the task of creating, as he called it, “a great art center in the States.”[29]
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The Rosenbergs arrived in New York harbor on September 20, 1940. The crossing had not been particularly calm. They had left Portugal during the height of the Blitz, on one of the few American liners that was still plying the Lisbon–New York route, and the war at sea put even neutral shipping at some risk. The dealer was also leaving a great deal behind: His gallery and house in Paris. His artists Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. And the hundreds of paintings he had stored in vaults, in Paris, Tours, and Libourne.
In the end, his precautions would prove far too little. His Paris inventory would be ransacked; later, German agents working for Hermann Goering would seize the 162 paintings he had stored in Libourne, as well as the ones that Braque had stored adjacent to his. (In their dark exactitude, while Nazi bureaucrats designated the art belonging to “the Jew Paul Rosenberg” for sale or trade, they ultimately released Braque’s paintings because he was “an Aryan.”[30]) And in the spring of 1941, Nazi officials went further, transforming Rosenberg’s gallery into the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, a Gestapo-financed organization whose sole purpose was the dissemination of anti-Semitic propaganda. Around the same time, the Paris police began their first roundups of Jews. Rosenberg’s own French citizenship would be revoked.
Yet as important for Rosenberg were the paintings that he had already gotten out. Awaiting him in the United States were not only the dozens of prime Picassos that he and Alfred Barr had astutely sent to New York the previous summer, but also a series of prominent museums that were clamoring to show them and a large new American audience that was eagerly absorbing them. Not least was the fact that the Picasso show had turned Rosenberg himself into one of the more sought-after figures in the American art world.
While Rosenberg was still in Portugal, Henry McIlhenny, the young Philadelphia curator, was one of the first to pick up on the dealer’s feat. After months of waiting, while the Picasso tour continued, McIlhenny was impatient to get the big, challenging 1931 still life, Pitcher and Bowl of Fruit, that he had bought from Rosenberg after seeing it in the Museum of Modern Art show. “I am terribly keen to have it,” he wrote one of Alfred’s assistants. Then he added: “Rosenberg has been in Portugal, but is, I hear, coming to this country. The Picasso show certainly has helped him out.”[31]
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Somehow the war had saved the exhibition, and the exhibition had saved Rosenberg. Transformed into a national tour by the disintegration of Europe, the show not only fulfilled, in spectacular fashion, Barr’s longstanding ambition to bring the full force of Picasso’s art to the United States. It also finally brought to America the man who had built and shaped his international reputation since World War I. With Paris’s most emblematic painter captivating audiences from Boston to the upper Midwest, and its most influential dealer now in New York, it was hard not to sense that a tectonic shift was under way. Rosenberg would soon be joined by many other members of the European art world. Two months after his arrival, Fernand Léger made it to the United States; and in early January, Justin Thannhauser, the dealer who had introduced Picasso to Germany and lent important works to the Museum of Modern Art, also gained entry.
By the following summer, with the help of the Barrs and others, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and a number of other artists would also have escaped. Meanwhile, the Picasso show itself would continue its tour, now going, in a new season, to Cincinnati, Cleveland, New Orleans, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh. In many ways, the unending Picasso show seemed to provide a backdrop to the new émigré avant-garde scene that was taking root alongside it.
Among those who never did cross the ocean was Picasso himself. While his paintings traveled from city to city around the United States, the fate of the man who made them remained a mystery. For much of the war, the artist’s existence in Vichy France remained largely unknown, even to Alfred Barr. (He had ultimately gone back to Nazi-occupied Paris, where he defiantly continued his wartime existence.) Yet Picasso’s absence was curiously beside the point. Already his work, helped now by Rosenberg in New York, was gaining a new market in the United States, and from now on, Americans would be his most enthusiastic audience—and his most avid buyers.
It was a quarter century late, and it took two World Wars to make it happen, but the prediction that Quinn confidently made in 1913 had finally come true. From now on, the story of modern art— the collectors who acquired it, the scholars who studied it, the museums that showed it, and the ordinary people who waited in long lines to see it—would be written in America.
Epilogue
In February 1945, Frank Kleinholz, the host of the weekly radio program Art in New York, decided to interview the veteran art critic Elizabeth McCausland. In her columns for the Springfield Republican, McCausland had long been one of the most astute observers of contemporary art in the United States. She also had a deep interest in artists’ engagement in politics, and in the great ideological battles of the time. On his show, Kleinholz wanted to ask her about one artist in particular. Over the past few years, the United States had been fixated on an aging painter in Nazi-occupied Paris. The artist did not speak English and had never set foot in this country. His art was often challenging and difficult. And until American forces reached the Champs-Élysées in the summer of 1944, almost nothing was known about his fate during the previous four years—or even whether he was still painting. And yet, since the war began, the artist had acquired a peculiarly central place in American culture.
Despite his remoteness and mystery, Kleinholz noted, Pablo Picasso had become a household name, and even more unexpectedly, a potent symbol of American values. Defiantly staying in Paris during the darkest days of Vichy, he was regarded as a hero of the anti-Fascist resistance, a man whom American soldiers were dying to meet. At the same time, having aroused suspicion for years, his exuberantly modern work was suddenly being embraced by hundreds of thousands of people across the country, from the traditional art centers of the Northeast to cities in the upper Midwest, from college towns in the Deep South to farm communities in the Central Valley.
When Kleinholz asked McCausland to account for this curious phenomenon, she began to talk about the influence of a single institution in New York. “The past fifteen years have seen a tremendous change in aesthetic values,” she said, “just because of the education, propaganda, call it what you will, carried on by the Museum of Modern Art.”
“But what does this have to do with Picasso?” Kleinholz asked.
“Everything,” she said.[1]
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By the end of the war, Picasso: Forty Years of His Art had become one of the longest-running, and most talked-about, modern art shows in history. Interest in the show had grown steadily throughout the first winter of its run. In New York, the show drew fifteen thousand visitors a week during its first month, a record that surpassed even that of the Van Gogh exhibit four years earlier. At the Art Institute of Chicago, people came from all over the Midwest to see it. “The Picasso exhibit in Chicago is great fun,” a writer for The Nebraska State Journal wrote after making the trek. “It’s amazing. It’s overwhelming even when taken in two jumps.”[2] In conservative Boston, the show alternately fascinated and flummoxed viewers, with the Boston Globe critic conceding that everything else in the Museum of Fine Arts looked “rather tame and drab” afterward; during three and a half weeks in St. Louis, nearly fifty thousand people squeezed into the City Art Museum to see Les Demoiselles, Girl before a Mirror, and Guernica.[3] Then it reached the San Francisco Museum of Art, where interest was so intense that some people had to be turned away. In early August, on the final day of the show’s run there, more than a thousand people sat down on the floor of the galleries and refused to leave, in what may have been the country’s first protest for modern art. The museum was forced to stay open long after its ten o’clock closing time.[4]
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By the fall of 1940, museums across the country were aggressively competing for the show, and a second, more crowded season began. New Orleans was so intent on getting Picasso: Forty Years of His Art that it formed a Picasso Exhibition Committee backed by all the main arts groups—museum, art school, art club, and college—to raise the necessary funds to sponsor it.[5] After reserving the show for four weeks in early 1941, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts spent months preparing viewers for the artist it called “the storm-center of discussion on two continents,” noting that “over 307,000 people in eight American cities” had already seen these formidable paintings.[6]
In the summer of 1941, the show returned to the Museum of Modern Art, according to the Times, “in response to hundreds of requests from teachers and students…as well as from New Yorkers who were unable to visit the exhibition during its first run.” Then it was back on the road again. By the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the show had traveled to eleven cities; when the Allies began their invasion of Italy in 1943, the number had doubled. Among the stops in these later iterations of the show were not only such major urban centers as Kansas City and Portland but also smaller cities like Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Durham, North Carolina.[7]
Not to leave out more far-flung regions of the country, Barr and his staff at the museum sent Picasso’s La Coiffure, a decidedly demure portrait of two women and a young child from 1906, on a solo tour of its own to more than a dozen smaller venues, including a women’s college in upstate New York and a historical society in Stockton, California, a town that was primarily known as the birthplace of the modern tractor. “I believe more persons brought notebooks and carefully studied the [Picasso] than any other exhibition we have ever held,” the director of the San Joaquin Pioneer Historical Museum in Stockton reported to one of Barr’s colleagues in New York.[8]
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Finally, in early 1944—more than four years after the New York debut of Picasso: Forty Years of His Art—the Museum of Modern Art arranged to send several dozen Picassos to Mexico City in an armored Pullman car, for the launch of a new modern art society backed by a group of leading Mexican art patrons. Though the paintings were held up in Laredo, Texas, for several weeks while they awaited border clearance, the show was a wild success, and the organizers begged New York to extend the loans. “It’s difficult to describe the strong reaction the show has produced in Mexico,” one of the organizers wrote. “The work of Pablo Picasso has served as a kind of healthy bomb in a place that was dull and complacent.”[9]
But it was the fate of the paintings themselves that perhaps best captured the show’s most durable legacy. Of all the Picassos that crossed the ocean back in 1939, many of them never returned to Europe. Some of the Paris loans, like Pitcher and Bowl of Fruit, acquired by McIlhenny, and Girl with Dark Hair, bought by Museum of Modern Art trustee Edgar Kaufmann, were purchased right off the walls of the show. (“Will you kindly send us the prices of the works…which are for sale,” a curator at the Chicago Art Institute had written Barr, in response to demand there.) Others found permanent homes in museums and private collections across the United States in the years after the tour finally ended. Picasso himself, though he remained in Paris, did not reclaim the paintings he had lent the museum until the 1950s. And as Franco’s dictatorship became increasingly entrenched in Spain, Guernica became one of the longest “war loans” ever—becoming a cornerstone of the museum’s permanent galleries until it finally went back to Spain in the early 1980s.
After the show, the Modern’s own collection of premier Picassos, from its dramatic start in the late thirties, now began to grow at an ever accelerating pace. In 1945 came Ma Jolie; four years later, with Mrs. Guggenheim’s checkbook, the museum finally managed to snare Rosenberg’s Three Musicians. Later still came several more Quinn pictures, by now hardly controversial. Having for years struggled to get by without a permanent collection at all, the museum amassed so many Picassos that in the early 1950s one trustee estimated that 20 percent of its wall space was devoted to the artist.[10] In 1968, despite everything else that was happening that year, Life magazine devoted a special double issue to Picasso and the huge shadow he cast over American culture. To its seven million readers, the magazine wrote, “The revolution he generated, sweeping far beyond artist studios, has helped shape the geometries of cities, concepts and techniques of movies and TV, the graphic idioms of advertisements, the homes we live in and the clothes we wear.”[11] Once the Picasso juggernaut had finally started, it could not be stopped.
