Picasso's War, page 5
For now, though, they had run out of time. With Strindberg having discovered their hotel, John was in a hurry to get out of Paris, and they set out for the south of France in a big 75-horsepower Mercedes, which they had borrowed from Ryan, along with his German driver, Ewald Brenner. “We shall throw her off the scent by means of the car,” John said.[4]
It was not a trip that afforded much time for reflection. There were hurried stops in cathedral towns along the way, and they argued—and often disagreed—about Baudelaire, Wagner, Oscar Wilde, and the fifteenth-century frescoes of Avignon. (Quinn was awed by the murals’ fresh and luminous colors—“paint looks like tar compared to them,” he told John—but John dismissed any relevance to contemporary art.) Unused to such intense company, John was quickly worn out, while Quinn was frustrated at how little they managed to see. To keep John happy, Quinn found himself plying him with “champagne for lunch, champagne for dinner, liqueurs of all kinds, vermouth, absinthe, and the devil knows what all.” When they reached Provence, John took Quinn to his usual haunts, including, at one point, a whorehouse, which Quinn found squalid and repulsive: “No kick,” he wrote.[5]
The woozy tour was not helped by Brenner’s driving. One night, while descending a mountain road in the Cévennes, they encountered a dense fog, and Quinn lost his nerve. Convinced they were heading off a cliff, he opened the door and flung himself out of the car. They found him lying in a field beside the road, dazed but miraculously unscathed. Still, the drive haunted him for the remainder of the trip. In a letter to Joseph Conrad that fall, he recounted the recurring nightmares he had about “stone houses, fences, trees, hay stacks, stone walls, stone piles, dirt walls, chasms and precipices advancing towards us out of the fog.” For all his interest in the new art, the landscapes that had inspired several generations of modern painters had instead been reduced to instruments of terror.[6]
At this point, Quinn might have been justified in giving up on French modernism altogether. Picasso’s drawings had left him nonplussed. Paris had been illusory. They had nearly been held at gunpoint by a possessed Austrian woman; then he had nearly broken his neck trying to experience the great landscapes of the south in the company of a Welsh reprobate. He had gotten no closer to Picasso and Matisse than hearing rumors about the Steins, and he had so little time at the Paris galleries that he returned to New York with nothing more than a few Manet drawings.
* * *
—
If France had largely refused to give up its secrets, however, the misadventure with John made Quinn all the more intent on unlocking them. Disoriented and unnerved, he withdrew to his hectic law work, and for several months thought little about modern art at all. But even the Impressionists he had seen at Vollard’s had sharpened his senses and he was now naggingly aware of the insistent provincialism of much of the American art world. “Some of these American artists paint as though Constable and Turner and Monet and Manet and Renoir had never exhibited a picture,” he told John Sloan. Going back to the Metropolitan, he was struck by the almost total absence of good nineteenth-century paintings, let alone more recent work. “Aside from its old things,” he wrote Augustus John, the museum “would be negligible among the galleries of the world.”[7] Meanwhile, the Metropolitan was the richest museum in the world, yet apart from its Old Masters, he thought there were probably not more than twenty paintings out of its hundreds that were “worth wall space.”[8]
The spring after his French excursion, Quinn fell in with a group of young New York artists who were intent on shaking things up. Led by Walt Kuhn and Arthur B. Davies, they had founded a new society, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, with the aim of promoting the work of American artists who defied the academic teachings of the conservative National Academy of Design. But Davies and Kuhn also shared Quinn’s impatience to, as he had put it, “bring the post-Impressionists over here.” At first, Davies wanted to exhibit some European work alongside the new American art that would be their primary focus. But with Quinn’s encouragement, they soon began to conceive of a far more daring project.[9] It was the unlikely beginning of what would become one of the most legendary, if poorly understood, art events of the twentieth century.
In July 1912, Quinn incorporated Davies and Kuhn’s association, which now had the aim of staging a single large-scale show in New York the following winter. That same month, Quinn received a letter from Cologne, Germany, from an art dealer friend who had just seen an extraordinary exhibition. Staged by a group of German enthusiasts called the Sonderbund, the show aimed to be a comprehensive survey of international modern art and was filled with post-Impressionist, Cubist, and Futurist paintings, including eighteen Picassos and more than one hundred Van Goghs. If the art in it could somehow be brought to the United States, the dealer told Quinn, it would “give America the exhibition of its life.” Quinn, fascinated, must have informed Davies, who soon after obtained the Sonderbund catalog from Birnbaum. “I wish we could have a show like this,” Davies told Kuhn. There would still be American art, but now their primary objective was to provide a sweeping view of the new art movements that were conquering Europe. Importantly, they were also determined to sell the works in the show directly to the public, to demonstrate that there was a market for modern art in New York.[10]
From the start, it was a quixotic venture: The association had no building and no budget. It also didn’t have any art. They would have to raise the funds they needed, acquire the paintings from Europe somehow, and rent an exhibition space large enough for the huge presentation they envisioned. A still greater obstacle was that Davies and Kuhn knew almost nothing about the new art they wanted to show. Until now, Davies had primarily been known for his pastel landscapes, some of which were strewn with unicorns; Kuhn was so unfamiliar with the “freak cubists,” as he called them, that by his own admission, he was starting from zero. But they were determined to pull it off, and Quinn encouraged them to aim as high as possible.
Then, just as these plans were getting under way, Ryan dispatched Quinn back to Paris on an urgent business matter. The circumstances were hardly more favorable than during his earlier trip. Pinned down with work, he had almost no time for art; he later told Conrad that he found the city “hateful to me and everything in it.”[11] As soon as he could steal a few hours, however, he headed straight for Vollard’s. Though the secretive dealer liked to hold back from clients, Quinn, on this second visit, won his respect. By the time he left, Vollard had agreed to relinquish what would soon become three of the most important post-Impressionist paintings to cross the Atlantic: a dramatic Cézanne painting of his wife, Hortense; one of Gauguin’s final Tahiti scenes, painted a year before the artist’s death; and a searing Van Gogh self-portrait, also from his final years. For Davies and Kuhn, these paintings would serve as crucial anchors for their show.
Shortly after Quinn returned from Paris, Kuhn set out on his own last-minute art-gathering trip to Europe, where he was later joined by Davies. With crucial help from friends in Paris, they were improbably successful, managing to borrow more than three hundred works from many leading artists and dealers. Even Kahnweiler, who did not have any major American clients at the time, agreed to contribute a few Braques and Picassos. “All of the big names of the last twenty years and of today are going to be represented,” Quinn reported to Jack Yeats, the artist brother of W. B. Yeats. “They will have a room for the Futurists. Also a room for the Cubists.”[12] Meanwhile, they gathered hundreds of works by American artists to show alongside the European art. As one of the few Americans with a large contemporary art collection of any kind, Quinn himself became the show’s biggest lender, furnishing dozens of his English and American paintings, along with the Cézanne, the Van Gogh, and the Gauguin that he had just acquired from Vollard.
But lining up the art was not the only challenge Davies and Kuhn faced. The association had planned the show to open in February 1913, which gave them only weeks after their return from Europe to stir up public interest. Drawing on his experience bringing Yeats and other literary figures to the United States, Quinn knew they would need to prepare the ground as much as possible. “Our show must be talked about all over the U.S. before the doors open,” he told Kuhn. While Kuhn began writing artists and newspapers around the country, Quinn himself began to court members of the political and cultural elite. “I am going to have the mayor of the town, the governor of the state, and United States Senator Root at the opening,” he told friends.[13]
In fact, Quinn remained skeptical of some of the newest work that Kuhn and Davies were planning to introduce. It was less than eighteen months since his first, flailing excursion to Paris—a trip during which he had met no artists, seen little art, and acquired almost nothing—and even his second trip had failed to expose him to the contemporary art scene. “Personally I don’t understand or sympathize with cubism,” he confided to one British friend during the final preparations for the show. But he also recognized that challenging prevailing tastes, including his own, was precisely the point. “American art needs the shock that the work of some of these men will give,” he argued, in an interview for one art magazine. “Our art has been too long vegetating.”[14]
Not least for Quinn was the opportunity to take the battle to the conservative forces that he believed were holding back American culture. By bringing the new and strange art directly to the public, he felt, they could outflank the Old Master dealers and the men of the Metropolitan, who seemed to resist modern art of any kind. And as he discussed the show’s publicity campaign with Kuhn and Davies, he told them they “should not apologize or explain but should attack.”[15]
5
A GLIMPSE OF THE LADY
In February 1913, the young journalist and critic Jeanne Robert Foster visited the Manhattan headquarters of the “Fighting 69th,” an Irish American infantry regiment that had served with distinction in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. The 69th Regiment Armory, the brigade’s sprawling home, had been known, since its completion seven years earlier, as one of the city’s more unusual buildings. Styled as an oversized Beaux-Arts mansion with a two-story mansard roof, the Armory took up an entire block of Lexington Avenue. It also featured a soaring, vaulted main hall that was two hundred feet long and nearly 130 feet tall.
The cavernous expanse had been designed as a staging ground for military exercises. But as one of New York’s largest indoor spaces, it had quickly found other uses as well. Shortly after the building was finished, the hall hosted an indoor lawn tennis championship; a few years later, a little-known Swede shattered the world indoor marathon record on a small track installed around its perimeter. Now, however, the giant enclosure had been procured for a far more controversial purpose: displaying the more than thirteen hundred works of modern art that Kuhn and Davies had spent the fall and winter gathering. Fueled by the extraordinary publicity effort that Quinn had urged on, the show had already attracted wall-to-wall attention in the press, and Foster decided she needed to see it.
In fact, despite its seemingly anodyne title, the International Exhibition of Modern Art had struck New York like cannon fire. Although there were many more paintings by American artists, the core of the show was the three hundred artworks that Kuhn and Davies had gathered in Europe—including dozens of avant-garde paintings and sculptures that were wildly unlike anything previously seen by the public. At a time when the circulation of images was highly limited and color reproductions of modern painting virtually nonexistent, the unveiling of this new art, right in the center of Manhattan, carried a raw force that is almost impossible to imagine a century hence. Thousands of people were lining up to get in; there were traffic jams on Lexington Avenue from morning till night. Already a lively debate had erupted over whether the works were to be taken as sheer entertainment or were a dangerous threat to civilization itself. (Royal Cortissoz, one of the city’s most prominent critics and a staunch conservative, worried about these “foolish terrorists” who were trying to “turn the world upside down.”) Perhaps no work captured the show’s radicalism with more visceral power than Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, a kinetic Cubist work that observers likened to an explosion in a shingle factory or a “dynamited suit of Japanese armor.” Even as it attracted huge crowds, the painting, like others in the show, left visitors baffled and critics riled.[1]
Foster wasn’t baffled or riled, however; she was fascinated. Though she had seen very little of the new work, she had read about some of the new schools of art, and understood that the artists in the show were “art revolutionists” who were trying to capture some of the forces that were giving shape to the new century. She also understood that the show’s organizers were laying out a bold challenge to the American public. In visiting the Armory, she hoped to write a lengthy essay in The American Review of Reviews, the literary and current-affairs magazine where she worked. Amid all the smoke and fury, it was time, she felt, for a more considered appraisal.
Along with the art, she was curious about the prominent lawyer who had been one of the show’s driving forces and who had formally introduced it to the public. She had never met Quinn, but she had followed his outspoken statements in the press and his rousing, if somewhat over-the-top, opening night speech, in which, before an audience of four thousand guests, he described the show as “the most complete art exhibition that has been held in the world during the last quarter century.” She had also been warned about Quinn’s reputation with women. As a talented critic who was well known for her beauty, Foster was definitely Quinn material, and her friends thought she might be his next target. As she entered the exhibition, she wondered whether she would run into him.[2]
Inside the packed drill hall, Foster was confronted with a big opening gallery that led into a series of partitioned octagonal spaces, each one crammed with paintings. The hall’s two side flanks had been divided into six galleries each; these appeared to be filled mostly with American art. It was the central corridor, however, that drew visitors to the main attraction. In it was a series of larger spaces that loosely traced the history of European modernism from the nineteenth century to the present. At the start, there was a sampling of historical paintings and Impressionist works, from Goya and Delacroix to Renoir and Monet. Beyond was a gallery filled with works by Cézanne and Van Gogh, including the works recently acquired by Quinn, and another gallery featuring a broad assortment of French modernists. Foster was immediately taken by Cézanne, whom she found a towering presence in the show. But she was even more interested in the work of his contemporary followers.
The climax of the show was the galleries at the far end of the hall, where the newest French art had been installed. At first, Foster was as bewildered as anyone else by the paintings and sculptures that filled these spaces. They represented a disorienting array of movements, including post-Impressionists, Pointillists, Fauvists, Futurists, and Cubists; many of the works seemed violent or even offensive in the way they defied nature. A “runaway horse has not four legs but twenty,” she wrote. A nocturnal scene was painted with “orange stars bobbing in a green sky.” A supposed human figure resembled the “pleasing patterns of a rug.”
But Foster was a quick study, and her impressions began to shift even as she stood in the galleries. Confronted by Francis Picabia’s iridescent Cubist work La Danse à la source, she initially saw “a meaningless jumble of pink and red geometrical forms.” After gazing hard at it for a few minutes, though, she found it suddenly resolving “into two dancing figures audaciously composed of blocks of color.” Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s Mlle Pogany, a breathtakingly simplified head in smooth white marble, had been ridiculed by one critic as a “hard-boiled egg balanced on a cube of sugar.” But Foster noted that Margit Pogany, the sculpture’s subject, was herself a dancer, and after examining the different sides of the work, she observed that Brancusi had reduced “the movement of the conventional ballet to its simplest form, an ascending spiral.” And then there was the notorious Nude Descending a Staircase. At first blush, she wrote, Duchamp’s disorienting painting appeared to be an almost indecipherable “arrangement in browns.” Yet if one understood the work as a sequence of six partly superimposed images of a figure in movement, she observed, it was not so difficult to “catch a glimpse of the lady.”[3]
As she lingered in the show’s Cubist gallery, she finally spotted John Quinn. She needn’t have worried about attracting his attention. He was deep in conversation with a large, distinguished-looking man with a mustache, clearly an old friend. With them were several of the artists who had organized the exhibition. As they peered at one startling picture after another, she kept hearing Quinn’s companion exclaim “Bully!” in an unmistakable high-pitched twang. It was former president Theodore Roosevelt. The scene left a singular impression on Foster. For whatever else might be said about him, there was nothing usual about Quinn. Here was a man who surrounded himself with young artist renegades and embraced the most challenging new work, but who also seemed to enjoy improbable proximity to the established seats of power. It was a combination that she was unusually well equipped to appreciate.[4]
