Picasso's War

Picasso's War Plot Summary

Introduction

In the spring of 1911, a successful Wall Street lawyer named John Quinn climbed the stairs of a nondescript building on Fifth Avenue to view an exhibition that would change his life. The paintings he encountered—strange, fragmented figures by an artist named Pablo Picasso—left him deeply unsettled yet inexplicably fascinated. Quinn's bewildered reaction mirrored America's broader cultural isolation at the time. While European cities embraced radical new artistic movements, the United States remained stubbornly provincial in its tastes, with museums and collectors focusing almost exclusively on Old Masters and academic painting. What followed was a decades-long struggle to bring modern art to American shores—a cultural battle fought across two continents and through two world wars. This remarkable story reveals how a small group of determined individuals transformed America's artistic landscape forever. Through their persistence, paintings once derided as "insane" and "degenerate" eventually found homes in America's greatest museums. The narrative illuminates the complex relationship between art and politics, showing how modern art became entangled with the great ideological conflicts of the 20th century. For anyone interested in how cultural tastes evolve, how artistic movements gain acceptance, or how America developed its distinctive voice in the art world, this tale offers invaluable insights into the forces that shape our cultural institutions.

Chapter 1: The Outsider's Vision: Quinn's Early Struggle (1911-1913)

In the early 1910s, America stood at a cultural crossroads. While the nation had emerged as an industrial and economic powerhouse, its artistic sensibilities remained deeply conservative. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, like most American museums, focused almost exclusively on Old Masters and academic painting. Modern European art movements like Cubism, Fauvism, and Expressionism were virtually unknown to American audiences. The country imposed punitive import taxes on contemporary foreign art, effectively creating a barrier between American viewers and the revolutionary work being created in Paris. John Quinn, an Irish-American attorney with literary connections and cultural ambitions, became an unlikely champion for modern art. His journey began with tentative steps—a visit to Alfred Stieglitz's tiny 291 Gallery in 1911, where he encountered Picasso's drawings for the first time. Quinn described the experience as "blood-curdling" and "like some awful dream partly forgotten but haunting still." Despite his initial confusion, Quinn was intrigued by these challenging new forms. Unlike most Americans of his era, he was drawn to the unfamiliar and the provocative, often telling friends who questioned his interests, "I like to be a man of my own day and time." The watershed moment came in 1913 with the International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show. Quinn served as the exhibition's legal counsel and became one of its most vocal champions. The show introduced Americans to works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Duchamp, among many others. The public reaction was explosive—newspapers denounced the exhibition as "insane," "immoral," and "degenerate." Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase became the show's most controversial work, described by one critic as "an explosion in a shingle factory." Despite the controversy—or perhaps because of it—the Armory Show marked a turning point in American cultural history. Quinn emerged as modern art's most important American patron, purchasing numerous works from the exhibition. He recognized that the battle for modern art's acceptance in America would be long and difficult, but he was determined to fight it. In the aftermath of the Armory Show, Quinn began systematically collecting works by Picasso and other modernists, convinced that these artists represented the future of art. Quinn's advocacy extended beyond collecting. He successfully lobbied Congress to remove tariffs on imported modern art, arguing that America needed cultural enrichment more than protectionism. This legislative victory in 1913 made it financially feasible for galleries and collectors to bring European modernist works to American shores. Quinn was preparing to wage what he called the "modern art fight"—a struggle not just for aesthetic innovation but for America's place in the cultural vanguard of the twentieth century.

Chapter 2: Eastern Embrace: Russia and Germany's Modernist Fervor

While John Quinn was just beginning to glimpse the radical new directions of modern art, two countries to the east of Paris had already become enthusiastic centers for avant-garde painting. In the years before World War I, Russia and Germany—not the United States or even Great Britain—emerged as the primary markets for the most advanced French art, particularly the work of Picasso and his contemporaries. This eastern embrace of modernism represented a surprising cultural alignment that would later be violently reversed. In Moscow, a new mercantile elite had amassed enormous wealth, and their combination of financial resources and intellectual openness made them unusually receptive to French modernism. Sergei Shchukin, Moscow's leading textile baron, had already acquired a substantial collection of Monets, Van Goghs, and Cézannes when he first encountered Picasso's Cubist paintings. Though initially repelled—"It felt like stuffing pieces of broken glass into my mouth," he told a Russian friend—Shchukin was determined to understand this new art. Soon he was buying an average of ten Picassos a year from Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, the young German dealer who had become Picasso's primary representative. Shchukin's impact on Russian culture was dramatic. He converted his baroque Moscow palace into a house-museum, which he opened to the public on Sundays. By 1914, there were so many Picassos and Matisses that each artist was given his own gallery. These paintings, far more radical than those that had shocked Quinn's friends in London, were soon widely embraced by the Moscow public. A new generation of Russian artists, from Kazimir Malevich to Vladimir Tatlin, found inspiration in Shchukin's collection, launching their own artistic rebellion that would eventually produce Russian Constructivism and Suprematism. Germany, too, proved remarkably receptive to the new art. Unlike Russia, Germany was highly industrialized, with numerous cities, a large educated middle class, and some of the world's most advanced universities. Its public museums had already embraced Van Gogh and other post-Impressionists. By 1913, Kahnweiler was collaborating with German dealers to market his artists throughout Central Europe. His first Picasso show at the Thannhauser Gallery in Munich was so successful that it traveled to Stuttgart, and he soon mounted an even more ambitious exhibition in Berlin called "Picasso and Tribal Sculpture," featuring more than fifty paintings paired with the indigenous artifacts that had influenced them. The irony of this eastern embrace of modernism was profound. The countries that were the leading champions of modern art before World War I would become, two decades later, their most violent antagonists. Under Hitler and Stalin, avant-garde art would be rejected and shunned, and artists once celebrated as apostles of the future would be persecuted and driven into exile. Not a single one of the Picasso collections Kahnweiler helped form in Germany would survive the Nazi period; in Russia, Shchukin's Picassos and Matisses would disappear into government storerooms for decades. If the art world of today looked anything like it did in 1913, the world's greatest Picasso collection—and its premier museum of modern art—would likely be in Moscow or Berlin, not New York. 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. The United States was not yet in the game, but the coming world war would dramatically reshape these cultural alignments.

Chapter 3: War's Disruption: Cubism Amid Global Conflict (1914-1918)

When war erupted in Europe in the summer of 1914, it shattered the cosmopolitan art world that had flourished in the previous decade. The conflict not only scattered artists and dealers but also transformed the very conditions under which modern art could be created, exhibited, and sold. For Picasso and his circle, the war's outbreak marked a devastating rupture in their creative community, separating collaborators and disrupting the delicate network of patronage that had supported their experimental work. Just weeks before hostilities began, Picasso, Georges Braque, and André Derain had been working together in Provence, pursuing their art on their own terms. With Kahnweiler's all-encompassing contracts, none of them had to think about sales or exhibitions—the dealer took care of everything. This arrangement had provided a remarkable level of creative freedom. But as France mobilized for war, Braque and Derain were called to military service, leaving Picasso, as a Spanish citizen, isolated in Paris. "I am always worried thinking about Paris about my house and all my things," Picasso wrote to Gertrude Stein in September 1914. For Kahnweiler, the war proved catastrophic. As a German national living in Paris, he was forced to flee to Switzerland when hostilities broke out. Left behind in his gallery were more than seven hundred paintings, including well over one hundred works each by Braque, Derain, Vlaminck, Gris, and Picasso—essentially the entire story of Cubism and Fauvism told through their leading figures. In December 1914, the French government seized all of Kahnweiler's property as enemy assets. This extraordinary trove of avant-garde art would remain out of circulation for most of the next decade, effectively making an entire school of art disappear during the war years. The conflict also fed on the art it disrupted. In a strange twist, both French and German armies began applying modernist techniques to military camouflage. When Picasso saw a French cannon painted in overlapping splotches of gray and green that resembled analytical Cubism, he exclaimed to Gertrude Stein, "We're the ones who did that!" A French camouflage unit, the Section de Camouflage, was formed with numerous artists, including André Dunoyer de Segonzac, one of Quinn's favorites. Meanwhile, on the German side, the Expressionist Franz Marc painted army tarpaulins with nature-mimicking patterns, applying everything he'd learned "from Monet to Kandinsky" before being killed at Verdun. In the United States, the war created both opportunities and challenges for Quinn's modernist project. With Paris, Moscow, and Berlin "out of business" as far as new art was concerned, New York suddenly emerged as the place where "paintings and sculptures are viewed, discussed and purchased," as Quinn's friend Frederick James Gregg argued in Vanity Fair. Several new galleries opened in Manhattan, showing works by European modernists who were now cut off from their home markets. Quinn himself accelerated his purchases, acquiring important works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and others. Yet the war also intensified American cultural nationalism and xenophobia. When the Metropolitan Museum finally hosted its first show of modern French art in 1921, a group of self-described "citizens and supporters" launched a scathing attack, linking the exhibition to "Bolshevist propaganda" and denouncing the works as "degenerate." Quinn fought back, calling this "Ku Klux art criticism" and challenging the anonymous protesters to "take off their masks." But the controversy revealed how deeply suspicious many Americans remained of European modernism, even as Quinn and his allies worked to establish it in New York.

Chapter 4: Transatlantic Alliance: Quinn and Roché's Collection Strategy

In the aftermath of World War I, John Quinn faced a personal crisis that would transform his approach to collecting. In January 1918, after weeks of ignoring stomach cramps and rectal bleeding, he finally saw a specialist who delivered a dire verdict: a malignant tumor in his lower abdomen. Though he survived the operation, Quinn was given about six years to live. This diagnosis forced him to confront not only his mortality but also the unfinished state of his cultural projects, including his still-scattered collection of modern art. During his convalescence, Quinn met Jeanne Foster, a striking woman in her mid-thirties who had been a model, journalist, and poet. Foster had traveled extensively in Europe, knew French, and shared Quinn's passion for modern literature and art. They quickly formed an intense bond that would last until Quinn's death. "You are not trapped by life. You are free," she told him, recognizing his restless spirit. Foster would become Quinn's closest companion and collaborator, helping him refine his vision for what his collection could become. In September 1919, Quinn made another crucial connection when he invited Henri-Pierre Roché, a tall, red-haired Frenchman, to lunch at his apartment. Roché was a remarkable figure—multilingual, intellectually omnivorous, and seemingly acquainted with every important artist in Paris. It was Roché who had first brought Gertrude and Leo Stein to Picasso's studio in 1905; Roché who had helped Picasso find Braque when he had been wounded at the front. Quinn proposed that Roché become his "informant" in Paris, finding exceptional paintings and sending him photographs and descriptions. What Quinn outlined to Roché was a new, more focused collecting strategy. "I am going to try to limit my purchases, as much as possible, to first-rate examples," Quinn wrote, "...to works of museum rank or what we refer to here as star pieces." Rather than acquiring broadly, as he had done before the war, Quinn now wanted to concentrate on obtaining the very best works by a select group of artists who, in his estimation, were changing history. These included Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Derain, along with sculptors like Constantin Brancusi. Quinn was no longer interested in merely supporting artists or promoting modern art; he was racing against time to build a definitive collection. When Roché returned to Paris, he began sending Quinn detailed reports about available paintings. Their correspondence grew into an extraordinary transatlantic partnership, with Roché serving as Quinn's eyes and ears in the European art world. In July 1921, Quinn finally traveled to Paris with Foster, where Roché arranged meetings with Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Derain, and many others. These personal connections deepened Quinn's understanding of the artists' work and strengthened his resolve to acquire their most important paintings. By 1922, Quinn had achieved an almost magical presence in Paris despite being an ocean away. When he needed an opinion about a Cézanne he was considering, André Derain was glad to oblige. When he required photographs of unseen Picassos, Man Ray crossed Paris to take them. So eager was Brancusi for Quinn's reactions to his latest sculptures that he would study the lawyer's letters line by line. Through Roché, Quinn had established direct relationships with the artists he most admired, often bypassing dealers to acquire works straight from their studios. As one critic observed after visiting Quinn's apartment, "From a most unlikely looking corner were drawn a dozen paintings that simply swept me off my feet."

Chapter 5: Dangerous Networks: Artists, Dealers and Cultural Politics

By the early 1920s, Quinn had established himself as the world's leading collector of avant-garde art, but his position was built on a complex and often precarious network of relationships. At the center of this web was his increasingly complicated connection with Pablo Picasso and the artist's primary dealer, Paul Rosenberg. Unlike Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who had represented Picasso before the war with a quiet, intellectual approach, Rosenberg was a showman who sought to domesticate the avant-garde for wealthy clients. Rosenberg had transformed Picasso's life after the war, setting him up in a chic apartment on rue La Boétie next to his own, and helping him and his Russian ballerina wife, Olga Khokhlova, craft an appropriately upscale lifestyle. The dealer also carefully managed which of Picasso's works to show and sell, often favoring his more accessible neoclassical paintings over his Cubist experiments. For Picasso, who had lost many of his bohemian friends during the war and needed financial security for his new family, Rosenberg's support was crucial, even if it meant living "like a marionette in a glass box." Quinn, however, was interested in the full range of Picasso's work, including his most challenging Cubist paintings. Through Roché, he began to negotiate directly with Picasso, bypassing Rosenberg. In early 1922, when Rosenberg temporarily stopped buying Picasso's paintings, Roché seized the opportunity to arrange a secret deal between Quinn and the artist. "I am going to tell you something most confidential about Picasso and Paul Rosenberg," Roché wrote Quinn, explaining that Picasso was willing to sell some of his most important recent works directly to the American collector. This clandestine arrangement was fraught with risk. Rosenberg's gallery was next door to Picasso's apartment, and the dealer could "walk in at any hour." To document the paintings without alerting Rosenberg, Roché enlisted Man Ray to take photographs in Picasso's studio. Though Quinn ultimately decided not to purchase the specific works Picasso had offered, the episode marked the beginning of a period in which Quinn effectively established first right of refusal with both the artist and his dealer, creating a virtual monopoly over Picasso's work. Quinn's dealings with Rosenberg became even more strained in December 1923, when the dealer visited New York with a large group of Picasso paintings. Despite Quinn's advice to include a representative selection of Picasso's different styles, Rosenberg showed only neoclassical works at the Wildenstein Gallery, hoping they would appeal to wealthy American collectors. The show was a commercial failure, and during a dinner at Quinn's apartment, Rosenberg made the mistake of pressuring Quinn to bring his friends to see the exhibition. Quinn was furious at what he saw as the dealer's presumption, and in a letter to Roché afterward, he unleashed a stream of anti-Semitic invective that revealed the darker side of his character. The incident highlighted the fragility of the network Quinn had built. For all his cosmopolitanism and support of avant-garde art, he was not immune to the prejudices of his time. Like many modernist writers and artists, including T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Quinn could express shockingly intolerant views even as he championed cultural innovation. This contradiction reflected the complex social dynamics of the early twentieth century, when modern art was often seen as a threat to established values and traditional hierarchies.

Chapter 6: Legacy in Peril: From Quinn's Death to MoMA's Birth

On July 28, 1924, just months after acquiring Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy, John Quinn died of liver cancer at the age of fifty-four. His death marked the end of the most ambitious private effort to bring modern art to the United States, but it also set in motion a chain of events that would eventually transform American culture. The fate of Quinn's extraordinary collection—which included definitive works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Seurat, Rousseau, and many others—became an immediate concern for his friends and executors. Quinn had left conflicting instructions about his art. His will ordered that all his paintings and sculptures be liquidated to benefit his sister and her daughter. Yet in a separate document, he had outlined a plan to keep his most important works together, provided that his friend Arthur B. Davies could raise $250,000 to purchase them from the estate. This "possible contingency," as Quinn called it, would have created the nucleus of the modern museum he had long envisioned. But Davies was unable to secure the necessary funds, and after his own sudden death in 1928, the prospect of preserving Quinn's collection intact seemed to vanish. The dispersal of Quinn's paintings became a cultural catastrophe that haunted New York's art world. Most of his Picassos were sold to Paul Rosenberg and returned to Paris; his other post-Impressionist and avant-garde masterpieces were auctioned at the Hôtel Drouot in Paris, where they attracted enormous attention. "The John Quinn Collection, which should be in a state museum, is now up for resale, its magnificent unity destroyed," wrote Janet Flanner in one of her first dispatches for The New Yorker. In early 1927, the remaining eight hundred paintings and sculptures were sold off in a four-day auction in New York, with some Cubist works going for as little as $7.50 apiece. Yet the very public dissolution of Quinn's collection ultimately helped inspire a new generation of modern art advocates. Among those who witnessed the breakup was Alfred Barr, Jr., a brilliant young art historian who had been struggling to study modern art at Harvard and Princeton, where the subject was largely ignored. In January 1926, Barr visited a memorial exhibition of works from Quinn's collection at the Art Center in New York. He was particularly struck by Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy, which made "a profound impression" on him. The show gave Barr a visceral sense of what Quinn had been trying to accomplish—and what had been lost. Three years later, Barr was appointed the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, founded by three New York women who had been deeply affected by the loss of Quinn's collection: Lillie Bliss, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Mary Sullivan. Bliss had supported Quinn's efforts since the Armory Show; Sullivan had followed his avant-garde patronage for years. Both women recognized that the dispersal of Quinn's Seurats, Rousseaus, and Picassos was a stain on the city's cultural reputation. With Rockefeller, they resolved to create the institution that Quinn had envisioned but never lived to see. In his initial plans for the museum, Barr explicitly drew on Quinn's ideas. Like Quinn, he identified the Luxembourg Museum in Paris as a model for a gallery that would both showcase new art and build a permanent collection of exceptional works. He also diagnosed the same crisis that Quinn had faced: the Metropolitan Museum's failure to acquire works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Matisse, or Picasso. "Had he lived another decade," Barr later reflected, "what a wonderful president of the Museum of Modern Art he would have made."

Chapter 7: The Great Migration: Art's Escape from Fascism (1939-1945)

As Europe descended into war in 1939, an unprecedented migration of art and artists began. With Nazi forces advancing across the continent, countless masterpieces of modern art—works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and others—were at risk of confiscation, destruction, or forced sale. Simultaneously, the artists themselves, along with dealers, collectors, and museum directors associated with modern art, faced increasing danger, particularly if they were Jewish or politically opposed to fascism. This crisis precipitated one of the most significant cultural transfers in history: the flight of European modernism to America. The Museum of Modern Art, under Alfred Barr's leadership, played a crucial role in this migration. In 1939, Barr organized a landmark Picasso retrospective that brought together more than 300 works by the artist, many of them borrowed from European collections. When war broke out just months before the exhibition opened, these loans could not be returned to Europe. Instead, with Barr's encouragement, they remained in the United States for the duration of the conflict, touring to museums across the country and introducing Picasso's work to hundreds of thousands of Americans who had never before encountered modern art. The flight of art dealers from Europe further accelerated the transfer of modernist masterpieces to America. Paul Rosenberg, Picasso's primary dealer, escaped from France in June 1940 just days before the Nazi occupation of Paris. Though much of his inventory was seized by the Germans, he had already sent many important works to the United States, including numerous paintings that were part of Barr's Picasso exhibition. Settling in New York, Rosenberg became a central figure in the American art market, helping to establish new values and audiences for the European artists he represented. Artists themselves constituted the most important element of this cultural migration. By 1941, a remarkable constellation of European modernists had taken refuge in the United States, including Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, Max Ernst, André Breton, and Marc Chagall. The Museum of Modern Art, working with various refugee organizations, helped secure visas for many of these artists, with Barr's wife Marga playing a particularly active role in these efforts. The presence of these European masters in New York transformed the city's artistic landscape, creating unprecedented opportunities for exchange between European and American artistic traditions. The impact of this migration extended far beyond the art world. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized in his 1939 radio address dedicating the Museum of Modern Art's new building, the defense of artistic freedom was inseparable from the defense of democracy itself. "The arts cannot thrive except where men are free to be themselves," Roosevelt declared. "The conditions for democracy and for art are one and the same." By providing sanctuary for endangered art and artists, American institutions were not merely preserving cultural treasures; they were taking a stand against totalitarianism. By 1945, as the war in Europe came to an end, the center of the modern art world had effectively shifted from Paris to New York. This transfer, precipitated by political catastrophe in Europe, would have profound and lasting consequences for the development of American art and culture in the postwar period. Young American painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko, who had studied the European modernists intensely during the war years, were poised to launch Abstract Expressionism, America's first internationally significant art movement. The seeds planted by John Quinn a generation earlier had, through the most unexpected circumstances, finally taken root in American soil.

Summary

The story of modern art's journey from European avant-garde circles to mainstream American culture represents one of the most dramatic cultural transformations of the 20th century. At its core, this narrative reveals how artistic revolutions require not only creative genius but also passionate advocates willing to challenge prevailing tastes and institutions. From John Quinn's lonely crusade after the Armory Show to Alfred Barr's systematic campaign at the Museum of Modern Art, the battle for modern art in America was fought by a remarkably small group of determined individuals who recognized the importance of what was at stake long before their contemporaries. This history offers profound insights for understanding cultural change in any era. It demonstrates that aesthetic innovations often face initial resistance precisely because they challenge fundamental assumptions about beauty, meaning, and tradition. It reveals how external threats—in this case, totalitarian assaults on artistic freedom—can transform public perception of controversial cultural movements. Perhaps most importantly, it shows that cultural institutions matter enormously in shaping public taste and preserving creative heritage. The Museum of Modern Art succeeded not just because it collected important works, but because it developed a coherent narrative that made modernism comprehensible to audiences with no prior exposure to its revolutionary ideas. For today's cultural innovators and institutions, this history offers a powerful reminder that persistence, strategic vision, and unwavering commitment to artistic freedom can ultimately transform how societies understand themselves and their creative possibilities.

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Hugh Eakin

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