9

The Grand Illusion

Henry McBride, the New York Sun’s adventurous art critic, was a man of uncommon experience. Having spent his adolescence in a boardinghouse in southern Pennsylvania, he had worked variously as an illustrator for seed catalogs, a teacher of immigrant children on the Lower East Side, and a cattle inspector on transatlantic ships before becoming a newspaper columnist in his midforties. Unlike nearly all his peers, he also knew the contemporary Paris art world. He had been to Matisse’s studio and had at least passing familiarity with many of the artists of Picasso’s generation. And having watched the Armory Show at close hand, he was acutely aware of the peculiar unease that many Americans seemed to feel around modern art.

During the first winter of the war, however, what struck McBride as he wandered around the city was not the familiar resistance to advanced work. To the contrary, it seemed to him that the “wild men” of Paris had suddenly taken over Fifth Avenue. There were the Matisses—three roomfuls—at the erstwhile conservative Montross Gallery. Farther uptown, the Bourgeois Gallery, run by an émigré Frenchman, was showing Van Gogh and Cézanne along with Braque, Derain, and a number of American modernists. At the Washington Square Gallery, though they had managed to get only a single consignment from Kahnweiler, Robert Coady and Michael Brenner were giving the city its first good look at Juan Gris and Diego Rivera. And on East Forty-fourth Street, the new Carroll Galleries, directed by a fashionable young woman named Harriet Bryant, seemed to be surveying the whole course of French modernism from Van Gogh to Picasso.

“Who shall say the return of Cubism is bad for business?” a stunned McBride asked his readers. He had just watched a steady stream of “white whiskered gentlemen and lovely ladies in Persian costumes” filing into the Carroll Galleries’ latest show. This was hardly the crowd that frequented Alfred Stieglitz’s 291. Though Bryant was showing some of the most daring recent paintings and drawings from Paris, she seemed to attract the same Midtown crowd that frequented Delmonico’s, a bastion of the New York establishment on the same street. People left the restaurant with every intention of heading up Fifth Avenue, McBride wrote, but “some invisible force” pulled them into Bryant’s avant-garde gallery instead. “Isn’t that strange?”[1]

By all appearances, the sudden gallery boom was a powerful validation of Quinn’s and his friends’ efforts to bring modern art to New York. In part, it was the war that did it. As Quinn’s friend Frederick James Gregg argued in Vanity Fair, Paris, Moscow, and Berlin had gone “out of business” as far as new art was concerned, leaving New York as the place where “paintings and sculptures are viewed, discussed and purchased.”[2] At the same time a small but growing number of foreign artists, men like Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, had decided to sit out the fighting in the United States, pushing Americans themselves to extraordinary new work. Arthur Davies, the erstwhile landscapist, was absorbing so many new ideas that, according to McBride, he was now putting “post-Impression, cubism, dynamism, and even disintegration…all in one picture.”[3] But the new crop of galleries was also indebted to Quinn’s campaign to repeal the modern art tax, which had overnight eliminated a significant barrier to exhibiting and selling new paintings and sculptures from Europe.

Much harder to account for, though, was the “invisible force” that was shifting public taste and apparently sustaining the scene. After all, Stieglitz had been showing many of the same artists for several years and had rarely made any sales, and the Armory Show, for all the interest it had attracted, was hardly a commercial success. Yet now, apparently, New Yorkers were not only attending numerous shows of the new paintings but actively buying them. Such was the speed of the transformation that Gregg somewhat breathlessly announced that Quinn’s prediction to Congress was already coming true. New York, his Vanity Fair article proclaimed, was now “the world’s new art center.”

In fact, there was another, more straightforward explanation for the boom: the activities of Quinn himself. By now, the lawyer had a growing reputation as the city’s leading promoter of modern art, the man who had backed the Armory Show and almost single-handedly persuaded the U.S. government to change the tax code. Throughout the winter and spring, as New Yorkers marveled at the explosion of modern art exhibitions, the proliferation of new galleries, the foreign artists flocking to the city, and the growing coverage of the new scene by progressive magazines and critics, it was not difficult to find Quinn’s hand in almost every part of it. Just as he had done with the Armory Show, he talked up the shows, got his critic friends to write about them, and subsidized the modernist journals that covered them. When European painters arrived in the United States, it was Quinn who found them jobs, bought them dinner, and if necessary, provided them with funds—or, in Duchamp’s case, a restorative week on the Jersey Shore. (“Duchamp looked thin so I invited him to go down to Spring Lake as my guest,” Quinn explained.[4])

What hardly anyone seemed to realize, though, was that Quinn was also the main driver of the market. When the Montross Gallery staged its big Matisse exhibition, not only did Quinn urge his critic friends to write about it and his professional contacts to go see it, he also took home the two most important paintings in it. It made the show look like a commercial success, despite few other sales. Returning to the same gallery a month later, he single-handedly saved a show of challenging new American art, spending $2,800—an enormous sum for contemporary art at the time—on a whole cache of works by Davies, Kuhn, Charles Prendergast, and Morton Schamberg, among others. Further such large-scale purchases followed throughout the spring: Other people may have attended Montross’s shows, but it was Quinn who bought.

At the Washington Square Gallery, Quinn’s support proved to be a lifeline. Already in the spring of 1914, with the gallery barely open, Quinn had acquired from Coady and Brenner a series of Derain and Picasso prints that had come in the first shipment from Kahnweiler.[5] Soon, he would also buy several Cubist still lifes by Braque, Gris’s mathematically inspired Man in a Café, and a Derain self-portrait.[6] And Quinn was buying more and more from Stieglitz as well, including a pair of Brancusi sculptures that laid the ground for what would soon be the most important avant-garde sculpture collection in the world. Still more intense, though, was his activity at the upscale Carroll Galleries, whose business so intrigued Henry McBride. In February, when the gallery put on a show of the American modernist Maurice Prendergast, Quinn took home sixteen paintings all at once, more or less assuring the show’s success. And in March and April, Quinn bought four Fauvist works by Raoul Dufy, Duchamp’s Chess Players, a work by the Cubist theorist Albert Gleizes, and three Cubist paintings by Jacques Villon, nearly all of them from a single exhibition.[7]

Sometimes, Quinn’s frenzied buying stood in for the market itself. In the middle of 1915, Marius de Zayas, the Stieglitz associate who had organized the 1911 Picasso show, decided to open his own gallery, called the Modern Gallery. Observing the apparent success of the new crop of dealers, he was confident that, unlike 291, his enterprise would be able to “pay its own way” by bringing the best new art to mainstream collectors, or what he called “the purchasing public.” With financial backing, de Zayas was able to mount an impressive series of small shows devoted to Van Gogh, Picasso, Braque, Derain, Brancusi, and Marie Laurencin—the avant-garde painter known for her elegant, elongated figures who was part of Braque and Picasso’s circle before the war—but he was mistaken about the purchasing public. “In the three years of its existence,” he later wrote, “there were only two buyers, Arthur B. Davies, who knew all there was to be known about buying pictures, and John Quinn, who just bought and bought.”[8]

Yet nothing better captured the extraordinary lengths to which Quinn was prepared to go to spur the new trade than the mysterious bulk sale of Picassos from the Carroll Galleries in the spring of 1915. At the time the war started, Picasso’s work had utterly failed to gain traction in the United States. There was Stieglitz’s disastrous 1911 exhibition, with its eighty-one unsold drawings. At the Armory Show two years later, the only Picasso to find a buyer was the small watercolor acquired by Davies. And in the fall of 1914, Stieglitz had shown a new group of works by Picasso and Braque—works he had gotten from the exiled painter Francis Picabia—that produced such dismal results that he had been forced to make embarrassing excuses. (According to McBride, he blamed the total lack of sales on the fact that “all the millionaires have moved uptown.”[9])

In the second week of March, however, Harriet Bryant opened the third and most ambitious of her shows of French modern art. By her gallery’s own account, the show set out to provide “a complete survey of the evolution of Cubism from its beginnings to the present day.”[10] However extravagant the claim, the show was filled with advanced work by artists who were still largely unknown in New York. Starting with a few post-Impressionist paintings by Van Gogh and Gauguin, the show went on to present works by a half dozen leading Cubists, including Roger de La Fresnaye, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Jacques Villon, and others. The centerpiece, though, was an exceptional group of Picassos, spanning from his Blue period to analytical Cubism, all of which were appearing in the country for the first time. McBride, who had tried unsuccessfully to meet Picasso in Paris before the war, was floored. Just consider, he asked in his Sun column, “the gravity of the public exhibition of seven Picassos in New York.”[11]

McBride was not the only one who was impressed. Critics and visitors flocked to the show, which was accompanied by an elegant bound catalog, printed by one of the city’s top printers, with an essay on the seven Picassos by Gregg. (“If anybody is not able to see their intrinsic beauty and power,” he wrote, “so much the worse for him.”[12]) That the gallery had managed to bring over such recent work from Paris during wartime—paintings, not drawings—was all the more surprising. Still, given New York’s previous track record with Cubism, few expected the Picassos would find buyers. Surely, this would be a show to acclimatize the public rather than to generate sales.

But then came the bombshell. Shortly after the opening, the Carroll Galleries announced that five out of the seven Picassos had already been bought by an anonymous collector. Observers of the city’s art scene were tantalized. Finding an American buyer for a single Picasso painting was rare enough; selling a group of them, before they had been seen by critics and the public, was almost unimaginable. Even rival dealers were baffled. After all, there were only a handful of serious collectors of twentieth-century modern art in the entire country—people like Quinn and Davies—and they were well known. Fresh from his own most recent Picasso failure, Stieglitz was determined to solve the mystery. One day in mid-March, he decided to go see Bryant in person.

In both decor and clientele, the Carroll Galleries was as different from Stieglitz’s Spartan 291 rooms as Paul Rosenberg’s Right Bank emporium was from Kahnweiler’s rue Vignon storefront. Occupying an airy former design studio, the Carroll Galleries exuded a sense of refinement and glamour, a seductive Peitho to 291’s fearsome Prometheus. The walls were lined with gray silk, and the two main rooms were spacious, with artworks laid out in an uncrowded display; the whole place seemed to have a sort of studied affluence about it. “The spots of color upon the silvered walls had that indefinable air of being smart, and important and the real thing, even before the spots were examined in detail,” McBride wrote, after one visit to the gallery.[13] In many ways, the look was everything that Stieglitz, in his anticommercial purism, resisted.

Yet Stieglitz could not but have a certain grudging admiration for Bryant, the gallery’s young and enterprising proprietor. Slim, tall, and smartly dressed, she was an early forerunner of the art world power woman—a type that, a century hence, would become a fixture of the international gallery scene. At the time, though, she was virtually one of a kind, the only major female art dealer in New York. And though she had no prior experience in the art world, she also appeared to be remarkably successful. Try as he could, however, Stieglitz was unable to make any headway on the Picasso mystery. Soon after, he sent another associate to make inquiries, but Bryant told both of them that she was under strict orders not to mention the buyer’s name.

What Stieglitz couldn’t pry out of Bryant was what Quinn had privately relayed to his close friend, the critic James Huneker. “I hope you have seen the Picassos,” Quinn wrote to him, a few days after the show opened. “Strictly entre nous, I have bought five of them but that is very very confidential.”[14] At first glance, Quinn’s insistence on anonymity was puzzling. After all, his activities in the modern art world had long been well known, and he had never objected to publicity. Moreover, he had been especially eager to get attention for this show in particular, urging as many of his contacts as possible to go to it, sending out copies of the catalog, praising Gregg’s essay on Picasso, and calling the paintings “the best pictures that have been shown in this city this winter.” Yet apart from Gregg, Huneker, and a few other close friends, he told no one that he had already arranged to buy the five Picassos back in late February, more than two weeks before the show opened.[15]

But Quinn had another motive for secrecy about the Picasso sale. At other galleries, he had rapidly established himself as the city’s dominant player. In this case, however, he was doing far more than that. As his advance purchase made clear, he had prior knowledge of what Bryant was showing. Not only was he accounting for the lion’s share of her gallery’s sales; he was also closely involved in the gallery’s operations. The reason he was able to buy the Picassos so early was that he himself had procured them from Ambroise Vollard in Paris and arranged for them to be in the show. At the Carroll Galleries, Quinn was not just the chief client. Much as he had been at the Armory Show, he was also the gallery’s chief backer.


Quinn’s involvement with Bryant’s enterprise had begun in 1914, a few months after the collapse of his initial plans to establish a permanent exhibition space for modern art on Fifth Avenue. That spring, he had met Bryant, an attractive interior decorator who ran her own design studio in Midtown. Impressed by her poise and her understanding of affluent taste, he decided to help her transform her studio into a new kind of art gallery. Despite her lack of art world experience, the arrangement seemed to offer considerable advantages: Quinn had contacts in Paris and knew many artists; Bryant was at home among uptowners and had a talent for creating stylish and inviting spaces. She could be responsible for the day-to-day management of the gallery, while he supervised the operation from behind the scenes. For additional modern art expertise, he enlisted Walter Pach, a trusted associate who knew Paris and had assisted Kuhn and Davies with the Armory Show. The new venture would not be the museum-like space that Quinn originally envisioned, but it would offer the chance to pitch living art to an entirely new audience.

But then the war started, and almost immediately threatened to derail their plans. Improbably, the Germans had reached the outskirts of Paris within weeks; as British and French casualties quickly reached the tens of thousands, Quinn began hearing from friends in Europe about the unfolding horror. It also put a stark new perspective on the artists Quinn wanted to show, many of whom were now in the fighting. “The war is indeed horrible, tragic, awful beyond words,” he wrote the director of the Contemporary Art Society in London, who was trying to create a fund for painters and sculptors serving in the war. “If later on your suggestion of raising a small fund seems to be practicable, I will do what I can.”[16]

At first, given the circumstances, gathering artworks in Paris seemed out of the question. But staging shows in the United States, Quinn felt, would be another way to support threatened artists, and after the French stopped the German advance at the Marne, he decided it was calm enough to send Pach to Europe. (To reduce the expense of the trip, they shared costs with the Montross Gallery, for which Pach had agreed to select the Matisses.) Still, the wartime mission was risky, and Quinn supplied Pach with $1,100 in gold, as well as a letter of introduction from former U.S. president Teddy Roosevelt.[17] In the event, the journey went smoothly, but with so many galleries shut and most artists at the front, Pach had considerable difficulty getting art. Complaining that Pach’s initial Paris haul amounted to “chicken feed,” Quinn eventually persuaded Vollard to relinquish the Picassos and other paintings, which, together with other sources, provided the makings of Bryant’s three French shows that winter.[18]

Almost immediately, the Carroll Galleries attracted notice—as much for its unusual look as for what it contained. In its first show, the gallery announced that it aimed to put the new art “in surroundings that have none of the deadness of a museum, or the baldness of an ordinary gallery,” but that “suggest life itself and places where people live.”[19] The atmosphere was enhanced by the gallery’s socially adept proprietor, and critics like McBride had taken notice. Though it would be several years before Quinn would meet Paul Rosenberg, his and Bryant’s efforts to domesticate the avant-garde were remarkably similar to what the French dealer had set out to do a year earlier in Paris.

By the time of her third French exhibition, the one with the seven Picassos, Bryant was getting frequent attention from the Times, the Sun, and The Evening Post, as well as from magazines like Vanity Fair and Puck. She also was spending more and more time with Quinn. In February, while they were planning the Cubism show, he took her to a marionette performance in Little Italy; soon after, he invited her on a motoring trip to Rye, New York, together with another lady friend, Belle da Costa Greene, the remarkable librarian and director of J. P. Morgan’s rare book collection. Later, Bryant joined Quinn and a small group of his friends for a getaway on the Jersey Shore. Such was their closeness that spring that at one point he felt it necessary to dispel rumors—however accurate they might be—that they were romantically involved.[20]

In reality, however, the gallery was hardly selling any art. Overwhelmingly, it was Quinn’s purchases, and Quinn’s alone, that accounted for what little commercial success Bryant had. Again and again, when a show reached the end of its run, she found herself saddled with large quantities of artworks; again and again, Quinn would acquire a large portion of them. Even after buying the five Picassos, Quinn came back two months later and bought one of the remaining two in the show, another striking Cubist picture. And at the end of the season, when Bryant was still left with a large inventory of unsold works, Quinn swooped in and bought five André de Segonzacs; five sculptures by Raymond Duchamp-Villon; nine Dufys; a porcelain panel, a ceramic nude, and two paintings by Georges Rouault; and three works by Auguste Chabaud, a Frenchman he put in the lesser rank but nonetheless felt he had to support since he was fighting in the war. (“I know this isn’t the way to buy pictures,” he told Pach.[21])

By late spring, Quinn was accumulating advanced art at a frightening pace. Almost every week, a fresh load of artworks was delivered to his ninth-floor apartment; the paintings accumulated in stacks in his guest bedrooms, the sculptures lined the hallways or cluttered desks and tables. Despite the accelerating pace of his acquisitions from Bryant’s gallery, he did not slow down his purchases elsewhere. While he kept his Carroll Galleries Picassos secret from Stieglitz, he did not hesitate to buy frequently from Stieglitz himself, including, that summer, yet another important Picasso, an earlier Cubist watercolor from the artist’s “African” phase.[22] “I think I have bought more modern art this year than anyone else in America,” he wrote Vollard.[23]

What was perhaps even more striking, though, was the modest resources with which Quinn had achieved this dominance. As a top Wall Street lawyer with an almost legendary capacity for work, he was handsomely compensated, if not at anything close to the multiples that someone in his position would enjoy today. At times, he would receive payments of $10,000 or more for a case, a considerable sum. Yet Quinn could not come close in spending power to a figure like the Philadelphia collector Albert Barnes or the Washington, D.C., patron Duncan Phillips. He had to pay his law partners, and despite his continual earnings, he could often just barely keep up with his general cultural patronage and his art purchases, which usually amounted to no more than a few thousand dollars each. Even in later years, when his earnings grew, he would complain that “Renoir is beyond me in price.”[24] Indeed, in the letter to Vollard boasting of his success, he also informed the dealer that he needed “a month or two” before he could pay the first installment on the six Picassos he had bought that spring for 21,500 francs, or about $3,800. “Collections have been very slow here,” Quinn explained.

If Quinn’s buying spree had come at a bargain, it was also yielding dramatic results. With extraordinary speed—and despite a war and the virtual impossibility of travel—Quinn was beginning to amass a distinguished, if uneven, collection of avant-garde art. Vollard’s Picassos alone were an exceptional catch, including three of the artist’s most important Blue period paintings, as well as a Rose period masterpiece and two important Cubist works. At the same time, Quinn’s own art education was progressing rapidly. If during the Armory Show he had begun to feel an unformed attraction to the bracing abstractions of Picasso and Braque and the dazzling colors of Derain and Matisse, now he was beginning to understand these artists as seeking to lay out important new pathways for art itself. As he explained to one acquaintance, the works on view at the Carroll Galleries were difficult, but they also captured the complexity of an era in which there were no longer any easy, comforting truths. “They are not story-telling pictures, they point no moral, they are not part of the ‘uplift’ and the artists are not interested in any movement outside of painting or sculpture,” he wrote. “But they are alive.”[25]

As the year wore on, however, Quinn began to have nagging doubts that his broader strategy was succeeding. For many of the American artists he supported, he knew that his purchases were often the only thing separating them from destitution. “The advanced men, the courageous, younger, progressive, honest fellows, are not bought at all,” he wrote the expatriate sculptor Jacob Epstein that summer. “Some of them have said that I saved the art season last year.”[26] For the European artists, the brutal truth was that other American collectors were hardly more prepared to spend money on them than they had been before the Armory Show. “As you know, some of the very wealthy men here buy the so-called Old Masters,” Quinn told Vollard. “But it has been very difficult, if not impossible, to sell modern art this year.”[27] For all his effort, Quinn was no longer making the market. He was the market.

The experience of the Carroll Galleries was especially illusory. Almost as rapidly as Bryant captivated New York society, her star seemed to fade. For all of Quinn’s own purchases, she was still unable to pay many of her artists, and the gallery quickly ran into financial trouble. Much of the fascination with the gallery had owed to its elegant spaces, but overhead was enormous and she struggled to keep up the lease. In June, having barely finished her first season, she was forced to vacate the Forty-fourth Street space and seek a smaller and more affordable location downtown.[28] Meanwhile, Quinn was left with the growing headache of placating his artist friends in Europe, who had often received nothing for their contributions to the gallery. It was the beginning of a long and expensive unwinding of his involvement—with Harriet Bryant, and with the modern art trade.


By the late spring of 1915, the war in Europe was beginning to touch the United States as well. A few weeks after the end of the Carroll Galleries’ Cubism show, Quinn met Lady Gregory’s nephew, Hugh Lane, a brilliant young Anglo-Irish art dealer who had sought to bring French modern art to Ireland and who was visiting New York on business. Quinn and Lane were unusually well matched—Lane affectionately called him “my rival”—and during Lane’s two-week stay, they dined with Quinn’s friends, went to auctions together, drove out to Sleepy Hollow with Harriet Bryant, and talked endlessly about art. (Lane was skeptical about Quinn’s Picassos but came around to his Gauguins, as Quinn put it, “after the champagne had some effect.”[29]) The night before Lane’s departure, they dined again, and Quinn urged Lane to prolong his visit and postpone his return: Lane was scheduled to sail on the Lusitania, and Quinn had heard from contacts in Washington that Germany was threatening to torpedo the British liner. They talked it over, and decided such an extreme act was unlikely. Seven days later, Lane drowned with more than eleven hundred fellow passengers when the Lusitania was sunk.[30]

The atrocity rode Quinn hard. He blamed himself for Lane’s death, but he also turned violently against Germany, developing a hatred that would never subside. In later years, he would even refuse to buy German modern art, a rare blind spot in his prescient collecting activities. At the same time, however, the Lusitania disaster drew him more firmly than ever into the French camp. He was furious at the Wilson administration for failing to come to the aid of the French and the British, and he was increasingly conscious of the fact that many of the artists whose works he had been championing were risking their lives at the front. “Of the nine living artists represented here, Picasso is a Spaniard and is not in the war,” Bryant had noted, in the introduction to her Cubism show that spring. “Six of the other eight…are fighting for the land of art.” Several of them had already been injured. “Derain has been wounded and returned to the trenches, and de La Fresnaye has been wounded twice and is either still in the hospital or has returned to the front.” It was uncertain, she added, “whether any or all of these artists” would “survive this war.”[31]

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