10

Cubists at War

By the fall of 1914, the breakup of Picasso’s old circle was devastatingly complete. Not only were most of his fellow painters now in the army, but many of those who were not, like Francis Picabia, had fled the country. In all the time that Picasso had been in France, he had never experienced such a rupture. When he had painted the Demoiselles, he had alienated his closest friends; now, there was no one even to alienate. Adding to the sense of isolation was his immigrant status, which brought anxieties of its own. Though he had lived and worked in Paris for ten years, he remained a Spanish citizen, and as a man of military age who was not fighting for France, he was now regarded with suspicion, a person who lacked a legitimate place in the national order. Notably, Juan Gris, a fellow Spaniard who was stuck in a different part of the south, was threatened with expulsion.[1]

Above all, though, was the collapse of the unique arrangement that had sustained Picasso’s life in art. Day after day, while he and Eva lingered in Avignon and watched French troops preparing for war, he expected to hear from Kahnweiler, but no news came. For years, the dealer had subsidized his and Braque’s ever deeper excursion into Cubism when hardly a collector would go near their work. And Picasso had come to depend on his letters, his daily visits, his continual purchases, and even, at times, his efficient management of Picasso’s messy personal affairs. Two years earlier, when Picasso broke with Fernande and, telling no one but Braque and Kahnweiler, abruptly ran away with Eva to the Pyrenees, it was the dealer who moved his things out of Fernande’s apartment, while Braque rescued Frika, Picasso’s beloved spaniel-shepherd mixed breed, and had her shipped to Céret, where they were staying.[2] But now Kahnweiler was abroad somewhere, apparently cut off by war, and he owed Picasso a large sum of money. All at once, Picasso’s single source of security was gone.

Meanwhile, Eva’s health was deteriorating again. She had long suffered from what she vaguely described as angine, or bronchial inflammation. But now it appeared that the operation she had had earlier in the year, for what was more correctly called cancer, had been unsuccessful.[3] By October, Picasso was increasingly unnerved and they began to contemplate going back to Paris for treatment. “We saw a doctor here but not knowing him we do not feel altogether confident,” he wrote Gertrude Stein. Finally, in mid-November, they returned, and found the city utterly transformed. As Eva had been warned, it was “like a village, nobody in the streets after eight p.m.”[4]

The art world was especially dark. During the opening weeks of the war, German troops had advanced so rapidly on Paris that French forces commandeered taxi drivers to drive soldiers to the front. On the night of September 1, with the capital under threat, French officials also took the unprecedented step of evacuating the Louvre, giving curators a few hours to load 770 of the most important paintings and sculptures, including the Mona Lisa and Poussin’s The Rape of the Sabine Women, into special train cars bound for Toulouse, a designated safe haven in the south. For the works left behind, the government sandbagged all the windows, and later, because of the threat of chemical warfare, distributed gas masks to the staff. The museum would not fully reopen for five years.[5] The day after the Louvre evacuation, the French government itself had left the city and set up temporary headquarters in Bordeaux. For many Parisians, the flight of the nation’s leaders and its treasures was a heavy blow to morale, but it also showed how much the country’s art was implicated in the war. Less than three weeks later, the German army shelled and largely destroyed the thirteenth-century Reims Cathedral, in what quickly became an infamous symbol of cultural destruction.

Along with Paris’s museums, the city’s art galleries had been shuttered, and, like their artists, dealers of military age were mobilized. Just months after he had staked his career on his huge new gallery, Paul Rosenberg was posted to French military headquarters; his brother Léonce, who had already become an important Cubist patron, joined the flying corps. Following the Louvre’s lead, many dealers also sent their inventories out of Paris for safekeeping. Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which represented Matisse and other modern artists, sent fifty-four crates of paintings to Bordeaux for storage.[6] Vollard, while taking advantage of the chance to sell Picassos to Quinn in New York, ultimately decided it was prudent to store much of his art in the Loire Valley.

But what about Kahnweiler? In Paris, Picasso found the rue Vignon storefront locked up like the other galleries. Yet something else was not right. The dealer had never come back, and at the Banque Française, where Kahnweiler did his banking, Picasso learned that the gallery’s account was empty. In fact, as he soon discovered, unlike the other dealers’ inventories, Kahnweiler’s had never left Paris, including the most recent batch of paintings Picasso had given him at the start of the summer, for which he had not been paid. If he couldn’t get the money he was owed, Picasso was determined to get his paintings back. But though they were close at hand, these works were completely inaccessible—to Picasso or anyone else.

Caught in Rome when hostilities broke out, Kahnweiler initially thought he could ride out the war. Finding himself simultaneously exiled from France and Germany, he had prolonged his stay in Italy, moving his family to cheaper accommodations in Siena, where they spent the fall. It was a delicate situation. Cut off from his artists in France and his clients in Germany and Eastern Europe, he had very little money. And as a German draft dodger, he risked prosecution if his activities became known to the German authorities. Even with his own relatives in Germany he felt it necessary to communicate via third parties. Still, he assumed his treasured Paris stock was safe. The gallery, at this point, contained the sum total of his efforts, hundreds upon hundreds of avant-garde paintings by the select group of artists he had boldly staked his career on. But he was not particularly concerned about bombs, and as long as he kept up with the rent, he figured, everything would be fine. As he had told Michael Brenner, whatever difficulties he faced personally during the war, the paintings would be there waiting for him.

It was a disastrous miscalculation. Along with other innovations such as machine guns and poison gas, the Great War proved to be a watershed in the treatment of private property—including modern art. For more than half a century, international treaties and Western legal doctrines had endorsed the principle that private businesses were sacrosanct, that the personal assets of foreign nationals were inviolable in war as much as in peace. As one legal scholar put it, among civilized countries, the practice of seizing private property during conflict was considered “as obsolete…as the enslavement of the enemy’s women and children.”[7] In 1914, however, Germany had more financial interests abroad than any other country, and Allied governments viewed its global economic might as a central part of its threat. Barely a week into the war, Britain passed the first of a series of laws aimed at confiscating enemy-owned assets. And at the end of September, the French government followed with its own decree, specifically targeting German businesses and property in France. In the fall of 1917, the United States would join in too, with the passage of the Trading with the Enemy Act, legislation that was shaped in part by John Quinn. By the end of the war, the law would be used to seize nearly half a billion dollars of German- and Austrian-owned assets.[8]

Since Kahnweiler was a German national, everything he owned—his gallery, bank accounts, personal property, and paintings—was now fair game. Even so, it took the French government some time to track down German assets in Paris, and Kahnweiler might still have arranged with friends to rescue his paintings. But he didn’t like the idea of sneaking around the authorities, and he sat tight. “I behaved stupidly, out of respect for the law,” he said.[9] Finally in December—months after he turned down Brenner’s offer to move his inventory to New York—the French authorities seized his rue Vignon property and all of its contents.[10] No matter how tenuous the link between Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist still lifes and Germany’s military-industrial complex, every last artwork in Kahnweiler’s storerooms was now in the possession of the French state. And by the summer of 1914, that amounted to a staggering quantity of art: 135 Braques, 132 Picassos, 111 Derains, and 215 Vlamincks, along with dozens of Juan Grises and Fernand Légers, sculptures by Manolo, and paintings by the Dutch French artist Kees van Dongen. In fact, these paintings were of comparatively little economic value, since the market for avant-garde art—and particularly Cubist art—remained tiny, but in hindsight it was an astonishing haul. Had he been able to hold on to these works, Kahnweiler’s strategy would have gone down as one of the greatest art wagers in history. By the end of his long life, this prewar stock would be worth more than a billion dollars and many of the paintings would be in museums around the world. “Had it not been for the war,” Fernande Olivier later wrote, “he would have become the most important dealer in Paris and extremely rich too.”[11]

At the time, though, it was hard for Kahnweiler to see how much was riding on the seizure. For seven years, he had been buying up the entire output of his artists and storing most of it, based on little more than his own conviction that what they were doing would one day be highly valued. This trove contained the stories of Cubism and Fauvism and, in a sense, the foundations of twentieth-century art. Now the core production of the leaders of the Paris avant-garde, during the crucial years in which they had changed history, was out of circulation and would remain so for most of the next decade. Not even in World War II was an entire school of art made to disappear in this way.

Caught up in the fighting, most of Kahnweiler’s artists were hardly aware of what had happened to his gallery. But Picasso, at loose ends in Paris, was in a rage. He couldn’t get his paintings back, and, with the market effectively moribund, he also couldn’t sell any new work. Blaming everything on Kahnweiler, he sought help from a French lawyer to try to get his paintings out of sequestration. He got nowhere. A few weeks after Picasso’s return to Paris, Kahnweiler had moved his family from Italy to neutral Switzerland, where, with the help of a friend in Bern, he planned to stay for the duration of the war. Even now, Kahnweiler continued to hope he could reclaim his paintings and reconstitute his group of artists when the war ended. But he had no money to pay Picasso, and in the first months of the war, he had already managed to turn his most important artist against him.


Amid these troubles with Kahnweiler, Picasso also watched the darkening war. In Paris, there were wounded soldiers in the streets and frequent air raids; during the opening months alone, some three hundred thousand Frenchmen had been killed. “I don’t ask for anything other than for this war to end and you and all our friends to return in good health,” Picasso wrote Guillaume Apollinaire, who had joined an artillery regiment, at the end of December.[12] But the war didn’t end, and soon Picasso was reduced to serving as a courier of dismal news among his dispersed cohort. “Derain…should be leaving soon for the front,” he wrote Apollinaire in April, who was already in the trenches. “The painter Doucet”—an artist Picasso had met in Avignon just weeks before the war—“has been killed.”[13] Later, when Apollinaire received a shrapnel wound, Picasso did a moving charcoal drawing of him wearing his Croix de Guerre, his head wrapped in bandages.

No one concerned him more than Braque, who had embraced the war with a fierce patriotism. Trained as a machine gunner, he had quickly distinguished himself, and by the spring of 1915, he was leading a platoon near the Belgian border. In May, however, his men were caught in a firefight, and a piece of German shrapnel went clean through his helmet and into his skull. Knocked out from the sheer force of the projectile, he collapsed in the no-man’s-land between the two sides. So certain were his men that he had been killed that they informed the military command.[14] Then, a full twenty-four hours later, a group of stretcher-bearers stumbled upon him, unconscious but still breathing. No one seemed to know whether he would survive.

“Braque is wounded. That’s all I know,” Picasso told Henri-Pierre Roché, his well-connected friend, who was working at the military high command in Paris. He begged Roché to try to find out what happened. “You know my friendship for Braque,” he wrote.[15] As Picasso would soon learn, Braque had been temporarily blinded by the attack and holes had to be drilled in his skull to relieve the pressure. After he was finally transferred to a Paris hospital, his wife, Marcelle, asked Picasso to come with her to see him: She was too terrified to go alone. In the end, Braque was okay, but for nearly a year, he would be unable to pick up a brush, let alone paint.

Picasso was not the only one following the morbid progress of artists at war. In New York, even as he was buying contemporary paintings in quantity, John Quinn was acutely aware that the country from which most of them had come was being torn apart. “I could read scarcely anything else or think of anything else,” he told one acquaintance, a few months into the conflict.[16] From his Irish friend Maud Gonne, who had been volunteering in an overwhelmed French field hospital, he was receiving grisly reports of “poor mangled, wounded creatures” who were being patched up only so they could be returned to the front. “It is race suicide,” she wrote him. “Every kilometer of advance means the loss of 30,000 to the attacking army and about half that number to the defenders.” He also knew that many of the dead and wounded belonged to the same generation of writers and artists whose work he found so electrifying. By May, Gonne was writing to him that “all the young art and intellect of France is being killed in the trenches.”[17]

The war left Quinn deeply conflicted. He admired the valor of the French and loathed President Wilson for his refusal to join the Allied cause, even after the sinking of the Lusitania. Yet he also believed it was a murderous stalemate that was likely to continue for years, and hated the idea that so many young men, including those whose work he had championed, were being sacrificed in battle. “It would be a damned monstrous idea,” Quinn wrote to Gonne, “if all creators of beauty…were to turn themselves into soldiers.”[18] Already in the spring of 1915, amid his intense season of art buying in New York, he had begun to view his efforts as part of the war effort, and he began sending messages of support, and sometimes money, to artists who were in the fighting.

In early June, the avant-garde sculptor and platoon leader Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was huddled in a putrid trench near Vimy Ridge, a few kilometers from where Braque had been hit three weeks earlier. Just twenty-three years old, he had already been twice promoted and decorated for bravery for his daring raids on the German line. After days of intense fighting, however, the Germans had brought in mechanized artillery, and he was losing men by the hour. “It is a gruesome place all strewn with dead,” Gaudier-Brzeska wrote to his friend Ezra Pound, in a brief letter. As German machine guns crackled around him, he stood up from time to time to lob one of his dwindling supply of grenades. Addled by days of incessant close-range combat, he was worried that his senses were dulling and that he might be making himself an easy target. But he had something else on his mind, too: the maverick New York lawyer who had been interested in the direct-carved sculptures he had left behind in London. “Have you succeeded with Quinn?” he asked. It was among the last words Gaudier-Brzeska wrote. Two days later, while leading another charge on the German line, he was shot in the head and died instantly.[19]


Even as men like Braque and Gaudier-Brzeska were becoming casualties, the war was feeding on their art. One cold evening during the first winter of the conflict, Picasso and Eva were walking with Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas down the Boulevard Raspail in Paris when a French military truck drove by, pulling a large cannon. As they watched it rumble past, Picasso was astonished by the cannon’s appearance: It had been painted in overlapping splotches of grays and greens in what looked like a crude pastiche of analytical Cubism. “We’re the ones who did that!” he exclaimed.[20]

He wasn’t entirely wrong. At the beginning of the war, a group of artists in the French army had begun experimenting with using modernist techniques to disguise artillery. By the summer of 1915, the effort had turned into the world’s first camouflage brigade, the Section de Camouflage, which was given the job of disguising French military hardware. An artist himself, the unit’s commanding officer believed that the innovations of Cubism were ideally suited to the task because, as he put it, “Cubists don’t paint things to look the way they are.”[21] (For his part, Picasso concluded that earth tones were not very effective, and that the army should have mimicked his more colorful art. “Even when painted gray, artillery and cannons are visible to airplanes because they retain their shape,” he wrote Apollinaire at the front. “Instead, they should be painted very bright colors, bits of red, yellow, green, blue, white, like a harlequin.”[22])

Quinn was as intrigued by the new camouflage as Picasso. In the months after Gaudier-Brzeska’s death, he began corresponding with André Dunoyer de Segonzac, another artist at the front whose paintings had been shown at the Carroll Galleries. They quickly became friends, with Segonzac sending Quinn drawings of his experiences at the front, and Quinn replying with his usual meandering disquisitions on the international situation. (Quinn’s letters were popular with Segonzac’s platoon, the artist later reported, because he gave a far more unalloyed view of the war than they got from the French papers.[23]) Then, in late 1915, Segonzac wrote that he had been assigned to the Section de Camouflage. Quinn was fascinated to learn about the unit, telling Segonzac that he was glad that his art was being made “useful,” though the idea of a brigade full of artists made him fear even more for their safety.[24]

The military potential of modern art was not lost on the Germans either. Almost at the same moment Segonzac was learning to disguise French guns, the German Expressionist Franz Marc was holed up in a hayloft near the Western front painting army tarpaulins with nature-mimicking patterns; as he wrote his wife, he was applying everything he’d learned “from Monet to Kandinsky” so that German armaments would remain unrecognizable from two thousand meters away.[25] A few weeks later, Marc was killed at Verdun. For his own deployment, the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee was assigned to a military airfield near Munich, where he painted lozenge patterns on German biplanes so they would blend in with the sky.[26] Today, it is hard to imagine Picasso-inspired cannons firing at Klee-painted biplanes, but seemingly no aspect of contemporary European culture was spared the reach of a war that had upended civilization: Even as the French government was locking up Kahnweiler’s Cubist paintings as enemy assets, it was applying Cubist ideas to its artillery and turning actual Cubists into platoon leaders.


Back in Paris, Picasso spent much of 1915 contending with an unfolding personal tragedy. Following a second operation at the start of the year, Eva’s health had continued to decline. “Eva has been in the hospital for nearly a month…and I’ve been very worried,” he wrote Apollinaire in February.[27] By late fall, she lay dying, uncomplaining as always, in a nursing home near the Bois de Boulogne. At many points in the long arc of his life, Picasso’s self-absorption could render him maddeningly aloof, or even callous. Not with Eva. Throughout her decline, he sought the best medical advice he could find; as her illness entered its final stage, he crossed Paris on the Métro every morning to be with her. He sat with her, and sketched her on her deathbed, a haunting, disturbed geometric portrait from which all signs of animation seem to have been extinguished.[28] Then she was gone. “My poor Eva is dead,” he told Stein.[29]

As the Battle of Verdun got under way, the artist entered one of the darkest periods of his life. He had never wanted for company and was usually the center of it. Yet at the Café Rotonde that winter, he would show up in the evening in a worn-out brown raincoat, take a table by himself in a back room, and watch people come and go, saying nothing.[30] Only eighteen months earlier, he and Eva had been with Braque and Derain and their wives in the blithe world of Avignon. Now, his friends were at war, his dealer was gone, his lover was dead. He found he could no longer work and live in the studio he had shared with Eva, and soon he abandoned Montparnasse entirely for a house in the suburbs. One acquaintance, after visiting him, thought he was going to “dump Cubism” altogether.[31]


The visitor was wrong about Cubism, but Picasso’s world was changing. What Picasso did not know, and what he would not learn until after the war, was that he already had acquired an important new patron on the other side of the Atlantic. A year after a record season of buying in New York—a year after he had bought his first group of Picassos from Vollard—Quinn’s thinking about modern art had begun to shift in important ways. By now, he had bought a huge number of paintings of varying quality by American and European artists. “Too many,” he told the critic James Huneker. He had poured money into the city’s art galleries, funded modernist journals, sent money to France, written letters to artists in the trenches. He was running up debts and concerned about his expenses. “It has nearly busted me,” he said.

Now he was also beginning to wonder if he was casting his net too broadly. Many of his purchases, it seemed to him, had done far more to “help artists along” than to further the cause of great art. He had, it was true, supported the work of some of the most daring new Americans. The pioneering abstractionist John Marin, he conceded, was “one of the most intellectual painters we have.” But when he stood back, it was unclear what it added up to; there was a lack of rigor in the choices. He had an urge to narrow, to concentrate on the far more select group of painters and sculptors who were doing something dramatically new. Among them were several of the artists whom Jeanne Foster had singled out in her Armory Show essay, but also men like Gaudier-Brzeska, whose work Quinn had been pursuing with even greater intensity ever since Pound had written him about his tragic death on Vimy Ridge. These were the artists who ultimately mattered, whose work, he felt, held more than flickering interest. As he told Huneker, “Picasso and Matisse will be remembered.”[32]

Yet for all Quinn’s efforts, these artists had made little headway in the United States. Quinn had been almost the only one to buy Matisses at Montross, and the only one to buy Picassos from the Carroll Galleries. Even in Europe, during his abbreviated life, Gaudier-Brzeska had sold hardly a single sculpture. As for the Cubists that Harriet Bryant had tried to introduce to New Yorkers, their most important work had been confiscated by the French government, and many of them were themselves in the trenches. Helpless to stop the violence, and frustrated by the faltering progress of his “propaganda work” in New York, Quinn began to conceive of a different project—one that was geared less toward promoting art in the present than preserving its best examples for the future.

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