12
A few weeks after Roché returned to Paris, a journalist named Georges Martin set out for an appointment in a chic Right Bank neighborhood. He was on assignment for L’Intransigeant, France’s leading conservative paper; it was raining, and a characteristic gray cloud cover hung over the city. Nevertheless, he couldn’t help pausing to admire the très bourgeois feel of the district. Nearby, amid small boutiques and prim apartment houses, was the Latinville patisserie, the place where Proust’s faithful housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, would go late at night to acquire “something with chocolate” for her employer.[1] Farther up the street was the Salle Gaveau, the coveted modern recital hall that had managed to render Louis XVI–style neoclassicism in reinforced concrete. The Lycée Condorcet, the prestigious training ground for the country’s professional elite, was a few minutes away.
Reaching the doorway of a classic six-story Haussmann building, Martin walked into the foyer, where a modern elevator whisked him to an apartment that took up the entire fourth floor.[2] A maid promptly answered the door, informing him that the man he had come to see would appear momentarily. Then she ushered him into a dining room with parquet floors, a round Louis Philippe table, and gauze-curtained windows. A parakeet chirped in a cage on a side table, and the walls were carefully hung with bright colored pictures in ornate gilded frames. The whole ménage struck Martin as almost painfully fashionable: like a Georges Lepape illustration from the pages of Paris Vogue.
But the pictures in those golden rectangles were not decorative scenes of the beautiful life; they were startling Cubist abstractions. After a few minutes, a small, spry man emerged, freshly shaven, a dark forelock sweeping across his forehead. He was wearing silk pajamas. Picasso was about to give his first solo exhibition in Paris since well before the war and Martin had come to talk to him about it.
The artist was thirty-eight, but Martin thought he might pass for a decade younger: a jeune maître. Immediately, he led Martin through a pair of doors into a pair of large adjoining rooms. Here, there were also ample windows and elegant moldings, and each room was endowed with a marble fireplace surmounted by a tall mirror. In absolute contrast to the fastidious order of the dining room, however, a state of utter chaos reigned: They had entered Picasso’s studio. Casually propped on a heap of canvases was a gnarled, desiccated wooden Christ, perhaps from some medieval Spanish church; a group of ancient carved figures, possibly from Senegal or Polynesia, seemed to be communing with a series of strange Cubist sculptures. Dominating the whole mess was a large, curiously formal portrait of a young, very pale woman seated and holding a fan, her hair carefully parted in the middle.
As Martin surveyed the room, he began to ask Picasso about his métier. Picasso offered a brisk and curiously anodyne life story. “Success came little by little,” he said, blandly. “I sold my works to dealers, and now you can find my pictures hanging next to Matisses and Cézannes as far away as Moscow.” Unmentioned were his precarious early years in the filthy bateau-lavoir, when he had eaten meals on credit and rummaged in trash cans to feed his dog. He didn’t talk about his checkered history with exhibitions, his struggles during the war, or the fact that, for much of the past five years, he hadn’t had a dealer at all. Nor did he tell Martin that most of his Cubist paintings had been sequestered by the French government in 1914 and had been seen by no one for years, or that the brief appearance of his Demoiselles d’Avignon, which remained in his personal possession, at a group show during the war had left the public cold. (“He has painted, or rather daubed, five women who are, truth be told, all hacked up,” Le Cri de Paris had written.[3]) To hear Picasso tell it, he’d had a steady upward trajectory among the arbiters of bon goût almost from the moment he arrived in Paris. And now, he continued pleasantly, “an exhibition of my drawings is about to open at a dealer here on rue La Boétie, a neighbor of mine.”[4]
Picasso must have been enjoying his own performance. Gone were the old brown raincoat, loose green sweater, and ill-fitting blue trousers he’d worn during the dark days of the war.[5] Gone was his old circle of radical poets, louche Spaniards, and avant-garde hangers-on; he hadn’t spoken to Gertrude Stein in two years. Even his old Cubist friends had lost touch with him. Do I know this man? Braque wondered aloud after seeing a photograph of Picasso in his new getup.[6] In Picasso’s domestic arrangements, Frika, his beloved German shepherd half-breed, had long since been succeeded by Lotti, a Pyrenean sheepdog. And in place of his quiet, unassuming Eva, he now had an imposing wife, the Russian ballerina Olga Khokhlova—the sitter in the large portrait that Martin couldn’t take his eyes off.
In almost every respect, Picasso’s existence had shifted 180 degrees from before the war. It was a metamorphosis as dramatic for his social identity as the Demoiselles had been for his art. And in no small way, the transformation owed to yet another part of his new life: his new dealer, Paul Rosenberg. It was Rosenberg who had planted Picasso and Olga in the heart of Right Bank society, finding them the apartment on rue La Boétie and then, with studied choreography, reintroducing him to the public. If before the war, Picasso’s world had been sustained by the austere, antibourgeois, publicity-shy Kahnweiler, now it was shaped by the taste-making showman Rosenberg, who lived next door to him.
With remarkable speed, Picasso had become the focal point of Rosenberg’s strategy. Though the opening of his huge gallery, back in the spring of 1914, had been exceedingly ill timed, the dealer had been carefully positioning himself for the reemergence of the Paris art world after the war. Almost as soon as he had completed his own military service, he had begun to prepare for the postwar boom that he was confident would be coming. In 1917, with museums still shuttered but the public starved for culture, he had mounted an improbably resplendent show of classic late-nineteenth-century paintings to raise money for disabled war veterans. Featuring a distinguished group of works by Cézanne, Corot, Manet, Renoir, Van Gogh, and others, the show was attended by some of his own military superiors and did much to raise Rosenberg’s profile. As he reestablished himself, he also began to move more decisively into twentieth-century art. It was amid this activity that he had joined forces with Picasso.
By the end of the war, Picasso enjoyed substantial name recognition in Paris, but much of his most important work remained obscure. He was, as his friend and biographer Pierre Daix later put it, a “celebrated unknown.”[7] During the war, Picasso had gained some help from Rosenberg’s brother, Léonce, who had briefly tried to corner the market in Cubism following Kahnweiler’s exile. But Léonce’s efforts had largely come to nothing, and aside from Picasso’s old circle, which had largely disintegrated, and the handful of connoisseurs who collected him, few in France knew much about the artist’s development since his early Blue and Rose period paintings. He was ripe for reinvention, and Paul Rosenberg, who was a far shrewder judge of the market than his older sibling, seized the opportunity. “We’re going to see a lot more of each other,” he told Picasso.[8]
Picasso was a ready accomplice. The dispersal of his old group, the break with Kahnweiler, his own helplessness in the face of his friends’ sacrifices, and especially the death of Eva had exacted a heavy toll, and he had spent much of the war trying to get his life in order. At first, responding in the only way he knew how, he had plunged into a series of impetuous liaisons that invariably ended badly. Within the course of a year, he had proposed to two different women, both of whom bluntly rejected him for more stable partners. (“Picasso had decided to marry me,” one of them later wrote. “I was not altogether sold on the idea.”[9]) Yet a third, a Martinique native, had abandoned him in a matter of weeks, unable to cope with his gloom.[10] At thirty-five, the man who had once gathered around him all the poets and painters of Montmartre, and a seemingly unending stream of women, was beginning to wonder if he was doomed to solitude.
But then he’d been given an unlikely fresh start in one of the Continent’s last remaining bastions of high-culture frivolity. A few months after Eva’s death, Jean Cocteau, the wealthy and insistent young poet and Parisian dandy, turned up at Picasso’s studio while on leave from the war. Picasso had met Cocteau the previous summer, but this time he came with an extravagant proposal: He was desperately trying to persuade Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes to produce a modernist ballet he had written called Parade, and he hoped to enlist Picasso to design the sets. Catering to Parisian society, the Ballets Russes had little connection to the bohemian circles that Picasso frequented. During the war, it had also suffered financial setbacks—including a disastrous tour of the United States, where it had almost been shut down by the police for alleged indecency. But Diaghilev’s troupe was known all over Europe and it was one of the few going cultural concerns at the time; the commission also would bring Picasso some income. Gradually, Picasso was won over to Cocteau’s idea, and in early 1917, he and Cocteau traveled with the ballet company to Rome to begin working on the production.
For Picasso, the project provided the seeds of a new life. Shortly after he arrived in Rome, he became entranced by the young Ballets Russes dancer Olga Khokhlova, a slender, dark-haired, classically featured woman from St. Petersburg. She had been selected for the troupe by Nijinsky himself some years earlier and seemed to be a rising talent; she also was hard to get. The daughter of a czarist colonel, she seemed to come from a more elevated background than some of the other dancers, and she kept her distance from the men in the company. When Diaghilev learned of Picasso’s interest, he warned him that her parents would never approve. But Picasso was unshakeable. By the time the troupe went down to Naples for a series of performances in late April, Picasso was accompanying Olga on long carriage rides in the shadow of Vesuvius. After a long engagement, they were married in a private ceremony in Paris during the final summer of the war.
The real transformation, however, began with the honeymoon, which he and Olga spent as guests of the Chilean socialite Eugenia Errázuriz in the south of France. An exacting woman with an unusually advanced taste in art and design, Errázuriz had met Picasso shortly before he began making sets for the Ballets Russes. Her help had proven especially crucial in Picasso’s courtship of Olga, who came with expectations that were completely new to him. (“Olga likes tea, caviar, pastries, and so on,” Picasso confided to a Catalan friend. “Me, I like sausage and beans.”[11]) And in the weeks after their marriage, staying at the luxurious Errázuriz villa in Biarritz, Picasso had his first sustained encounters with the social set that would soon dominate his life. Among them were Coco Chanel, the Old Master dealer Georges Wildenstein, and Wildenstein’s neighbor and sometime business partner, Paul Rosenberg.
In Biarritz, Picasso was fascinated to watch Rosenberg, almost dancing with energy, ply Eugenia’s rich friends with modern art. “He’s sold all his Rousseaus,” Picasso reported to Apollinaire.[12] That anyone could do a brisk business with Henri Rousseau, the late self-taught artist whom Picasso adored, in this war-stricken country seemed remarkable. It also was pertinent. With his marriage to Olga, he could no longer rely on handouts from people like Madame Errázuriz and occasional one-off sales; he desperately needed a regular dealer. Soon Picasso was showing Rosenberg and Wildenstein his recent work, which ranged from large Cubist still lifes, to his jazzy and possibly Chanel-inspired Bathers, to a majestic, neoclassical Pierrot. Raising the stakes, he also agreed to paint the dealers’ wives.
For Picasso, the portraits of Madame Wildenstein and Madame Rosenberg were a delicate undertaking. These elegant and very Parisian women were far less adventurous than Errázuriz; if they didn’t like the pictures, it might wreck his chances with the dealers. Sensing that he should err conservatively, he turned Madame Wildenstein into something like Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville; then, in an even more bravura painting, he depicted Madame Rosenberg with her plump young daughter Micheline (“Miche”) on her knee, a work that seemed to draw on everything from the Madonna-and-child tradition of Renaissance painting through to Renoir. The performance was a blatant display of his range and skill, but it worked. Soon after the Madame Rosenberg painting was finished, Rosenberg took it back to Paris, where it created a stir. “Everyone knows that Picasso did a portrait of my wife and daughter,” he wrote him.[13] Picasso had found a new dealer.
—
For Rosenberg, taking on Picasso was by no means an obvious move. The market for his work remained tiny. Upended by war and revolution, many of Kahnweiler’s most important clients were no longer active. Forced into exile by the Bolshevik regime, the onetime avant-garde fanatic Sergei Shchukin took refuge in France, but he was a changed man. Having been stripped of his fortune and briefly imprisoned, he was so embarrassed by his destitution that, according to one story, when he saw Matisse in the street, he crossed to the other side.[14] Moreover, Cubism itself was broadly out of favor in Paris, and there was little consensus on what kinds of modern art were going to succeed with the postwar public. Rosenberg’s own brother, Léonce, had gone nearly bankrupt investing in the paintings of Picasso and his friends during the war. And dealing on the level that Rosenberg preferred, with large-scale gallery shows and continual promotion, was far more expensive than Kahnweiler’s lean operation before the war. It might be several years before Rosenberg’s investment in Picasso would begin to pay for itself, and that was only assuming that he would, in the end, be able to build a market.
Nonetheless, Rosenberg was utterly convinced about Picasso, and, in keeping with his preferred practice, devised an approach that was the exact opposite of Kahnweiler’s. First, unlike Kahnweiler, he did not agree to buy all of Picasso’s output, but only to have first right of refusal on his paintings. Picasso would be handsomely paid for whatever the dealer bought, but it would be up to Rosenberg to decide what to market and sell. At the same time, Rosenberg would center his operation around frequent, event-like shows, for which he insisted on wide latitude over what to show and when. Significantly, while he bought a large number of Picasso’s Cubist paintings soon after they formed their alliance, he decided to devote his debut show instead to drawings and watercolors that the artist had created in a neoclassical style. Here was a radical artist, Rosenberg seemed to be arguing, whose gifts could nevertheless appeal to uninitiated viewers: More challenging work could follow in due course. Sometimes, he gave Picasso more specific instructions about what to paint. During their second winter together, he urged Picasso to produce a whole series of Harlequin paintings, which he felt would be more likely to draw in a wary public.
Even more unusual, though, was Rosenberg’s stage-managing of Picasso’s private life. Not only did the dealer set up Picasso and Olga in a model rue La Boétie apartment adjacent to his own, he also went to great lengths to help the couple craft an appropriately upscale lifestyle in it. Thus, while the dealer kept careful watch over Picasso’s work, Margot Rosenberg schooled Olga in the finer arts of household management and society hosting.[15] In public, the Rosenbergs took the Picassos to the opera and the theater; at home, the Rosenbergs suggested decors and furnishings, counseled the Picassos on where to shop, and attended to other needs. Margot was known to send Picasso pairs of the espadrilles she knew he preferred at the beach; and when Picasso and Olga went to London with the Ballets Russes in 1919, the Rosenbergs took care of their parakeet. (Unfortunately, the dealer proved far less adept at nurturing tropical birds than modern artists, and the creature dropped dead within a few days. “I fear you will accuse me of negligence,” he wrote Picasso, protesting that he had done everything he could to keep it soigné.[16])
By the time that Georges Martin was profiling him in the pages of L’Intransigeant, Picasso had cemented an alliance with Rosenberg that was virtually without parallel in the history of modern art. Ordinarily, Picasso would have bridled against a dealer telling him what to paint and where and how to live. It went against nearly twenty years of defiant bohemianism, and it also was at odds with Picasso’s career-long mistrust of the art market. (Even as he was joining Rosenberg’s gallery in the fall of 1918, he was telling Rosenberg’s brother Léonce that “the dealer is the enemy.”[17]) Yet the war had left Picasso profoundly changed. With his marriage, he desperately needed financial security, but he also was impatient to reassert himself creatively. With Rosenberg’s lucrative support, he could continue to pursue his radical experiments privately, even as he gained a new audience for his paintings in Rosenberg’s gallery. If securing the dealer’s powerful backing meant living a bit like a marionette in a glass box, it was a bargain Picasso was prepared to make.
In turn, Olga had her own reasons for embracing the curated lifestyle that Rosenberg laid out for them. From her conservative upbringing in St. Petersburg, she was far more in tune with upper-middle-class mores than her free-spirited predecessors, Eva Gouel and Fernande Olivier. But she was hardly the grasping minor dancer that Picasso’s biographers have made her out to be. Perhaps as important, as the researcher and archivist Thomas Chaineux has recently shown, was the personal tragedy she was escaping. Her courtship with Picasso had played out against the violence of the Bolshevik Revolution. Along with the wrenching destruction of the Russia of her childhood, the upheaval had left her cut off from her White Russian family, who were now on the wrong side of the war. Though she feared the worst, she was unable, for several years, to make any contact.[18] Marriage itself was a form of consolation, and she welcomed the distractions of Parisian society. Soon both Picasso and Olga had fallen into the Rosenberg orbit.
In fact, Rosenberg’s plans for his new artist went well beyond the salons of rue La Boétie. Like Kahnweiler before him, he had his sights on other countries, though his reading of the international market was almost the opposite of Kanhweiler’s. By the end of the war, Central and Eastern Europe seemed to hold little promise for the modern art trade: Germany was bankrupt and Russia was in the throes of establishing a Communist state. By contrast, Scandinavia and London seemed to have growing markets. And then there was the country that Rosenberg had been watching with interest throughout the war: the United States. As Rosenberg knew well, for several decades, American collectors had been spending unimaginable sums on old European paintings and they were starting to be interested in nineteenth-century modernists. The country also appeared to be obsessed by art. By 1920, the number of American art museums had more than doubled since the start of the century, and nearly every self-respecting city seemed to be building a well-endowed public gallery.[19] Granted, these museums were overwhelmingly historical in emphasis, but Rosenberg saw no reason why Europe’s most important contemporary art couldn’t make its way onto their walls as well.
In the early summer of 1920, Rosenberg began to conjure a large-scale assault on the United States. What he had in mind was characteristically ambitious—and characteristically over the top. He was going to organize a landmark show of Picasso’s work in one of America’s leading cities that would, in a single onslaught, win over the public to the artist and conquer the American market. As he told the artist, the show would include both Cubist and non-Cubist work, and he hinted, grandly, that he would collaborate with an institution such as the Metropolitan Museum in New York or the Art Institute of Chicago. “Think of the retentissement [resounding impact] that it will have,” he said. “In one of the most beautiful museums in the country, next to the Verrocchios and Pollaiuolos and the great chefs d’oeuvres of past eras.” Rosenberg had yet to explore the idea with American partners, and for the time being, it was not much more than an extravagant fancy. But throughout the summer, he kept bringing it up with Picasso, who had gone with Olga to Juan-les-Pins in the south of France. “I hope you’ve been getting a good rest,” Rosenberg wrote in mid-July, “because I need a large number of canvases for the big show I am planning in the United States.” He added, with his usual hyperbole, “I am now placing an order for 100—deliverable this fall!” In another letter, a few weeks later, he pleaded for more works, telling him, “Don’t forget the American show!” And by late August, he was anxious that Picasso hadn’t returned to Paris. “Haven’t yet had enough of the pines [of Juan-les-Pins]?” he wrote. “Don’t forget that the walls of all the museums of America are empty and avid to show Picassos.”[20]
Reading Rosenberg’s letters at the modest, somewhat overgrown house he had rented in the quiet beach town in Antibes, Picasso did not think much of this grandiose project. Olga had just learned that she was pregnant, and they were enjoying a blissful escape from the social pressures of rue La Boétie. Amid frequent swims in the sea, Picasso had been taking lots of photographs and playing with new approaches, such as his almost Surrealist depiction of giant figures at a beach with shrunken heads. The notion of huge numbers of his paintings filling some stately museum on another continent could only provoke amusement. After all, he had yet to be given a museum show in Europe itself, and what few attempts had been made to show his work in America, even on a small scale, had fallen flat. Whatever the twitchy dealer was planning, it could wait. For much of the holiday, Picasso’s output mainly consisted of some racy drawings of Nessus, the wild centaur from Greek mythology, assaulting the naked wife of Heracles.[21]
In fact, Rosenberg’s American plan was almost ludicrously far-fetched. He had not bothered to assess whether there was interest in such an exhibition, and he seems to have been wholly ignorant of the conservative forces that continued to hold sway at the Metropolitan and the Art Institute. Yet for all his naïveté, his determination to bring Picasso to the United States was real and would shape his efforts for years to come. Already, he had set up a partnership with Wildenstein, the Old Master dealer, to promote Picasso’s work internationally. Wildenstein was not really interested in avant-garde art, and for all practical purposes, it was Rosenberg who handled Picasso. But Wildenstein could offer something else: a branch gallery in New York. In theory, then, Wildenstein could provide Rosenberg the foothold he needed to begin promoting Picasso’s work in the United States, if no museum were ready. First, though, Rosenberg would need to find a few Americans who supported his ideas. It was around this time that he received a letter from Henri-Pierre Roché, who had sometimes worked with him as an art agent, about an unusual friend of Roché’s in New York. The man was wary of art dealers, Roché wrote, but he already had a large number of avant-garde paintings and was gradually assembling a premier collection. “I will bring him to you if he comes to Paris,” Roché wrote. He added, “His name is John Quinn.”[22]