13

In Picasso’s Garden

Roché was sitting down to lunch with one of his former mistresses when the telephone rang; he was at her home, but the call was for him. It was his mother. “Mr. Quinn is in Paris,” she said. He wanted Roché to meet him at 2 p.m.

Roché held the receiver in startled silence. For nearly two years, he had been corresponding with Quinn, and Quinn had shown no interest in traveling to Europe. Just a few weeks earlier, Roché had urged, in one of his letters, that he come to France to meet his artist friends, but the letter had gone unanswered.[1] Now, on an exceptionally hot Tuesday morning in July 1921, he had simply turned up. Rapidly finishing his meal, Roché excused himself and rushed out.[2]

For Roché, finding art for Quinn had become something of a vocation. In Paris, it had given him a pretext for rekindling old friendships and cultivating new ones. It was also an education in taste, training him to identify the exceptional works that might appeal to his demanding patron. As he had earlier told Quinn, he felt like a dog scaring up “some big birds” for Quinn to shoot or not, as pleased him.[3] Nearly as important, though, was the question of money. For all his worldliness, Roché, at forty-two, continued to live with his mother, and the work for Quinn was finally bringing him closer to taking control of his baroque personal life.

Since his return to Europe, Roché’s existence had revolved around two women in particular: Germaine Bonnard (“Mno”), a longtime French companion with whom he had a largely untroubled open relationship; and the stormy and conflicted Helen Hessel (“Luk”), the German journalist with whom he was madly in love. A strong blonde, Helen was the wife of one of Roché’s closest friends, the writer and translator Franz Hessel, and he had been spending months at a stretch with the Hessels and their young children in a town near Munich. (Their triangular affair would provide the material for Roché’s late-career novel Jules et Jim and the François Truffaut film based on it.) Roché dreamt of having a child of his own with Helen but feared that his own finances were too precarious for it. With his work for Quinn, however, he had new hope. “Quinn is buying everything,” Roché wrote in his diary the previous autumn, after helping him acquire several of Picasso’s most important recent paintings. “I am finally earning money. I will have the ‘right to be a father.’ ”[4]

At the moment of Quinn’s arrival, in fact, Roché was on the cusp of setting in motion his grand plan. Helen had agreed to divorce Franz that summer, and Franz had told Roché to go ahead and have a child with Helen if they felt they were “in the right.” Roché had gained the approval of his mother and—with some difficulty—even sworn himself to celibacy with Germaine and his other mistresses. As soon as the divorce went through, he planned to go to Germany to be with Helen. He had even converted a large part of his French savings into German marks. Fueled by Quinn’s Picasso habit, Roché was going to settle down. In order to do that, however, he needed to be available for Quinn at a moment’s notice. For the next six weeks, he would do almost nothing else.

Shortly after the phone call from his mother, Roché found his American patron at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery. He was looking at Matisses in the company of a striking woman he introduced as Mrs. Foster. Roché was immediately intrigued—“Good and gentle (Will they marry?)” he mused in his diary—but Quinn was all business: “Activity, galleries, paintings,” Roché wrote.[5] It was Quinn’s first trip to Europe in nearly a decade, and he counted on meeting as many artists and writers as possible. Foster, in her own playful, gracious way, was also formidable. She knew Paris well, was knowledgeable about the theater scene, which she followed in French, and had already been complaining to Quinn about what she called the “stupid made-to-order Bohemianism of Montmartre.”[6] For Roché, it was the beginning of some of the most intense weeks of his life.

Over the next few days, the three of them visited the studios of Derain, Dufy, Segonzac, Duchamp. They met Roché’s friend Marie Laurencin, whose paintings Quinn had been buying for several years. They dined with the composer-eccentric Erik Satie; shared cold grog with the art critic and anarchist Félix Fénéon; and examined late Cézannes with Ambroise Vollard. One morning, taking a rattling taxi out to Issy-les-Moulineaux, on the outskirts of Paris, they visited Henri Matisse. Conversation did not come easily for the painter, and with cool formality he showed them his house, which was filled with art, old furniture, and violins. When Quinn described the large number of Matisses that he had in his apartment in New York, however, the painter relaxed and began to talk about his winters in Nice, where the locals thought he was mad because of his habit of working all day and going to bed at nightfall. “I follow the sun,” he told them.[7]

They saw a good deal of André Derain and his spirited wife, Alice—“a very beautiful woman,” Quinn observed—including an evening at Foottit’s Bar, a popular night spot run by a retired English clown. They had an extravagant lunch with Pound, who was trying to write music for a modern opera based on François Villon’s fifteenth-century poems; and a terse encounter with Joyce, who was struggling to complete Ulysses in his dark, barren apartment: “Quite a misanthrope,” Roché decided.[8] During a series of visits, Georges Braque showed them his latest paintings, and also the long dent in his skull from his German shrapnel wound. (“Put your finger in it and see,” he told Quinn, and Quinn found he could fit the length of his little finger in the depression.[9])

One evening, Roché took Quinn and Foster to dine with Brancusi at his studio in the Impasse Ronsin, a Left Bank cul-de-sac. Quinn had been fascinated with the sculptor since the Armory Show, and during the war, he had quickly become his leading patron. They had corresponded frequently, and at times, when Quinn was worried about Brancusi’s health or livelihood, he had fronted him money. And with Roché’s help, Quinn had accelerated his purchases of Brancusi’s work. Until now, however, they had never met. Brancusi occupied a rambling building at the end of the street, and when the group appeared, they found him amid a forest of wood columns and chunks of marble. Broad-shouldered, with a white-streaked beard and thick, black curly hair covering a strong, square head, the artist was nearly as striking as his sculptures. “Like an elderly faun,” Foster observed. He also was fond of food and drink, and on the stove he had built in the studio, he made them a hearty soup followed by broiled chickens, which they consumed with grappa, white wine, red wine, and cognac. As they sat at his large stone table, he told stories about farmers, Roman architecture, and his boyhood in Romania, with Roché translating. The meal ended with a no-name champagne, which Brancusi, lacking coupes, served in oil cruets.[10]

On a blistering hot Saturday morning, Quinn, Foster, and Roché drove to Fontainebleau, where Picasso and Olga were renting a house for the summer. Europe was suffering from a record drought, and as they made their way south, they could see farmers already beginning the dry harvest. Several hours later, after they traversed the Forest of Fontainebleau, they arrived at a plain-looking stone house enclosed by a high wall. When they pulled up, they could see someone waving at them from the window and indicating a green door in the wall. Entering through the door, they found themselves in an enclosed garden with a dry fountain and a large catalpa tree. Then the man they had seen at the window appeared. It was Picasso.[11]

A few moments later, they were joined by a dark-haired woman in a soft blue gown and rose-colored lip paint. Radiant and svelte, Olga Picasso showed few signs of her recent pregnancy, though Foster detected a certain fragility in her beauty. (In her diary, Foster wrote, “delicate nerves, delicate heart.”) With Picasso, Roché translated for Quinn; but Olga knew some English and, unlike Picasso, had direct experience of the United States. Though it has been almost completely overlooked by Picasso scholars, Diaghilev had brought her to America with the Ballets Russes in 1916, and she performed in numerous cities on the East Coast and across the Midwest. “New York, Boston, St. Paul, St. Louis, Cleveland,” she said, rattling off some of her itinerary.[12] It was a curious point of connection between the Ohio-born Quinn and the ballerina from St. Petersburg. To Picasso, of course, Middle America had little meaning, but he was intrigued to finally meet the mysterious New Yorker who had become his most discriminating patron.

Unusually, Quinn’s interest in Picasso’s work extended to dramatically different styles. In the previous year alone, he had bought four Cubist paintings, including two of Picasso’s most important late masterpieces, Harlequin with Violin (Si tu veux) and Girl with a Hoop. But he had also acquired the completely contrasting Two Nudes, a large—almost life-size—work that Picasso regarded as the most important statement of his recent monumental style. (Quinn told Picasso he liked to call it the “Bronze Women” because their powerful, statuesque forms reminded him of archaic Greek sculpture.) Along with the distinguished paintings he had already amassed at Central Park West—standout Blue and Rose period paintings as well as works from the early phases of Cubism—these works already positioned Quinn by 1921 as the leading Picasso collector in the world.[13] For Quinn, Picasso’s continual, restless development was important in itself.

At Fontainebleau that summer, Picasso was exploring several modes all at once. At the time of their visit, he was laboring on a large archaic painting, Three Women at the Spring, whose simple carved monumental figures, though deeply classical in inspiration, were suffused with an animate, Mediterranean earthiness. (“The flesh is of the color of flesh that has lived freely under the sun,” Roché later commented.[14]) Yet he would also produce two different versions of an extraordinary Cubist masterpiece, Three Musicians, whose collage-like ensemble brought a poignant new grace and lyricism to the synthetic style he had evolved in the late years of the war. Meanwhile, he was pursuing other works in yet a third idiom, including a series of “maternity”-themed paintings inspired by Olga and their new child.

As Picasso and Quinn talked, the group gathered around a table for tea, foie de canard, and baba au rhum. When Olga brought out Paulo, who was now five months old, Picasso lit up. Amid this domestic idyll, Roché could not help but think of Helen. Before they left Paris that morning, he had received a worrying letter from her saying that Franz had new misgivings about the divorce, which was supposed to take place in a few days. Roché now wondered if they would go through with it, and if he would ever find the same contentment with Helen as he witnessed in Fontainebleau. “Am I moved by the example of Picasso…?” he wrote. Quinn, watching the artist with wife and child, was less convinced. He admired Picasso’s current serenity but was skeptical that it would last. “I do not recommend to you, my dear Roché, to go and do likewise,” he told him afterward. “It is a serious business: a very wonderful happiness if it is a success, but hell if it is not.”[15]


As the French sojourn unfolded, Quinn kept his own collecting ambitions firmly in view. From Braque he took two exquisite Cubist still lifes. At Derain’s studio, he asked the artist to do a portrait of Jeanne, and Derain began sketching her on the spot. He bought a Cézanne Mont Sainte-Victoire from Vollard, another series of Dufys, and a few more Segonzacs; he talked to Fénéon about finding an exceptional Seurat. A few days later, returning to Bernheim-Jeune, Quinn bought another large Matisse, a portrait of the artist, seen from the back, sitting at his easel painting and carefully studying a nude woman draped on a chair next to him.[16] And then there were meetings with the two men who, more than anyone else, had given shape to Picasso’s career: Rosenberg and Kahnweiler.

A visit to Rosenberg’s gallery had been one of the essential aims of Quinn’s trip. Over the previous year, he had come to regard the dealer as a crucial access point to both Picasso’s work and the modern art market itself. Unlike many of his counterparts, Rosenberg spoke English, and though they had never met, the dealer was unusually accommodating of Quinn’s singular methods, his purchasing from a distance, his habit of paying for works in installments, and his requests to send them back, or exchange them, if they did not, in the end, meet his standards. For his part, Rosenberg was fascinated by the supremely self-assured New Yorker and had begun to view him as a potential ally in his own plans for modern art in the United States.[17]

A few days after their visit to Fontainebleau, Quinn and Roché went over to rue La Boétie. Rosenberg greeted them with his usual high-keyed exuberance and began bringing out paintings. To Roché, who went to the gallery often, it seemed that he was showing them every Picasso he owned. But the dealer had something else on his mind as well. As they looked at the paintings, Rosenberg mentioned the American project he had hatched the previous summer, his plan to stage a major Picasso exhibition in New York or Chicago. He told Quinn he was now thinking of opening his own branch gallery in Manhattan, and wondered what Quinn made of the idea.

Quinn was characteristically blunt. “New York is ruinously expensive,” he told Rosenberg. Recalling his own disastrous experience with the short-lived Carroll Galleries, he noted that rents were staggeringly high in the most desirable neighborhoods. Huge amounts of money, he told the dealer, would be swallowed up in operating costs alone; many of the modern galleries that opened during the war had shuttered without ever turning a profit. In his own estimation, he said, Rosenberg would have “25,000 or 50,000 dollars of capital sunk, absolutely lost in the first year or two, and the business almost nil.”[18] As for a Picasso show, he thought the timing was poor, with the U.S. economy in a postwar slump and collectors generally skittish. Quinn advised him to wait a year or so, and suggested he make arrangements through an existing New York gallery rather than try to launch his own. Rosenberg thanked Quinn for his advice, and they agreed to stay in touch: Quinn’s Picassos alone would be a crucial draw in any such venture.

While Rosenberg was plotting his entry into the U.S. market, Picasso’s old dealer, Kahnweiler, was clawing his way back in France. In February 1920, after more than five years in exile in Switzerland, Kahnweiler had finally returned to Paris. With his usual methodical resolve, he had prepared the way by resuming contact with as many of his old artists as he could, and then, with a French business partner, opened a new gallery called the Galerie Simon, just a few blocks from Rosenberg’s. Despite his now straitened finances, many of the old crew remained loyal. He was able to buy works from Derain and Vlaminck, and he began representing, on a limited basis, Braque, Gris, and Léger. Shortly before his arrival, Kahnweiler also wrote Picasso a long letter in an effort to reconcile with the artist, though here he was, initially at least, unsuccessful.[19] At the same time, he recruited several of his artists and other French friends to try to negotiate for the release of his paintings seized by the French government. Just as he had refused to believe that a war was possible in 1914, Kahnweiler could not imagine that the government would not, in the end, return to him what was his. Tenacious as ever, he was beginning to rebuild himself.

In the aftermath of an exceptionally brutal war, however, French officials were in no mood to restore German assets. By 1920, France and Germany had reached an impasse over war reparations, and since the Treaty of Versailles authorized liquidations of enemy property, the stridently anti-German French government resolved to raise what revenue it could by selling off what it had seized. Even so, it has long been a mystery why France would take vindictive action against a pacifist art dealer who had not fought for Germany and whose Cubist paintings would hardly make a dent in government coffers. But there was more to the story. As the Picasso scholar Vérane Tasseau has recently discovered, in the spring of 1920, the French sequestration commission alleged that Kahnweiler had spied for Germany during the war, that he had been guilty of “suspicious activity in Italy and then in Switzerland” and was therefore a “dangerous enemy of France.” Not long after this report, in January 1921, the state confirmed its plans to liquidate all of Kahnweiler’s paintings for the benefit of the state in a series of public auctions.[20] Then, a few months later, it appointed an expert appraiser to oversee the sales: Léonce Rosenberg.

In theory, Léonce should have been a natural ally of Kahnweiler’s. Though they were only two years apart in age, Léonce made for a stark contrast with his younger brother Paul. While Paul was wisplike, delicate, and dark-haired, Léonce was tall, robust, and blond, and where Paul had natural instincts for business and calibrated his shows to what he felt the public could take, Léonce was an uncompromising idealist who was determined to show the newest work regardless of the prospects for selling it. Like Kahnweiler, he was also something of an intellectual and was fervently interested in Cubism. Shortly before the war, he had become one of Kahnweiler’s few major French clients, acquiring some twenty Picassos, ten Braques, and five Grises. Then, when Kahnweiler went into exile, Léonce rescued many of his artists—including for a time Picasso—giving them contracts, despite an almost nonexistent market. His efforts had even won praise from Kahnweiler himself.

But no one was buying Cubist work, and by the end of the war, Léonce was nearly bankrupt. And when the government made its ruthless decision to liquidate Kahnweiler’s stock, as a leading Cubist expert, he was glad to serve as the chief appraiser. By Léonce’s own account, the Kahnweiler auctions would stir new interest in Cubism and reignite the market. But it was hard not to see another motive, too: Having invested heavily in these artists, and watching Kahnweiler reestablish himself in Paris, he knew he would be outgunned if Kahnweiler got his paintings back. Sensing a fraught situation, Paul Rosenberg kept his distance from the auctions—and from his own brother. But with his growing control over Picasso, he was arguably the greatest beneficiary of the state’s decision, which, at least as far as Picasso went, largely sidelined his most formidable rival.

In public, Kahnweiler kept his head down, but privately he was fuming. “The Rosenbergs are bastards,” he told Derain.[21] Other artists agreed—at least as far as Léonce was concerned. At the first auction, which took place a few weeks before Quinn’s arrival in France, Braque was so angry at Léonce that when he arrived, he immediately accosted him and punched him in the face, in front of the entire crowd. (One of the witnesses was Matisse, who, as soon as he understood what was happening, shouted, “Braque is right! This man has robbed France!”[22]) Worse, the auction itself, coming at a time when the country’s economy was still reeling, produced dismal results and seemed to confirm the view of conservative critics that Cubism was a failed movement.

But Kahnweiler was not done yet. The sequestration authorities had forbidden him from bidding on his own paintings, but he formed a consortium of friends to bid for him and was able to reacquire a small but significant number of works. He refused to give up on Picasso, making further overtures to his estranged former artist. And he began to formulate a new international strategy of his own. A few days after their visit to Rosenberg’s, Roché took Quinn and Foster to meet Kahnweiler at the Galerie Simon. (“He is intelligent, but German,” Roché had warned Quinn, mindful of his residual wartime antipathy.[23]) Steady and serious as ever, Kahnweiler apparently showed little sign of his recent setbacks. For his part, Quinn was intrigued by the dealer’s deep knowledge of many of the artists he liked, and Kahnweiler showed them several Braques and Derains he had on hand.[24] In the end, Quinn decided to purchase from him a remarkable hybrid work of art and theater, for 360 francs, or about $26: a limited edition of Erik Satie’s absurdist dance-play, Ruse of the Medusa, which Braque had illustrated with Cubist woodcuts.[25] By now, Quinn had met both Satie and Braque, and he was delighted to have a work that demonstrated the breadth of the new art. (More than twenty-five years later, the play would acquire a cult following in the United States after it was performed by John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller at Black Mountain College.) Kahnweiler didn’t yet have many of the big paintings that Quinn was now hunting, but he had a good rapport with Roché, and the visit cemented a friendship that would one day prove crucial to Quinn’s goals for his collection.

Around the margins of his packed days with Quinn and Foster, Roché was also coming to a turning point in his own life. One morning, a few days after the visit to Fontainebleau, Helen had sent Roché a telegram stating that she had gone through with the divorce. Yet Helen’s letters were filled with misgivings, and Roché was once again with Germaine constantly. He promised Helen he would remain faithful until they were reunited in Germany, but Helen was herself unreliable and Germaine was loyal, tender, comprehending. (Two days after they got to Paris, Foster, who was fascinated by the occult and had some training as a palm reader, offered to read Roché’s and Brancusi’s palms. It is hard to know what the empirically minded Quinn made of this, but Roché recorded in his diary that she saw “two women, the first without any children, calm and happy; the second, with children, but without calm or happiness.”[26])

Paralyzed with indecision, Roché increasingly sought escape with his American friends. He was tantalized by Quinn, the strength of his attitude and taste, his emotional reserve, their deepening connection over art and artists, and what had become a shared project to bring the most exceptional examples of modern art to the United States. “I feel for him a simple and profound friendship,” Roché wrote. At the same time, he found Foster deeply unusual, and they began to spend increasing stretches of time together, sometimes without Quinn, who often left them when he had other business to attend to. “Beautiful talk with Mrs. F…alone…She is delicate, good, generous-spirited, I like her very much,” Roché wrote one day.[27] Foster was somewhat enthralled by Roché’s earnest urbanity. “Soft, generous, gracious. Sunlight on his face,” she wrote after one long drive with him. “A French gentleman.”[28] Quinn himself took pleasure in Foster’s kinship with his trusted friend and encouraged their company. Once again, Roché seemed to be forming the kind of intricate triangle in which his social relations worked best. As he grew close to both Quinn and Foster, he also gained insight into their own intense bond and its mysterious incompletion. (“He is suffering like I am,” Roché speculated at the end of Quinn’s stay. “He would like to have a child with Mrs. F. as I do with Luki.”[29])

As his departure approached, Quinn insisted that the three of them drive to Verdun, to experience for themselves the ravages of the war. For Quinn in particular, the devastated landscape was overpowering. “The most impressive thing I have ever seen,” he wrote later. The drive was strenuous, the heat was intense, and when they got there, the detritus of battle, the buried trenches and crumbling fortifications, was, as he put it, “horrible, unspeakable, unforgettable.”[30] Along with visits to the Hindenburg Line and the Argonne Forest, they inspected the skeleton of Reims Cathedral; they also stopped at a cemetery that contained more than ten thousand American war dead. For Quinn, the journey confirmed what he had felt from the beginning—that the war against France was ultimately a war against the United States.

In mid-August, after nearly six weeks abroad, Quinn sailed for New York. He had met nearly all the artists he was most passionate about, formed important new friendships, acquired astonishing paintings, and made hopeful plans for future conquests. He had also forged a crucial relationship with Picasso, the artist whose work he regarded, more and more, as a sort of touchstone of his collection. Not least, he now enjoyed a privileged position with nearly all of the modern art dealers in Paris, including Vollard, Bernheim-Jeune, and the Norwegian émigré dealer Walther Halvorsen, as well as Rosenberg and Kahnweiler. For the first time, the project he had outlined to Roché back in 1919—to acquire the most exceptional paintings and sculptures by the defining artists of the Paris avant-garde—was beginning to seem plausible, especially if, as he sensed, the American public was at last prepared to embrace the new art.

Yet he was filled with foreboding. After so much time away, he faced a fearsome season at his office, with new uncertainty in the financial markets and a pile of unattended work. And now he would be unjustly separated from Jeanne, who was staying on in Paris, and with whom social constraints at home required their relationship to remain private. (Roché, watching their final embrace, wrote in his diary, “He kisses Mrs. F. as he leaves. I love it.”[31]) He had the nagging sense that he had been in something of a dream world, and that it would be a long time before he enjoyed such freedom again. He also wondered whether he had the energy to keep fighting. “Many people think I am a man of immense vitality, that I like to do things, and that I love to be busy,” he wrote one of his European friends, around the time of his return. “The exact contrary is the truth.”[32]

In fact, though he could not know it, he was about to face one of the biggest art fights of his career.

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