14
New York was seemingly a different place from the city that Quinn left when he set out for Paris six weeks earlier. Since the previous winter, the U.S. economy had been teetering into recession, and in late August 1921, it tumbled. The double-barreled shock of the flu pandemic and the winding down of wartime industry had caused a severe decline in output, and the stock market hit rock bottom, having lost nearly half its value in eighteen months. A new round of corporate mayhem was looming and Quinn was suddenly finding it difficult to collect his clients’ fees. Even the federal government dramatically slashed a large payout to Quinn, who had, in February, successfully defended the constitutionality of the Trading with the Enemy Act before the U.S. Supreme Court.[1] With regret, he’d been forced to turn down, for lack of funds, two exceptional Matisses that Walther Halvorsen had shown him in Paris; explaining why he couldn’t give Margaret Anderson yet another $1,000 for The Little Review, he told her, “These are panic times.”[2]
In other ways too, American society was in turmoil. A few days after Quinn’s return, ten thousand armed coal miners in West Virginia staged a violent union uprising, leading to a five-day shootout with federal troops. The papers were full of stories about rising Klan violence in the south and the “corruption and terrorism” of Red rule in Moscow. An ugly xenophobia was setting in, with much of the ire directed against new immigrants from Eastern Europe who were allegedly bringing in communist ideologies and fomenting labor unrest. Amid growing hostility toward the Continent, Congress was raising tariffs on European goods again and accusing Britain and France of welshing on billions of dollars of war debts. (Quinn, having seen the devastation of Verdun, took the exact opposite view, arguing that the United States should forgive its wartime loans so that France could stand a chance of recovering.)
At least, he assumed, the country was finally coming around to modern art. A few months before he left for Paris, Quinn and his friend Arthur Davies had scored a major coup with the Metropolitan Museum. With the help of Lillie Bliss and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, they had convinced the archconservative institution to host a loan show of advanced French paintings, the first modern art show in its history. Given the innocuous title Loan Exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings, the show was hardly radical; as the chief lender, Quinn had been thwarted in his efforts to get Metropolitan curator Bryson Burroughs to include Cubist pictures. (“I do not think the inclusion of three blue things by Picasso…would be at all representative,” he complained to Burroughs, when he came to Quinn’s apartment to select paintings. “Particularly as you apparently do not want to include any of Picasso’s abstract work, beautiful and decorative though it is.”[3])
Still, Quinn managed to get a number of his important paintings in the show, including two Gauguins, a Van Gogh self-portrait, a Toulouse-Lautrec, a half dozen Derains, a Vlaminck, four or five Matisses, and Picasso’s daring 1906 Woman Plaiting Her Hair, as well as a series of early Blue period Picassos. Enhanced by Bliss’s stellar collection of Cézannes and other post-Impressionist works, the show’s overall quality was exceptionally high. “There are no scraps in that exhibition,” he wrote Ezra Pound at the time of the opening, in May, “no ‘pretty little small thing’ no ‘lovely little thing’ but all important things.”[4] In the catalog, Burroughs, despite his qualms about Cubism, hailed Picasso as an “artist of extraordinary skill and powers of assimilation.” For the first time, the country’s most important art museum seemed to be taking Quinn’s paintings seriously.
As far as Quinn knew, New Yorkers were embracing them as well. At the time he left for Europe, the show seemed to have captivated the city. The New York Times observed that more than fourteen hundred people had attended the opening, and that many of them were seeing post-Impressionist paintings for the first time. A writer for Town and Country found the exhibition “rich enough in material to provide discussion for the rest of the summer,” and noted, for those who found the art unsettling, “there is always the Egyptian Daily Life room to cool off in.” The art press was even more laudatory. “The show is amazing,” declared The Arts. “There has probably never been a finer public exhibition of modern French art in the world.”[5] The outpouring of interest seemed to bear out progressive critic Forbes Watson’s call that spring that the museum should recruit Quinn and Davies to help it start buying modern art. At last, the old American hostility to the followers of Cézanne and Van Gogh was breaking down.[6]
About a week after his return from Europe, Quinn discovered how wrong he had been. The day after Labor Day, a group of self-described “citizens and supporters of the Metropolitan Museum” launched a scathing attack on the show in the Times and other newspapers around the country. In a four-page, carefully printed manifesto titled “A Protest Against the Present Exhibition of Degenerate ‘Modernistic’ Works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” the citizen-protesters conjured up the familiar canards about late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century modern art: that it subverted the rules of nature; that it threatened public morality; that it was a dangerous foreign import; and that it was deviant and pathological. (To support their arguments, they cited such medical experts as Francis X. Dercum, the prominent neurologist who had treated President Wilson, and Charles W. Burr, a professor of mental diseases at the University of Pennsylvania, who had warned that looking at such art could arouse “unhealthy feelings” in the viewer.)
But to this cauldron, the protesters also added something new: “We believe that these forms of so-called art are merely a symptom of a general movement…having for its object the breaking down of law and order and the…destruction of our entire social system.” The movement in question was Bolshevism: In displaying these paintings, they argued, the Metropolitan was unwittingly promoting a form of “Bolshevist propaganda” that was being foisted on an unsuspecting public by a “clique” of European dealers. In essence, the show was part of a European plot that aimed to use the “influence and authority of the Metropolitan Museum and other American Museums” to promote “degenerate” art. For perhaps the first time in a major public forum, modern art was being linked to early-twentieth-century social theories about radical politics and racial decline.[7]
At another moment, the pamphlet might have been dismissed as crude conspiracy mongering. For one thing, it was unsigned, and it seemed likely that it was the work of a hysterical fringe. To Quinn, the notion that the artists he had just dined with in Paris might be Bolshevik agents rather than French patriots was bizarre. “No one,” he told John Butler Yeats, “could be more French than Derain, who was born in the city of Paris and is proud of it; Braque, who was born almost within the shadow of Notre Dame…; Matisse, who is French of the French; and Cézanne, who was as French as Foch or Poincaré.”[8] (He might have added that Picasso’s wife, Olga, came from a czarist family who were themselves being persecuted by actual Bolsheviks.)
In the fall of 1921, however, the United States provided fertile ground for paranoia about foreign subversion, and it didn’t take long for leading cultural figures to join in the protest. The day after the letter was circulated, Joseph Pennell, an archconservative member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, gave his own devastating assessment of the show in an interview with the Times. “Post-Impressionism is not an outgrowth of Impressionism at all, but is pure degeneracy, the same form of degeneracy that brought on the war,” he said. Singling out Quinn as the animating spirit behind the show, he accused him of undermining American values: “I am not dictating to Mr. Quinn what he should and what he should not buy…but an exhibition of this form is positively dangerous to the teaching of art in America.”[9]
For Quinn, Pennell’s attack was sobering. By now, he was unsurprised by efforts to censor the writers he supported and denigrate the artists he collected. But the protests against the post-Impressionist show went further. After years of unrelenting effort to bring the United States to the forefront of twentieth-century art and literature, Quinn found himself being denounced by a pillar of the cultural establishment. Meanwhile, the museum itself remained largely silent, limiting itself to responding feebly that the show was near the end of its run and had not previously caused protest. The show that was supposed to herald the Metropolitan’s belated embrace of modern art had instead left it slinking away from an unwanted controversy. The reactionary tendency, which Quinn had been confronting off and on ever since the Chicago attack on the Armory Show, was apparently thriving after all. It made him wonder whether the country’s flat-footed museums would ever change.
In fact, both Pennell and the protesters were drawing on a well-established strain of American conservative thought. Already at the beginning of Quinn’s career, the pseudoscientific concept of cultural degeneracy had gained wide currency in the United States. In his influential 1895 book Degeneration, the Hungarian doctor and intellectual Max Nordau had argued that modernist culture—from the ideas of Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Zola to the work of the French Impressionists—was an outgrowth of the social and racial decline of the late nineteenth century. In his strained interpretation, the rapidity of modern urban life—“the shocks of railway traveling…the perpetual noises and the various sites in the streets of a large town…the constant expectation of the newspaper”—had led to the physical degradation of human populations over time, a process that in turn was producing rampant crime, addiction, and deviant behavior, including subversive new forms of cultural expression.[10] In fact, modernist writers and artists were inspired by the gritty life of rapidly expanding cities and the accelerating tempo of information. But Nordau could see these influences only as pathological. “Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lunatics,” he began his 560-page tome. “They are often authors and artists.”[11]
Nordau’s thesis gained considerable attention in Europe, but it was in early-twentieth-century America—where the “degenerate” artists and thinkers he was writing about were little known—that he found his largest audience. Selling more than six hundred thousand copies, the American edition of Degeneration became one of the most influential books of the late 1890s and early 1900s, contributing to persistent fears among American intellectuals about “decadent” European influences threatening American values. Modern and avant-garde art, with its disorienting strangeness, was a natural target for these concerns. Even before the Armory Show had opened, one New York critic warned that the art that would be shown was “European intellectual degeneracy carried to its lowest depths.”[12] Such was the popularity of Nordau’s theories two decades after their initial publication that a close friend of Quinn’s, the critic James Huneker, felt it necessary to write a long magazine take-down of Nordau in 1915.[13]
The stakes in this debate were not minor: By the time Huneker was writing, Nordau’s ideas were finding eerie echoes in American anxieties about racial purity. Among the American writers informed by Degeneration was the conservationist and eugenicist Madison Grant, who wrote his influential book about racial hygiene, The Passing of the Great Race, during World War I.[14] By the time of the post-Impressionist exhibition, the eugenics movement—which stressed ways to prevent human degeneracy through forced sterilization, immigration controls, and racial separation—had gained wide currency in American universities and even in government. At the very moment that Quinn was confronting the protest over “degenerate” art at the Metropolitan, the city’s other great museum, the American Museum of Natural History, was preparing to host a huge international eugenics congress, in which scholars from dozens of countries were presenting new research on degeneracy. To mark the occasion, the organizers had commissioned a life-sized sculpture called Average American Man that was meant to use art to show the effects of degeneration on the Nordic race.
For Quinn, the effort to link the exceptional paintings in the Met exhibition to theories about cultural and racial decline was abominable. “If I were choosing a group of men to accompany me on an expedition to the North Pole, I do not know where I could get three better or stronger men than Matisse, Braque and Derain,” he told one New York friend. “And these are the men that old fossils like Pennell call decadents.”[15] But he also found himself virtually alone to defend the show. Most of the city’s progressive art critics seemed to be out of town, and his fellow lenders, including Lillie Bliss, were loath to be drawn into the controversy. It would be up to him to respond. Realizing that there would be little to be gained by getting into a public feud with Pennell, he concentrated his counteroffensive on the unnamed protesters.
In a series of interviews Quinn gave the Times, the Herald, and the Tribune, he observed that all important art movements had been attacked in their time. “A new way of stating truth and depicting beauty is always a scandal to some men,” he said. He deplored the protesters’ extreme language and suggested that they were exhibiting the same tendencies they purported to decry. Finally, he took on their anonymity. On the same day the protest erupted, the New York World began publishing its groundbreaking, multipart exposé of the Ku Klux Klan and its campaign of racial terror, and Quinn saw an apt, if extravagant, analogy. “This is Ku Klux art criticism,” he told the Times. “Let these Ku Klux art critics stand up and take off their masks….Then, if they are worthy of answer, answer will be given.” Obviously, no one was suffering personal violence in the attack on the Metropolitan, but amid the roiling tensions of the time, Quinn’s words seemed to have their desired effect: Nothing more was heard from the protesters or Pennell himself, and the controversy soon died down.[16]
For the time being, Quinn and his supporters seemed to have the upper hand. “I have had a good laugh in reading about our friends’ art as degenerate,” Roché wrote him from Paris. “But better still in reading your answer…which must have routed the enemies.”[17] “I think it did the job,” Quinn told him in response.[18] Still, like the ritual burning of “Matisses” in Chicago, the Metropolitan controversy had set an ominous precedent. Cowed by the dispute, the trustees of the museum had little interest in giving more play to modern art; indeed, it would be years before the Met would again attempt to exhibit paintings like these. Nor was it the last time that the modern art world would be threatened by charges of Bolshevism and racial and moral degeneracy. Although scholars in recent decades have overwhelmingly focused on Nazi Germany, the racialized attack on modern art was not an innovation of Hitler but began years earlier, in the United States.
More immediately dismaying for Quinn, though, was the apparent failure of the post-Impressionist show to lead new patrons to modern art. In October, he received a letter from Léonce Rosenberg, who was desperate to find foreign buyers for his unsold stock of Cubist paintings. In particular, he wanted to know if any of the other lenders to the show would consider such works. A few weeks later, Quinn sent a devastating reply. Mrs. Harry Payne Bingham, he wrote, was “very rich” but bought “nothing later” than Cézannes and Manets. William Church Osborn, a director of the Metropolitan Museum, was “perfectly hopeless from your point of view.” Mrs. George Vanderbilt “would not know art if she saw it outside of jewelry and dresses.” Harry Payne Whitney was “a great polo player, rich man, personal friend of mine….Buys many kinds of art but not cubistic work.”[19]
Even among Quinn’s own tiny group of avowed modernists, hardly anyone seemed to be buying avant-garde work. That winter, Walter Arensberg, who with Quinn had been one of the city’s most adventurous collectors, had suffered severe financial losses and was moving to California. (“I was very sorry to hear of his misfortune, for he was one of the few men here with money and courage to buy modern art,” Quinn told Roché.[20]) Arthur Davies continued to collect, but his funds were limited. And Quinn’s wealthy friend Lillie Bliss, for all her spectacular Cézannes and interest in modern art, remained hesitant about Picasso and Matisse. There was the exception of Albert Barnes in Philadelphia, who was buying up whole tracts of Renoirs, Cézannes, and Matisses, but Barnes was allergic to Cubism, and Quinn, whether by envy or sheer loathing, could see him only as an undiscriminating tyrant. (“If I had the money of that brute Barnes…,” he would complain to Roché, after hearing yet again of Barnes’s “ravages” through the Paris market.[21]) As far as Quinn could tell, the current “crop” of American collectors simply wasn’t ready for the new art, and a new crop was “not yet in sight.”[22]
In fact, though he did not know it, the Met exhibition did provide a spark to at least one young American. At the time of the show, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was not a collector at all but a cerebral Princeton undergraduate with a photographic memory and a fascination for taxonomy. Though he had not grown up around art, he had recently decided to major in art history and was rapidly consuming the available curriculum. Like its peers, Princeton did not teach art more recent than the nineteenth century. But one of Barr’s professors was Frank Jewett Mather, a former newspaper critic who was something of a radical by Princeton standards. He let students smoke in class and was curious about twentieth-century art. He also had taken a particular liking to Barr, who showed an uncommon facility for analyzing paintings and seemed to have already assimilated large swaths of Western art history. At the end of the term, Mather decided to take his brilliant young protégé to see the post-Impressionists in New York.
As they wandered through the Metropolitan, Mather greeted the newest work in the show with skepticism: He tended to dismiss Matisse’s paintings as “irresponsible nightmares” and was hardly more forgiving about the early Picassos, though he had previously acknowledged what he called their “grim power.” For Barr, though, it was an altogether different experience. Not only was he moved by the formidable group of landscapes and portraits by Cézanne, an artist he would later compare in complexity to the seventeenth-century French master Nicolas Poussin. He also was excited by the later paintings in the show: the extraordinary colors of a Derain window, the simple lines of Matisse’s Cyclamen, the startling, flattened perspective of Picasso’s Woman Plaiting Her Hair. Here was an art that was continuing to evolve, and whose story was not yet finished. As Burroughs, the Met curator, had written in the catalog, “The battle about the later painters, Matisse, Derain, and Picasso, still in the prime of life and work, wages furiously, with the decision still in doubt.” After seeing the show, Barr wanted to learn more about these painters and the war they were fighting. Though he did not know it yet, in a few years, he would be joining the battle himself.