15
One afternoon at the end of November, Roché went to see Picasso at his rue La Boétie apartment. He had just returned to Paris after several months away, and he was impatient to see what Picasso had been painting since their meeting in Fontainebleau in July. Following his adventures with Quinn and Foster, Roché had spent the fall in Germany, where he and Helen, now divorced from Franz, pursued an intense, erotic affair, which they had turned into a literary pas de deux in dueling diaries and letters. But the relationship proved highly unstable, and he had come back to Paris alone, nearly broke, deeply conflicted, and uncertain of whether she was carrying his child. (“Your love is too perfect to have children,” Franz had written to them, shortly before Roché left.[1])
Seeking escape, Roché had plunged back into the Paris art world and his work for Quinn. But even this was proving precarious, as he discovered in a chance encounter a few nights earlier. After attending a long Anglo-American press banquet, Roché had gone to a dance hall where, around 1 a.m., he happened to run into Halvorsen, the Norwegian dealer, who told him that Quinn wasn’t buying the two big Matisses. Roché would be out a handsome commission. “A sum of money that disappeared for me,” he wrote in his diary.[2] Quinn, who had not written to him all fall, was evidently in one of his periodic retreats from the chase. Now Roché would have to try to rekindle the lawyer’s interest with new Picassos.
When Roché arrived, Picasso seemed to be in excellent form. Olga served tea and they looked at some photographs they had taken during Quinn and Foster’s visit. Then Picasso and Roché went into his studio to look at paintings. As Picasso began to bring out pictures, it was clear that there was an immense variety of new work from Fontainebleau: Cubist clowns making music, beguiling, richly colored, collage-like; several very large canvases, including the three ancient women, whose splendidly robust figures reminded Roché of the big Two Nudes that Quinn already owned; small pictures that were exceedingly simple and direct—a pear, a jug. And there were exuberant variations on the mother-and-child theme, clearly inspired by Picasso’s new life en famille. Nor had he been any less productive since their return to rue La Boétie. He was experimenting with small-format paintings of giant bodies, whose proportions conveyed a sense of almost uncontained immensity, pressuring the edges of the canvas; he was also playing with a new approach to Cubist still lifes, using flat swaths of luminous color.[3]
By the end of the afternoon, Roché was dazzled. “Very big and very small canvases that I love intensely,” he wrote in his diary.[4] Having known Picasso since the bateau-lavoir days, he was long accustomed to seeing whatever he was working on, but it was unusual to find such a torrent of new ideas all at once, and over the next few weeks, Roché made a point of stopping in to see him whenever he could. “Picasso has worked magnificently in Fontainebleau and in Paris since he is back,” he reported to Quinn after several of these visits.[5]
As Roché saw more and more of the new work, though, he began to sense that something was not right. For all this fecundity, the paintings were piling up in Picasso’s studio, unknown to the world. Meanwhile, Picasso barely mentioned Rosenberg, though the dealer’s gallery was next door. Finally, Picasso told him what was going on. The paintings were piling up because Rosenberg had stopped buying them.
Roché was startled. How could such an important body of work be ignored by the man who, more than anyone else, now had a vested stake in Picasso’s career? After all, Rosenberg could reach Picasso’s studio within minutes; surely he would have been excited by the paintings that Roché had seen. It also went against the dealer’s character: Ever since their alliance began, he had breathlessly awaited each new canvas, showering Picasso with letters and messages and badgering him about his progress. (“I remind you: My harlequins!!!! My harlequins!!!!…Keep in mind that I need paintings,” he’d written in one typical appeal the previous January.[6]) At the same time, the Rosenbergs had brought Picasso and Olga ever more tightly into their family life. The previous spring, when Olga gave birth to Paulo just weeks after Margot gave birth to Alexandre, the Rosenbergs’ second child, Picasso and Rosenberg became godfathers to each other’s sons. In May, the dealer had put on another Picasso show in his gallery, and as recently as July, he had written Picasso at Fontainebleau to say he needed “a lot of canvases.”[7]
Since Picasso’s return to Paris, however, the honeymoon had come to an end. In fact, over the nearly three months since, the dealer had hardly set foot in Picasso’s studio. For Picasso, the neglect was unnerving. His whole ménage was predicated on the dealer’s steady purchases, and his life with Olga would be unsustainable without them. Roché wondered if the dealer was having financial difficulties; Picasso himself suspected that he was reluctant to pay the prices they had agreed upon. “I know the value of my paintings,” he told Roché. “Ros. is slow in recognizing it.”[8]
In fact, there was another reason for Rosenberg’s withdrawal: the postponement of his high-stakes strategy to bring Picasso to the United States. Already the previous winter, he had retreated from his initial idea of doing a Picasso show at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1921, after Quinn—from whom he wanted to borrow paintings—warned that he would be setting himself up for failure. (Through Roché, Quinn had recounted how in Chicago the Armory Show had been “treated as a joke, laughed at, ridiculed.”[9]) Then Rosenberg had come up with his alternative plans for New York. When he asked Picasso to prepare “a lot of canvases” in Fontainebleau, he explained he needed them for the show he was organizing “in New York this winter.”[10] But four days after Rosenberg sent this letter, he had met Quinn and Roché in Paris, and Quinn had advised him not to attempt any American show at all, given the current economic situation.[11] Taking Quinn’s advice, Rosenberg had reluctantly put the venture on hold, which also meant he no longer felt any urgency to invest in more Picassos.
Given the abysmal market in Europe and the barriers he faced in the United States, Rosenberg had reason to wonder if he was making too big a bet on Picasso. While he had few illusions about France’s ravaged economy, he had long counted on finding new buyers overseas, and building a huge inventory of Picasso’s work made sense if it allowed him to stage large-scale exhibitions and establish Picasso internationally. But after two and half years of heavy investment and constant promotion, he had been able to do neither. He had already organized several well-received shows in Paris, and Picasso was more visible than ever. But when it came to selling his work, Rosenberg had one major client and one alone: John Quinn. As he frequently told Picasso himself, business was “miserable.”[12]
Where Rosenberg feared failure, Roché saw opportunity. Roché knew that Quinn prized the close friendships he established with artists, and that he often preferred to buy works straight from their studios, just as he liked to receive manuscripts from writers and poets he admired before they were published. Roché was aware that Quinn had proceeded this way with Brancusi and Derain, among many other artists, and, having built a personal bond with Picasso over the summer, he would especially covet such a relationship with Picasso as well. With Rosenberg officially in control, though, it would be a delicate affair. During one of his visits to Picasso’s studio in early January, Roché finally decided to ask him outright: What if Picasso offered some of his new paintings directly to Quinn?[13]
Picasso was intrigued. Not only did he face new uncertainty about his income; after three years on rue La Boétie, he had begun to chafe at being a kept man. There was the controlling eye of Rosenberg and the constant expectations of Paris’s fashionable set; it had become a refrain among his old circle that his best work was being squeezed out by ballet sets and society balls. By contrast, Quinn seemed to come from a different universe. Driven by personal passion rather than social advantage, he was a man who, as Roché had explained, didn’t bother hanging his collection, who, as Picasso himself put it, simply “loved paintings.”[14] Here, then, was a chance to get important work into the hands of a defiant connoisseur, and the prospect of two-timing his dealer must have appealed to Picasso’s natural sense of mischief. He told Roché he was glad to try it.[15]
After the meeting, Roché, now in the heat of conquest, dashed off a letter to Quinn. “I am going to tell you something most confidential about Picasso and Paul Rosenberg,” he began. He described the extraordinary pictures Picasso had shown him and Rosenberg’s slowness to buy them. Then he outlined his plan. “Seeing him now and then, and seeing those pictures still in his home, what happens with Paul R., I have spoken to Picasso about the eventual possibility of selling pictures directly to you,” he wrote. In addition to giving Quinn rare access to unknown works, Roché noted that such an arrangement would help Picasso as well, since both of them would be avoiding Rosenberg’s commission. “You and he would profit by it,” Roché said.[16]
In New York, Quinn was quickly seduced by the idea. “I do not want to buy many pictures this year for reasons I told you,” he wrote Roché. “But I should be glad to make an exception in Picasso’s case.”[17] Having secured Quinn’s interest, Roché went back to Picasso’s studio to select some paintings. Picasso already had three in mind: his monumental Three Women at the Spring, the first version of Three Musicians, and a smaller Cubist still life. The choices themselves were remarkable. The first two were not only the twin peaks of his summer in Fontainebleau; they were easily among the most important paintings he had completed since the war. They would surely be paintings that Rosenberg would covet, if he were buying, and Picasso’s readiness to offer them secretly to Quinn suggested his unusual respect for the American. Even his prices were attractive. “This picture I’m willing to sell to Mr. Quinn for 50,000 francs,” he told Roché, referring to Three Women. From Rosenberg, he noted, it would cost “at least 70,000 francs.” Picasso seemed all but ready to jump ship for Quinn.
But not even Roché had anticipated how complicated Quinn could be. In addition to detailed descriptions of the paintings, Quinn insisted on getting large-format, high-quality black-and-white photographs, a step that Picasso was adamantly against. Picasso didn’t like the idea of an outside photographer documenting paintings he hadn’t shown to anyone, and if a professional photographer came to his studio, Rosenberg might find out. “The paintings ought to be photographed outdoors in the courtyard,” Roché told Quinn, “and Rosenberg’s private windows are facing this courtyard.” Even doing the shoot inside carried risks. Though the dealer had stayed away, he was unpredictable. “Ros. may walk in at any hour,” Picasso warned.[18]
Having spent years in bedrooms belonging to other men, Roché was sanguine about the risks, and he was determined to find a way to satisfy Quinn’s demands. Then he remembered the gifted young American artist and photographer he’d met in New York during the war. Part of the Dada scene around Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray had recently settled in Paris and was taking photographs to support himself. Roché knew he could count on Man Ray’s absolute discretion—“keeping silent, delivering all proofs and plates to Picasso,” as he told Quinn—and asked him if he would take on the job.[19] Man Ray had never met Picasso, but he quickly agreed and a few days later went over to Picasso’s apartment. Thankfully, there were no interruptions by Rosenberg, and the photographs came out well. When Man Ray was done, Picasso allowed him to take his portrait. They became friends.[20]
By the end of the month, Roché’s risky plan seemed against all odds to be working. He had established a backchannel to Picasso. He had worked out exceptional prices for several of his most important paintings and enlisted one of the greatest photographers in Paris to document them. He had also sent Quinn lengthy appraisals and, together with Picasso himself, written careful descriptions of the colors on the backs of Man Ray’s black-and-white photos.[21] And they had managed to keep the whole business secret from Rosenberg next door. No other modern art patron could come close to such an arrangement: A man thousands of miles from Paris had been given the chance to outfox one of the city’s most powerful dealers literally in his own backyard.
Yet Quinn was in no hurry. Even after sending him Man Ray’s photographs, Roché had gotten no reply. Meanwhile, Rosenberg had started coming to Picasso’s studio again—paradoxically because he now wanted new paintings to show Quinn. “Ros. has come and asked Pic. to deliver his pictures,” Roché wrote to Quinn. “Pic. has refused, waiting for your decision, of course without telling Ros.” But Picasso could not hold out on his dealer forever.[22] Finally, in the second week of March, Roché sent a cable to Quinn: “picasso expecting decision.”[23]
In New York, Quinn had been distracted, as usual, by a variety of other pressing matters. He and Foster had been deeply preoccupied with the final illness and death of their close friend John Butler Yeats, having stood in for his family, including W. B., who were all in Ireland. (Foster would eventually arrange to bury him in her own family plot in upstate New York.) At the same time, Quinn was immersed again in law work. And even as he dallied on the new Picassos, he regretted that he had missed the second auction of Kahnweiler’s seized inventory. “I should have commissioned you to use your discretion in buying some important Derains and Braques and Picassos,” he told Roché in late February.[24] But now that he had this extraordinary new chance with Picasso, he hesitated. A few hours after he received Roché’s cable, he sent his terse and disappointing answer: “have decided not to purchase large painting three figures or abstract painting or still life.”[25]
For all his efforts, then, Roché had come up empty. Quinn wasn’t ready to take any of the paintings Picasso had personally selected for him, no matter how important they were. In fact, a few days earlier, Quinn had sent Roché a letter—it hadn’t yet reached Paris—in which he explained that he was reluctant to buy Cubist works from black-and-white photographs, even if it was Man Ray who took them. He also was concerned about the dimensions of the two large paintings. “I haven’t the room, simply haven’t physically the room, for another painting of that kind,” he wrote. He asked Roché to offer Picasso a 30,000-franc advance on an undefined future purchase. “I am sure there will be no shadow of difference between Picasso and me.”[26]
Picasso was puzzled—and intrigued. According to his own Spanish sense of honor, he refused the money, but he seemed to gain a new respect for his singular patron. Over the next few weeks, he showed Roché dozens of older paintings he had kept aside in his studio, including a rare early self-portrait he had never offered to anyone, and other Blue period works. “He intends to keep them until I hear from you,” Roché wrote Quinn.[27] Soon they were engaged in elaborate negotiations for a whole series of works; in May, Roché wrote in his diary that he was “swimming in business” between Picasso and Quinn.[28] At one point, Picasso offered to send Three Musicians to New York, without any commitment to buy, just so that Quinn could see it. “Picasso and his wife like you much,” Roché reported.[29]
Remarkably, amid this growing entente with Picasso, Quinn continued to court Rosenberg as well. No matter how deep his loyalty to the artist, he was determined to have access to the best paintings, and by early April, he learned from Roché that Rosenberg was starting to buy again. (Characteristically, Roché was in bed with everyone, often going straight from Picasso’s studio to Rosenberg’s gallery, where the dealer would show him all his latest acquisitions.) By the end of the spring, Quinn was pursuing separate groups of works from both Picasso and Rosenberg. From Picasso direct, he bought Three Women at the Spring after all, together with a number of early paintings from Picasso’s personal collection, even as he took other important Fontainebleau paintings and an earlier Harlequin from Rosenberg. While the rest of the world balked, Quinn was building a virtual monopoly over Picasso’s work, having effectively established first right of refusal with both the artist and his dealer.
In fact, despite Quinn’s many distractions, the Picassos were only one part of his accelerating activity in Paris. From Brancusi he took yet another batch of sculptures—the Romanian being one of the very few artists for whom almost everything he created seemed to satisfy Quinn’s criteria of greatness. There were new Derains and Braques; and he was in constant touch, often through Roché, with most of the artists he had met the previous summer. Among his various dealings, Félix Fénéon was guarding a pair of particularly choice Seurats for him; Alphonse Kann, the great French connoisseur whose art-filled villa he had visited with Roché and Foster, was preparing to relinquish to him one of his best Dufys. Quinn also began a new push to acquire major works by Henri Rousseau, managing to acquire three of his major paintings over the course of a few months. And he continued to acquire an extraordinarily heterodox range of indigenous sculptures from many remote regions, which, following the pioneering shows of Alfred Steiglitz and Robert Coady, he had come to regard as a counterpart to what the modernists were doing. By one later assessment, Quinn would acquire as much first-rate contemporary art in 1922 as “any private individual in the world.”[30]
As Quinn considered his collection against the weight of history, he also began to form more programmatic ideas about the great artists of his time. Outlining his personal pantheon to friends, he placed at the very top Picasso, Matisse, Derain, and Braque; just beneath them was a second tier that included Georges Rouault, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, and Raoul Dufy, with Constantin Brancusi, as a sculptor, in a category of his own. These in turn were followed by a broader group of exceptional modernists, including the Cubists Roger de La Fresnaye, Juan Gris, Jean Metzinger, and Jacques Villon, and the Cubist-influenced Marie Laurencin. Supporting them were a select group of modernist progenitors, led by Cézanne and Seurat and followed by Gauguin and Van Gogh.[31] Perhaps most strikingly, next to Cézanne and Seurat, he also placed Rousseau, a figure who seemed to stand apart, yet whose importance for Quinn seemed to equal or surpass any of the others’. As he put it to one friend, Rousseau was “a naive mind, a pure mind, an artistic saint, a man who has had an enormous influence upon the great living artists.”[32]
By twenty-first-century standards, Quinn’s exceedingly narrow view of modern genius—let alone the hubris of trying to rank artists in order of importance—seems distinctly old-fashioned. Among other things, his German hatred left him blind to the innovations of Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Wassily Kandinsky, and many other German and Austrian modernists whom Roché admired and whose innovations would later be widely acclaimed. But at a time when no such hierarchy existed, indeed, when there was hardly any systematic study of modern art at all, his choices were remarkably prescient. He was defining the core of what he took to be an enduring movement, and for the most part, he was right. And he was also acting on it, by giving chase to single exceptional works by as many of these leading figures as his income would allow.
—
By the spring of 1922, Quinn, though he was an ocean away, had acquired an almost magical presence in Paris. In February, while Picasso was reserving his best new paintings for him, James Joyce, from a different corner of the city, was cabling him, with laconic gratitude: “ulysses published. thanks.”[33] If Quinn needed an opinion about a late Cézanne he was considering at Vollard’s, Derain was glad to oblige. When he required a large-format photograph of a Picasso or Braque that no one had seen yet, Man Ray was ready to cross Paris to take it.[34] So eager was Brancusi for Quinn’s reactions to his latest works that he would study his letters line by line; one day that summer, Roché found the sculptor in his studio holding the lawyer’s latest dispatch—“scratching his head, using his dictionary, jumping now then from marble blocks to wood blocks, hot, excited, and asking me to read it once with him so that he be quite clear about it.”[35] As they came to know Quinn and his exacting taste, his artist friends also gave considerable thought to their works in New York: Brancusi designed special bases for him to use with his sculptures, and on one occasion, Picasso spent hours at an antiquarian market searching for the perfect frame for a painting he was sending him.[36]
In the international art world, the legend of Quinn’s collection continued to grow. One day, Kojiro Matsukata, Japan’s leading connoisseur of French art, turned up on his doorstep; on another, Emil Gauguin, the painter’s son, came to offer him Gauguins that had remained in the painter’s possession. (Quinn decided his own Gauguins were better.) Among a small but growing number of young acolytes, an invitation to see Quinn’s Picassos was not to be missed. “From a most unlikely looking corner were drawn a dozen paintings that simply swept me off my feet,” Sheldon Cheney, an aspiring critic who went on to write one of the standard primers on modern art, wrote, about an evening at Quinn’s. “Picasso of the Harlequins, Picasso of the ‘blue period,’ Picasso the Cubist (and all Cubism rose in my estimation), Picasso painting great structural women almost without color.”[37]
Despite vows to the contrary, Quinn also continued to provide the backbone of almost every modern art exhibition in New York. That winter, when the Hungarian dealer Joseph Brummer wanted to stage a pair of ambitious shows devoted to the work of Derain and Vlaminck, he relied on two sources: Kahnweiler in Paris and Quinn in New York. (Through Quinn, Kahnweiler was belatedly discovering the potential of the United States, or at least of one New York collector.) Later that spring, when a new space called the Sculptors’ Gallery put on a show of “Contemporary French Art,” arranged by Arthur Davies, it might have been better described as a raid on Quinn’s apartment: Along with a selection of his Braques, Picassos, Derains, and Matisses, the show featured twenty-three of his Brancusis, including the celebrated Golden Bird, which Pound had already written about in The Little Review and on which Mina Loy would soon publish a poem in The Dial. Not in France itself could such a comprehensive show be found, and this was just a sampling of what Quinn had. Even Rosenberg was now borrowing from him to give his Paris exhibitions more luster.
For Roché, Quinn’s paintings had begun to provide the sense of permanence that he found lacking in his own life. That spring and summer, even as he and Quinn were conquering the French art world, Roché had been abandoned by Helen, who had aborted his child and remarried Franz, barely a year after their divorce; Roché was no closer than before to finding an anchor for his restless existence. Yet as he pursued with Quinn what he had begun referring to as “our collection,” he seemed to be building something of lasting value. Surely, the “museum rank” paintings and sculptures they were amassing at Central Park West would one day find their way into a prominent American institution. When Quinn hesitated about the size of some of the paintings Picasso offered him, Roché reassured him that someday, when Picasso’s “name is quite made, museums may want them.”[38]
And yet it was unclear if Quinn would be able to wait that long. By June, he was in precarious health again, and ruled out a repeat summer in Paris. By now, it was four and a half years since his cancer operation and if he was in denial, Jeanne knew that he was on an increasingly limited clock. But while he talked vaguely to Roché about retiring to a “little country place near Paris” where he could install the best of what he called his “French things,” he also couldn’t quite imagine stopping.[39] Even that summer, when his doctor advised two months’ rest, he had difficulty getting away for a short vacation with Jeanne in the Adirondacks, near the mountains where she grew up. During their stay, he gave up smoking, and came back more rested than he felt in years. But soon he was back in the fray, clenched and determined, on Nassau Street. He would have to double down in the time that remained.