16
Rosenberg arrived in New York City in November 1923, a year and a half after Quinn and Roché began buying directly from Picasso. It was the dealer’s first transatlantic crossing, and he was bringing with him nearly two dozen recent, large-format Picasso paintings. At last, he was carrying out his long-held ambition to launch the artist in the United States. The effort would begin with a three-week show at the Wildenstein Gallery in New York; then Rosenberg would take the paintings to Chicago, where he was going to show them at the Art Institute under the auspices of the Arts Club of Chicago. He aimed to stir up interest in the two metropolises that he, and many others after him, would see as holding the key to the coveted American art market.
Even now, though, Rosenberg was operating on blind confidence. Though the U.S. economy was far stronger than it had been in 1921, there were still few indications that interest in twentieth-century modern art was growing. Nor was Rosenberg particularly prepared for what he was getting into. For all of his prominence in Paris, he was, like Picasso, largely unknown in the United States, and while he had a firm grasp on the subtleties of Parisian upper-bourgeois mores, he had hardly any knowledge of American culture and American social dynamics. In New York, he found it difficult even to get appointments with prominent collectors. Meanwhile, because of financial upheavals in France, the French franc was in free fall, threatening to make his already costly trip ruinously expensive. So dejected was he a few days after his arrival that he wrote to Picasso that he was “seized with homesickness” and took consolation in looking at Picasso’s paintings and “imagining myself back on rue La Boétie.”[1]
Still, the dealer counted on several advantages for his show. With the Wildenstein Gallery, he would be able to reach an established New York audience that was apart from the fledgling avant-garde scene. At the same time, he had decided to shun Cubism entirely, shaping the show around a series of large neoclassical paintings of saltimbanques, Harlequins, and other stock characters from Picasso’s repertoire, works of almost calculated beauty and polish that would, he felt, be readily accommodated in any Manhattan townhouse. Above all, he had his friendship with John Quinn, whom he knew had had a central part in the American contemporary art scene for years. Surely, with Quinn’s support, the show would be a success.
—
At the time of Rosenberg’s arrival, Quinn was even more irascible than usual. Over the summer, he’d had a terrible, inexplicable falling-out with Joseph Conrad, his friend of many years, who had snubbed him during a visit to the United States. The matter had so upset him that he had resolved to auction off all of his cherished Conrad manuscripts, breaking a vow never to sell what he collected. (“Mr. Quinn has never been the same again,” Jeanne Foster told a mutual friend, the writer Ford Madox Ford, in Paris, warning him never to speak of Conrad.[2]) Meanwhile, Quinn’s legal work was taking him on multiple, harried errands to Washington and Albany and he was by now deeply unwell. He had lost weight during the fall, and could only tolerate a highly restricted diet.
Despite his general fatigue and physical discomfort, he had also just completed another strenuous voyage to Europe with Foster and Roché—his first since their trip to Paris and Fontainebleau two summers earlier. In the end, it had been a remarkable success, yielding, among other works, another important haul of Picassos, a huge Matisse still life, another major Rousseau, and a striking Cézanne portrait of his father, which Foster had picked out at Bernheim-Jeune on an afternoon when Quinn was too done-in to venture to the galleries. They had even managed to introduce Erik Satie and Constantin Brancusi to the game of golf in the Bois de Boulogne. (Satie, in his bowler hat, jacket, and umbrella, watched and told jokes while Brancusi, with determined precision, hit the ball as hard as he could. Quinn later bought Brancusi a set of clubs.[3]) But the trip had left him wasted and depleted, and Foster had once again stayed on in Paris, leaving him alone in New York.
Nonetheless, Quinn agreed to help Rosenberg in various ways. With the collapse of the French franc, he offered to pay him in dollars for his latest purchases—a huge windfall for the financially strapped dealer. He also shared his legal expertise, incorporating Rosenberg’s gallery as a New York company to facilitate American sales and avoid onerous taxation. As the show was getting under way, Rosenberg was effusive in thanking him, telling Quinn in his idiosyncratic English “how I appreciate your way of doing the things.”[4] But Rosenberg ignored Quinn’s advice about showing Picasso in New York. In their earlier conversations, Quinn had urged Rosenberg to present a “representative” selection of Picasso’s work in different styles, and to include less expensive drawings, which he thought would have a better chance with an uninitiated public. He also warned him not to use the Wildenstein Gallery, which was primarily known for Old Masters. “They have clients who are not educated up to Picasso,” Quinn told him. With painful speed, Rosenberg discovered how right Quinn had been.[5]
The Wildenstein Gallery was located in a five-story mansion on a part of Fifth Avenue known as Vanderbilt Row. The neighborhood was the very epicenter of the Gilded Age aristocracy, with much of the surrounding property owned by Astors, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers. For anyone selling Rembrandts and Holbeins, the location couldn’t be better. For Picassos, it was another story. Despite Rosenberg’s efforts to tame his artist into a handsome matinee idol, Wildenstein’s wealthy clientele stayed away. “Where in Paris one would be thronged with visitors,” Rosenberg wrote Picasso, “very few people have come—in a city of 6 million inhabitants.” Meanwhile, the small coterie of New Yorkers who already knew about Picasso’s work—the city’s “Montparnassians” as the dealer put it—were baffled by the bland presentation. “They think that someone has changed their Picasso,” he wrote, with seeming lack of self-awareness.[6]
As the exhibition continued, Rosenberg became more and more worried. He also realized he needed Quinn. If only he could tap into Quinn’s modernist circle, he might stir interest in the show. Soon he found the opening he needed. He had long been determined to see Quinn’s storied art collection, and given all the business they had done together, Quinn would surely be glad to oblige him. Such a meeting would provide an opportunity for Rosenberg to reengage him in his American Picasso venture. Contacting the lawyer again, he asked for a tour. “Rosenberg was very, very anxious to come see my things,” Quinn wrote Roché. At first, pleading fatigue and overwork, Quinn delayed, but as the exhibition reached its final days, he saw he could wait no longer, and, at the last minute, decided to host a small dinner for Rosenberg and a few other friends at his apartment.
On a wet Wednesday evening in early December, Quinn brought together a characteristically lively group: Mitchell Kennerley, the flamboyant British American publisher, whose books Quinn had defended against obscenity charges in court; Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach, a bibliophile and polymath who was one of the leading rare book sellers in the world; Muriel Ciolkowska, a brilliant poet and journalist who had lived in France for years and was close to James Joyce; and “El Greggo”—Frederick James Gregg—who had been Quinn’s ally in the modernist cause going back to the days of the Armory Show. Rounding out the company were the two prominent art dealers: Felix Wildenstein, the émigré Frenchman who ran the New York branch of the Wildenstein Gallery, and Rosenberg himself.
Lubricated by two quarts of pre-Prohibition champagne, the dinner got off to a racing start. Rosenbach, who traveled to Europe constantly and reveled in Shermanesque marches through the London and Paris book auctions, was an exceptional raconteur. Madame Ciolkowska, who had arrived with him, more than held her own in the otherwise all-male company. In between, while Quinn furnished acerbic comments about French politics and Irish writers, Gregg contributed his devilish wit and Kennerley his off-color humor. The art dealers seemed to be enjoying themselves too. Quinn had never met Wildenstein, who was the cousin of Rosenberg’s Paris colleague Georges Wildenstein, but he was affable and worldly and mixed easily with the others. For his part, Rosenberg, too, seemed pleased to find himself among the friends of the most important Picasso collector in the world.
In reality, though, Rosenberg was not at all at ease. While his English was proficient, he found it difficult to follow the rapid cross talk, and as the evening progressed, he grew more and more agitated. At first, as the guests flew from one topic to another, he kept trying to steer the talk to the art world. Then, addressing Quinn directly, he began to tell him about several paintings he had brought with him from Paris that he was storing at Wildenstein’s. “Mr. Quinn,” he said at one point, “won’t you come in to see me so I can show you a wonderful portrait of Madame Cézanne?” A few minutes later, Rosenberg tried again. “Mr. Quinn, why don’t you come in and let me show you a wonderful Lautrec?” This time, the lawyer was stony; he could not abide the “shop” talk at dinner. Still, Rosenberg would not let up. Misreading Quinn’s pique as distraction, he was determined to get his attention. “Mr. Quinn,” he interrupted again, how about “some lovely Braques.” The other guests began to notice it as well: Rosenberg seemed fixated on his paintings and could talk of nothing else.[7]
In fact, the dealer was facing a looming crisis. The show at Wildenstein’s had gone nowhere; his high-end strategy was proving to be a disaster. No one was buying his Picassos, and the dozens of American collectors whom he assumed would be ready to follow Quinn into modern art had not materialized. Even to Picasso, he could not hide his bitter disappointment. “Your exhibition is a great success,” he wrote him. “And like all successes, we have sold absolutely nothing!”[8] He still needed to go to Chicago, where sales were even less likely, and with the collapsing French franc, he was hemorrhaging money. Now, as the guests finished eating and he waited for Quinn to begin showing his paintings, Rosenberg was nearly desperate. He felt that it might be his last opportunity to stir Quinn into action. As with New York itself, however, he fatally misjudged his host.
Around 9:30, Quinn began his familiar ritual. Many of his best pictures were stored in two back bedrooms, and he brought out the ones he wanted to show them, one by one. This time, though, he chose with special care: He didn’t want Rosenberg to see the paintings he’d acquired directly from Picasso, to preserve the possibility of future such arrangements; nor did he want Rosenberg to know about some of his recent purchases from other private sources in Paris. One of these was Seurat’s spectacular final painting, Circus, which had not been on the market but which Quinn had managed to acquire from Seurat’s protégé, Paul Signac, after a prolonged secret negotiation. Kennerley and Gregg knew about Circus, but Quinn had ordered them to keep their mouths shut, and during the entire evening it remained in a back room under a cover.
Even so, as Quinn brought out some of the Picassos he had acquired in earlier years and many other paintings, it seemed to put Rosenberg on edge. Finally, he turned to him and brought up what was really on his mind:
“Mr. Quinn, why doesn’t Arthur B. Davies come to see my Picasso exhibition?” he asked. Quinn was surprised and annoyed to be put on the spot about his longtime New York friend. He said he had no idea about Davies. But Rosenberg pressed on.
“Why can’t you bring him?”
“I don’t bring Davies anyplace,” Quinn snapped. “He either takes himself or he doesn’t go.”
Rosenberg was disconcerted; surely Quinn’s friends would want to see Picasso’s new work. A little while later, as Quinn showed them more of his paintings, the dealer started in again. He asked Quinn if he would bring Miss Bliss to see his show. By now, Quinn was seething.
“I don’t bring Miss Bliss.”
The mood of the evening soured as the other guests watched the painful confrontation play out. After their exchange, Rosenberg finally let the matter drop. For both men, though, it was an explosive turning point. Having failed with Quinn, Rosenberg left the dinner feeling that he could not crack the city’s obscure social codes and that he would be unable to turn his show around. In the elevator down from Quinn’s apartment, he confided to Kennerley that he had sold almost nothing and that he was “disgusted with America.”
But it was Quinn who went radioactive. Rosenberg had ignored his advice about the show and then, having limited himself to a sterile group of living-room-ready Harlequins, priced the work far too high. Nevertheless, Quinn had incorporated his gallery, paid him handsomely in dollars, and, despite his vow not to entertain, invited him to dine with his friends and see his collection. Now, as Quinn’s guest, Rosenberg was pressuring Quinn to rescue his show? If the Picasso venture was causing Rosenberg grief, it was his affair. Quinn was through.
The next morning, in a hateful letter to Roché, Quinn gave an eviscerating account of the evening in which he suddenly devolved into the ugly, tribal mindset of his Irish American working-class youth. He began benignly enough, telling Roché how anxious he was to hear from Foster in Paris. “I have not had a single word from her by cable or letter,” he wrote. He knew she was returning soon, but this time their separation had pierced him with uncharacteristic force. But then he went on to describe the dinner and how he had reluctantly arranged it for Rosenberg, identifying each of the guests, who he knew would be of interest to Roché. “Rosenbach is a very fine man and a very amusing man,” he wrote. “So is Kennerley…. Wildenstein is a perfect gentleman. But Rosenberg showed himself to be a cheap little Jew.”[9]
A cheap little Jew. Here was Quinn letting rip all the latent prejudice of his time. Quinn, the progress-minded, cosmopolitan friend of writers and artists, the champion of innovation, the internationalist who railed against American provincialism and the benighted worldview of his fellow Irish Americans, the fearless modernist who fought against obscenity laws, blasted the intolerance of the Catholic Church, and ridiculed the eugenicist thinking of the country’s conservative art critics—at a dinner of highly cultivated Jews and gentiles in his own home, he had succumbed to the same rank cultural attitudes that he had spent so much of his career seemingly defying.
The current ran deep. Amid the cultural and racial angst of early 1920s America, Jews had become a primary target of crude stereotypes, with anti-Jewish policies extending from the country’s elite schools, which began to severely limit the number of Jewish students, to exclusionary real-estate covenants, to the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, many of whose chapters fomented anti-Semitism alongside their campaign of terror against African Americans. The New York bar itself, in which Quinn’s professional career played out, was notoriously segregated, with corporate law largely dominated by large Protestant firms, and Jewish firms operating on a second tier. Meanwhile, the country had had an influx of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who were culturally apart from their highly assimilated Western European counterparts of earlier decades. Since Quinn’s arrival in New York at the turn of the century, more than a million and a half Jewish immigrants had settled in the city’s five boroughs, fundamentally changing local demographics and helping fuel a new anti-immigrant alarmism among the elite.
To a man as worldly as Quinn, such attitudes should have been deplorable. Irish Americans were as prone to prejudice as any other group, and had a long tradition of denigrating “Hebrews” and others, even as they found themselves on the receiving end of WASP disdain. But Quinn had come very far from his provincial roots and could barely hide his antipathy for Catholic narrow-mindedness; he had also sought a life among artists, publishers, impresarios, and critics, who were often Jewish. He was one of Alfred Stieglitz’s most important clients; an early patron of the sculptor Jacob Epstein; a literary sparring partner with Alfred Knopf. He had socialized for years with Otto Kahn, the chairman of the Metropolitan Opera, with whom he had plotted various cultural projects; and he was friendly with Joseph Stransky, the director of the Philharmonic, who lent paintings to the Met’s 1921 post-Impressionist show. In Paris, Rosenberg was only one of several art dealers he had longstanding ties with, including the Bernheims and Kahnweiler; he had also cultivated Alphonse Kann, from the great banking family, whom he regarded as one of the most discerning art collectors in the world. A year before the dinner with Rosenberg, he had enthusiastically supported the work of Swiss critic Albert Dreyfus, who was writing a major book in German about Picasso. It would have been hard to find many gentiles in New York at the time who had as many Jewish friends as Quinn did.
And yet he never quite did escape, and he was capable in moments of indulging in some of the era’s most ferocious racial tropes. To Roché he complained about the Jews—“which is another word for international finance”—derailing the economic reconstruction of Europe; to Irish friends and salty correspondents like Ezra Pound, he could be more blatant, decrying the “million Jews, who are mere walking appetites, seven or eight hundred thousand dagos, a couple of hundred thousand Slovaks, fifty or sixty thousand Croats, and seven or eight thousand Germans” who were allegedly overrunning New York.[10] It was a confounding flaw, and one that was shockingly pervasive among the first generation of modernists. For all their promise to transform language and reinvent painting, the new artists and writers were often as susceptible to intolerance as others. Eliot wrote anti-Semitic poems; in later years, Pound would be drawn down the road of Italian Fascism. Among French artists, there was a current of anti-Semitism going back to Degas and Renoir in the late nineteenth century; it would continue on with the Fauvist painter Vlaminck, who later supported the Vichy regime. One day in late 1919, Clive Bell, the Bloomsbury critic and modernist aesthete, happened to be in Rosenberg’s Paris gallery when news arrived of Renoir’s death. When Rosenberg reacted with considerable emotion, it sent Bell into a bigoted rant. “This black jew, with the smutty tears on his cheeks,” Bell reported to his mistress, Mary Hutchinson.[11] Bell may have been unaware of Rosenberg’s close friendship with Renoir during the artist’s final years, but his words were particularly ironic in view of Renoir’s own complicated history of Jewish patrons on the one hand and anti-Jewish prejudice on the other.
Following the dinner at Quinn’s, Rosenberg carried on valiantly with his Picasso plans, setting out for Chicago by train a week later. By now, however, he had few hopes for his show, and even before he got there, he began tempering Picasso’s expectations. In a letter to Picasso, he described this second stop primarily as an opportunity to “meet people” and introduce his art; sales would likely be out of the question. “I doubt very much it will have the same success as in New York,” he wrote, straining to put a good face on what had already become an unmitigated failure.[12]
Rosenberg’s assumptions were not wrong this time. There were no sales at all, and by the time he left Chicago, he could barely hide his exasperation with American culture. “I’m impatient to see you again, to speak with you and exchange ideas,” Rosenberg wrote Picasso shortly before his departure. “The people here are so stupid!” When the dealer finally embarked for Europe again, around the turn of the new year, he had almost nothing to show for his hugely expensive transatlantic venture. A full twelve years after Stieglitz had tried it, a group of Picassos that had been brought to New York for exhibition were once again returning to Paris unsold. Only this time, they were major paintings rather than drawings, and the stakes were considerably higher. Perhaps the United States was not suited for modern art after all. “For selling your art, 21 Boétie is the only place,” he told Picasso, ominously. “The atmosphere of a new continent is not hospitable to new painting. It is better suited to the art of the past.”[13]