18
In January 1926, Alfred Barr went up from Princeton to New York to see some paintings. For a brief period of time, the Art Center, a two-story exhibition hall on East Fifty-sixth Street, was offering a rare glimpse at one of the most unusual private art collections in the world. Many of the nearly one hundred works in the exhibition were by artists who were still scarcely known in the United States; a number of them were said to be among the most distinctive of their kind. For Barr, it was a crucial opportunity.
Four and a half years after his first fleeting encounter with Matisse and Picasso at the Metropolitan’s controversial post-Impressionist show, Barr had become an aspiring scholar of modern art. Though he was barely out of college, he had gained a reputation at Princeton and Harvard for his brilliance and his quiet radicalism. Already the previous spring, despite only a single year of graduate coursework, he’d opted to take his general exams—and astonished his examiners by his performance. “One got the impression that he had thought deeply and ranged widely over the whole field,” one of them wrote.[1] But Barr was bored with the curriculum and had taken to complaining openly about the universities’ disdain for the current era. At Princeton, where he was now on a one-year teaching fellowship, there was still no course in twentieth-century modern art; at Harvard, the post-Impressionists were completely ignored.[2] In fact, few museums in the United States had works by any of these artists, and much of Barr’s own patchy knowledge came from back issues of The Dial and Vanity Fair.[3] Now, however, there was an exhibition hall in New York that was apparently filled with their paintings.
Arriving at the Art Center, Barr quickly found that the show exceeded his expectations. It began with several dozen paintings by some of the most interesting and daring living Americans, artists like Max Weber, Alfred Maurer, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Sheeler. Ordinarily, these canvases would have made a distinguished show in themselves. Here, though, they were merely a prelude to something else. As Barr went farther into the gallery, he found himself in front of a series of astonishing paintings by the modernists whose names went unmentioned at Harvard: Van Gogh, Seurat, Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Derain, Vlaminck, Dufy, Rouault, de La Fresnaye, and Picasso. There was a terrifically inside-out work by Braque, a green-and-gray cluster of fractured volumes from which emerged the contours of a large violin and a tall candlestick; and an enormous Matisse still life, transfigured by geometric structuring and bold swaths of color. Scattered among them were Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s wittily abstract bronze woman, and Brancusi’s Golden Bird. Then, at a certain point, Barr found himself ensnared by a supremely strange painting of a lion and a sleeping woman. It was by Henri Rousseau. He would never forget the encounter. “It made a profound impression on me,” he wrote almost three decades later. “More than anything else in a show of wonderful pictures.”[4]
—
Barr was getting his first—and, as it would turn out, only—sustained look at the art patronage of John Quinn. Officially titled The Memorial Exhibition of Representative Works Selected from the John Quinn Collection, the show was a small and imperfect sample of what had been found in the lawyer’s apartment when he died eighteen months earlier. Left out were many of his most important Seurats, Picassos, Matisses, Brancusis, Gaudier-Brzeskas, and other works, while the show also included lesser English and Irish works that Quinn had acquired earlier in his career. Yet as Barr took in the presentation, he began to appreciate the audacity of Quinn’s project, and to understand that he had been up to something greater than simply buying paintings he liked. As Barr would later reflect, in the short time that he had pursued modern art, Quinn had managed to assemble “many of the best works by many of the best artists.”[5]
Barr was not the only one impressed by the exhibition. “Eight square feet of Matisse with his blacks and burning reds and greens,” Murdock Pemberton, the jaunty, Kansas-born critic wrote in Harold Ross’s brand-new New Yorker. “Rousseau’s great lion with mane of rope and asses nose. ‘The Maternity of Picasso.’ The haunting melodies of Redon’s palette.” In The New York Times, Sheldon Cheney, the art writer who had met Quinn a few years earlier, wrote, “America has plenty of great art collectors of the ‘safe’ variety….John Quinn stands out from all those safe collectors as something of an epic figure.” In a lead editorial, Forbes Watson, the editor of The Arts, a prominent arts magazine, argued that “any museum, desirous of acquiring contemporary art” should be envious of the paintings at the Art Center. “Perhaps more than any other American collector,” Watson wrote, “Mr. Quinn ate, drank, argued, played and lived with artists actively engaged in promoting the cause of modern art.”[6]
But if the exhibition conveyed the peculiar power of one man’s unusual taste, it also gave Barr a visceral lesson in the limits of the American art world. For all the critics’ interest, the excitement was short-lived. The show ran for only three weeks; and far from establishing the collection in the city’s cultural firmament, it amounted to little more than a last-ditch effort by Quinn’s friends to exhibit a group of works that would never be seen together again. A few days after the Art Center show opened, The New York Times reported that the estate of the late collector had sold fifty-two of his Picassos, together with many of his Seurats, to a Paris dealer.[7] A few months after the show, many of Quinn’s most important remaining French paintings, including works by Cézanne, Derain, Matisse, Gris, Redon, and Rouault, were also sent back to France to be auctioned at the Hôtel Drouot. Some of Quinn’s final purchases, like Rousseau’s incomparable Sleeping Gypsy, would be leaving the United States barely two years after they arrived. “See the show,” Pemberton urged his readers. “For when the collection is dispersed you will not have the chance without traveling far and wide. There will be none left in New York.”
For much of the previous year and a half, Quinn’s friends had done everything they could to prevent this outcome. Already, the day after his death, Frederick James Gregg had argued in the New York Sun that the collection “ought to find a home somewhere in its integrity.”[8] Soon after, Ezra Pound had written to Quinn’s legal secretary urging that the paintings be kept in the United States and open to the public, a call that was echoed by Arthur Davies, Henry McBride, Walter Pach, and other members of Quinn’s circle. Though he did not know Quinn well, Duncan Phillips, the prominent Washington, D.C., collector and founder of the Phillips Collection, went further: The collection, he said, should be kept intact as a “museum of modern art.”[9]
But Quinn had left his own final intentions oddly unresolved. In Paris, Henri-Pierre Roché had long assumed, like Quinn’s New York friends, that the immaculate big game works they were hunting were destined, as he put it, “for the Metropolitan or for some other museums of the U.S.A.” Yet in a moment of distemper two years before his death, Quinn had privately dismissed the idea. He told Roché that he wanted to preserve the core modern and avant-garde works that they had assembled since the war. “What I have in mind is a certain selection of French works that are of museum rank and importance,” he told Roché. “These are paintings I would never part with.” But he also said that after so many years of struggle for modern art, he had lost faith in the United States. Anyway, the Metropolitan was highly unlikely to accept his paintings. “These Picassos belong in France,” he had said.[10]
If Quinn hoped to preserve his most significant artworks, whether in France or the United States, though, his wishes were poorly understood. The main instrument for dealing with his assets was the hasty will he had drawn up back in 1918, at the time of his cancer surgery, and redrafted shortly before his death. But that document made no differentiation among his paintings and sculptures and ordered that all the art he owned be liquidated to benefit his sister and her daughter.[11] It also did not seem to take account of the final six years of his life, when he and Roché had assembled a cohesive group of avant-garde paintings and sculptures. And while Quinn had grown increasingly disenchanted with the American art world after the “degenerate” art controversy at the Metropolitan, he made several later addenda to the will that seemed to conflict with the idea of a total liquidation. To start with, he wanted Seurat’s final masterpiece, Circus, to go to the Louvre, as he had promised Seurat’s protégé, Paul Signac. But he made no mention of the many other standout works that he had especially prized—Picasso’s lyrical late Cubist masterpieces and his archaic nudes; Matisse’s Blue Nude, which had once scandalized visitors to the Armory Show; Brancusi’s Golden Bird; Derain’s The Bagpiper; nor The Sleeping Gypsy, which, along with Circus, he had set up next to his deathbed.
In fact, in a separate set of instructions, Quinn had outlined a plan—a “possible contingency,” as he put it—to keep his most important paintings and sculptures together. The core of the collection—perhaps several hundred paintings and sculptures—could be preserved for the public trust, he wrote, provided that Davies, his well-connected friend, could raise $250,000 to purchase them from the estate.[12] The quarter million figure was perhaps only half of what Quinn had spent, but the plan would create the nucleus of the modern museum that he had long envisioned, while ensuring that his sister and niece would be well cared for. In an era in which a single painting by Rembrandt or Gainsborough could go for several multiples of this figure, the amount was hardly extravagant. And Davies also knew several wealthy women—including Quinn’s friends Lillie Bliss and Mary Sullivan—who understood the importance of Quinn’s legacy.
Davies made an impassioned case. His own alliance with Quinn went back to the Armory Show, and he had followed his art conquests for years. During the wartime art boom in New York, he had gone on almost weekly rounds with Quinn to the galleries to select paintings. Later, he had organized the 1922 show of Quinn’s paintings and sculptures at the Sculptors’ Gallery, and then, in the final months of Quinn’s life, he had attended the small dinner at which Quinn had unveiled The Sleeping Gypsy, the keystone of his collection. Davies fervently wanted these works to stay together. But for all the sympathy his plan drew, he was unable to persuade the women to fund the project.
Meanwhile, Quinn’s estate itself was in disarray. For one thing, he had never bothered to catalog what he owned, and no one was certain just what his apartment contained. Nor were his executors particularly interested in modern art. Quinn had intended his longtime legal secretary, Thomas Curtin, who had followed his purchases for years, to provide guidance, but Curtin died six months after Quinn. That left, as his remaining executors, a New York lawyer who had known Quinn for years but did not share his aesthetic tastes; and the National Bank of Commerce, for which Quinn had long served as legal counsel, an institution that was far more comfortable with monetary trusts than radical paintings and wanted to get rid of them as soon as possible. “We don’t want Wall Street laughing at us as the Cubist bank,” one of the bank’s officers told a friend of Quinn’s.[13]
—
Quinn’s years of overlapping female relationships created problems of their own. Alongside Jeanne Foster, he left financial bequests to several women he had been with over the years. One of them was Dorothy Coates, a schoolteacher he’d had a desultory relationship with in the early part of his career, and who had pursued him for years afterward. (Foster referred to Coates as “the dragon,” and Quinn, during his final illness, asked Foster and his caretakers not to let Coates see him under any pretext.) Shortly after the will was unsealed, Coates came forward with an explosive claim: She asserted that she was Quinn’s common-law wife and was entitled to a much larger share of his estate; she also maintained, absurdly, that she “knew every picture he bought and its history.” The case was eventually dismissed in Surrogate’s Court, but not before it made sensational headlines. (girl can’t collect from quinn estate, the Times had reported.)[14]
Left with no alternatives, the executors decided to liquidate the collection. At first they contemplated doing exactly what Quinn feared most: putting everything into an enormous auction. Jeanne Foster knew better than anyone else that Quinn regarded his collection as a work of art in itself and had feared its dispersal in an unsympathetic world. “If anything happened to me and there was a sale of my paintings,” he had told her during his final illness, “there would be a slaughter.” As much as he loved his artists, he sensed, in his bitter decline, that they carried very little meaning in 1920s America. “The large Picasso nudes could hardly be given away now,” he had told her. In desperation, Foster wrote to the executors, pleading with them to delay their plans and warning that many of Quinn’s paintings were “fifty years ahead of popular taste.”[15] But Foster had no legal standing with the estate and her influence was limited.
Still, there was Roché. Serendipitously, he had been invited to New York a few months after Quinn’s death, to assist a prominent French theater director who was touring North America. Foster had warned him that the fate of Quinn’s pictures hung in doubt and the trip gave him a perfect opportunity to meet with the executors and try to influence the outcome. Aware of Roché’s close collaboration with Quinn and his expertise in the Paris market, they welcomed his help. After he met with them in New York, they asked him to evaluate the most important works in the collection; they also wanted his advice about their disposal.
That winter, Roché spent several days alone in Quinn’s apartment, surrounded by all the paintings he had helped acquire.[16] For the first time, he could see the ensemble of works that the two of them had assembled. As he waded through the stacks and piles of paintings, turning them over one by one, his esteem for Quinn, the choices he made, the risks he took, grew further. “No other collection had this kind of concision and punch,” he wrote.[17] Like Foster, he knew that auctioning the paintings in New York would be disastrous; only in Europe was their true value known. He advised the executors to delay any sales, and to consider holding them in Paris instead.
Then, looking at all of Quinn’s Picassos, he had another idea. It was true, as Quinn had told Foster, that few people in the United States seemed ready for Picasso’s big nudes, his Cubist still lifes, or even his Blue and Rose period masterpieces. But Roché knew at least one art connoisseur who had a deep interest in Picasso and had long followed Quinn’s exploits in the Paris art world. He also knew that this man stood to lose almost as much as the Quinn estate if there was a general collapse in prices for Picasso and other artists. He felt fairly certain that the man would be more than eager to make an offer on Quinn’s Picassos, if he were given the chance. The man was Paul Rosenberg. What if Roché engineered a private deal between Rosenberg and the executors?
In fact, Rosenberg had had his eye on Quinn’s collection from almost the moment he learned of Quinn’s death, if not well before. (“Perhaps you know that Quinn is dead and there’s talk of selling his paintings!” Rosenberg wrote Picasso in the fall of 1924.)[18] Rosenberg was intrigued by Roché’s plan, and in early 1925, Roché approached the executors about a possible deal. “I presented you as the only man who has financial interests that are identical with those of the estate,” Roché wrote Rosenberg.[19]
The executors took their time, but in the end, the strategy worked. By the time the memorial exhibition opened at the Art Center, the executors were anxious to get rid of the artworks as quietly and efficiently as they could. Persuaded that Rosenberg was rescuing them from looming catastrophe, they let him walk away—for a significant discount—with nearly all of Quinn’s Picassos, as well as several important Seurats and other paintings. For Rosenberg, it was a remarkable coup. Having long fought with Quinn over how best to promote Picasso’s work in the United States, he was getting the last word: For the foreseeable future, the center of the artist’s work would be rue La Boétie, not Central Park West.
When they learned of the Picasso sale, some of Quinn’s friends were furious. Here was an unparalleled sweep of works that told the story of one of the leading modern artists through some of his most important paintings. If ever there were a case for keeping the core of Quinn’s collection intact in the United States, it was the Picassos. Yet now they were being scooped up and sent back across the ocean. In The Dial, Henry McBride grumbled about “the immense loot from the Quinn Collection that Mr. Rosenberg is taking back to Paris.”[20] In The Independent, Gregg wrote that the loss of Quinn’s paintings was “likely to put us back by a quarter of a century.”[21] But Roché was certain he had done the right thing: The United States was not ready for these Picassos. Quinn had said so himself. In turning them over to Rosenberg, he was doing the best he could for Quinn and his estate, while saving Picasso from yet another American embarrassment. He also stood to gain a handsome commission on the deal.
That fall, the other post-Impressionist and avant-garde masterpieces that Quinn’s executors had sent back to France were put up for sale at the same Paris auction house where Kahnweiler’s own vast collection of Cubist works had been dispersed a few years earlier. The catalog for the sale was introduced by Picasso’s friend Jean Cocteau. “John Quinn was one of the four or five people in all the world who discovered everything that vibrated, everything that moved,” Cocteau wrote. Buoyed by Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy and Matisse’s Blue Nude, the auction attracted enormous attention. “The John Quinn Collection, which should be in a state museum, is now up for resale, its magnificent unity destroyed in the Parisian auction rooms of the Hôtel Drouot,” Janet Flanner wrote, in one of her first French dispatches for The New Yorker. She added, “For forty-eight hours Mr. Quinn was better known in Paris than he had ever been known in New York.”[22]
Flanner was not wrong. Although a few adventurous American buyers took an interest in his paintings, Quinn remained an enigma. In early 1927, after the cream of the collection had been sold in Europe, the remaining eight hundred paintings and sculptures were sold off in a four-day auction in New York. The sale attracted considerable attention and, owing to the sheer quantity of lots, yielded $91,570; though the amount still paled in comparison to the value of a single Gainsborough or Vermeer, it would stand for years to come as the most lucrative sale of modern art ever held in the United States. Yet it was hard to deny the darker story about American culture told by the dissolution of the Quinn estate. In New York, some Cubist and Futurist works went for as little as $7.50 apiece; Roché called the sale a “massacre” and estimated that it achieved about 50 percent of the purchase prices.[23]
Devalued and dispersed, many of the works would disappear altogether. Decades later, when an art historian attempted to trace the present location of the paintings and sculptures that Quinn had collected, she concluded that three-quarters of them could no longer be found.[24] And once the collection was gone, there were remarkably few traces of Quinn left. Summoned home to care for her aging husband and her father, Jeanne Foster resigned from the Review of Reviews and withdrew to her family in Schenectady, where she kept a small private shrine to Quinn. Roché resumed his complicated life in Paris, deciding, finally, to marry Germaine, his demure and patient French love, while not quite abandoning his affair with Helen, his German torment. Even the apartment where Quinn had kept all that art turned out to have been merely a rental, and no known photographs of its cavernous art-filled rooms would survive. Soon his singular achievement was little more than a fading, exotic memory among those New Yorkers and foreigners who had had the fortune to be invited to his home, or to see the Art Center exhibition.
At least for Alfred Barr, though, the unusual show was less an end than a beginning. He was struck by what he called Quinn’s “astonishing prowess” for finding the most interesting new art, when much of it was deeply unpopular. There was also a thrilling sense of freedom in his choices, the same freedom from traditional ideas and cultural restraints that seemed to be present in the new artists themselves. Reflecting on the show, he would call Quinn the country’s “most emancipated” art collector. But he was also struck by his motivations. Here was a comprehensive vision of French modern art, told through its most inspiring examples, a vision that began with ancestors like Cézanne and Seurat, and continued through Matisse and Picasso to the present day. It was a story that was utterly absent from the country’s museums. It was also a story that Barr himself desperately wanted to tell.