23
For the young director of an unheralded foreign museum, the summer of 1930 was not a particularly auspicious moment to attempt a show of one of Paris’s most prominent artists. For one thing, in contrast to New York, Paris had been relatively unscathed by the initial months of the international financial crisis, and its burgeoning art scene bore little resemblance to the intimate world that John Quinn had known a decade earlier. Since the midtwenties, an influx of foreign capital, and an unrelenting vogue for modern art, had transformed the city’s art quarters into a dense jungle of galleries and elegant shops, and Rosenberg was no longer alone in pursuing a high-end trade in avant-garde paintings. Rue La Boétie itself had become a kind of Gold Coast, with half a dozen major dealers competing for wealthy clientele. “The street has been given over to the most glamorous stores,” Tériade, one of the city’s leading art critics, had observed.[1] The local art boom added challenges of its own to an unproven New York venture that had hardly any art of its own and no money to buy it.
In theory, Rosenberg should have welcomed Barr’s Picasso project. After all, he had been trying to bring the artist’s work across the Atlantic—and to prominent American museums—for nearly a decade. But by the time Barr was getting started, Rosenberg was no longer thinking much about the United States; he was squarely focused on his life in Paris. Since his disastrous effort to show Picasso’s work in New York and Chicago in 1923, Rosenberg’s ascent had been remarkable. Two years later, he was boasting to Picasso that “all the clients in the world are in Paris and occupy me from morning until night.”[2] Soon he had lured Braque and Léger—two of the other leading figures from Kahnweiler’s old stable—to join Picasso in his gallery; through the secondary market, he also built a growing inventory of Matisses and Derains. Fueled by the new European market, Rosenberg’s dominance over the pioneer avant-garde generation had begun to rival Kahnweiler’s monopoly before the war. By the late twenties, his decision to buy up Quinn’s Picassos and bring them back to Paris looked increasingly astute. “Five of the greatest names in contemporary art are now on view at the Paul Rosenberg gallery,” the critic for L’Intransigeant had written the previous spring.[3]
In contrast to his earlier ventures in New York, Rosenberg’s activities in Paris had also become extraordinarily profitable. After his first show at the dealer’s gallery, Braque bought an Alfa Romeo roadster; with Rosenberg’s steady purchases, Marie Laurencin funded an obsession with Chanel couture. With the money he had accrued over the previous decade, Picasso had bought a château in Gisors, north of Paris. And Rosenberg himself had lately acquired a stable of thoroughbreds. “I’ve bought many fillies this season,” he told Picasso. “I now own ten horses.”[4]
Nor was it only the French market that Barr was competing against. In Paris, Rosenberg had come to be known as much for his curatorial talent as for his business acumen. Unlike Kahnweiler, Rosenberg was no intellectual. He did not aspire to analyze the sources of Picasso’s art or the evolution of Braque’s Cubism; he was a man governed by his eye and his shrewd instincts. Yet in more than one way, his innovative shows seemed to anticipate what Barr was trying to do in New York. In a large Picasso exhibition in the midtwenties, Rosenberg had introduced sleek modern picture frames, in place of the ornate gilded frames commonly in use, to give the paintings a clean and uniform setting; like Barr, he also preferred to hang paintings in single rows rather than stacked on top of each other in the traditional manner. And just as the Museum of Modern Art had set out to do in its first few seasons, he continued to alternate more challenging shows of new art with distinctive presentations of classic modern paintings.
In Paris, Rosenberg was increasingly recognized as a shaper of French culture. Shortly after Alfred and Marga arrived, the critic Louis Vauxcelles wrote a front-page feature in Excelsior, arguing that “the most beautiful painting exhibitions of the last few years have been organized by—and at—Paul Rosenberg’s gallery.”[5] Rosenberg had also been named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, an unusual accolade for an art dealer. That same summer, even as Barr was desperately trying to locate paintings for his Corot-Daumier exhibition, the dealer opened a landmark Corot retrospective on rue La Boétie that included a catalog written by Élie Faure, a prominent French art historian, and was considered one of the most important shows ever done on the artist. In early June, the French president and the French secretary of beaux-arts came in person to see it. If Quinn had failed to impress Teddy Roosevelt at the Armory Show, Rosenberg was no longer having any difficulty with the leaders of France.[6]
Yet the greatest obstacles to Alfred’s Picasso plans were arguably more personal: Despite such outward success, both Rosenberg and Picasso were going through turmoil in their own lives that had created new tensions on rue La Boétie—and new turbulence in their alliance. First was the matter of Picasso’s faltering marriage. The critic for L’Intransigeant was not wrong in detecting a current of romantisme tourmenté, tormented romanticism, in the new paintings of his that Rosenberg had shown the previous spring. For years, the artist had been unable to reconcile his restless spirit with the expectations of his bourgeois household. As he rebelled, Olga found herself increasingly isolated and abandoned. Her dancing career with the Ballets Russes, which had once taken her all over Europe and North America, had been cruelly ended by a leg injury she had suffered just before their wedding, and she was now virtually cut off from her struggling family in Soviet Russia. She also began to suffer a series of physical and psychological troubles, sometimes spending months at a time in treatment.
As Olga and Picasso’s relationship fell apart, she poured her energy into their ruthlessly ordered home—her domain—while Picasso sought escape in the large studio he began renting on the floor above. They had violent arguments; while she was stirred to fury, Picasso was withdrawn and detached. More and more, he felt trapped in the existence that Rosenberg had set up for him, and he viewed Olga, however unfairly, as the embodiment of all that was stifling him.
Then, in early 1927, he met Marie-Thérèse Walter, a beguiling and very young blond woman of Swedish and German origin, at the Galeries Lafayette. “I am Picasso,” he told her. She was seventeen and a half at the time, and he was forty-five; his name meant nothing to her. Nevertheless, she agreed to meet again. “He charmed me,” she later recalled. Soon after, she began spending long hours at his studio posing for him, and by the following summer—she later insisted she was eighteen by then—they had begun an intense affair. “He told me that I had saved his life, but I had no idea what he meant,” she said.[7]
Today, it is difficult not to view Walter’s youth and their extraordinary age difference without alarm. By her own later accounts, she was deeply in love with Picasso, and though he clearly wielded enormous control, their relationship lasted, quite untroubled, for nearly a decade. Even at the time, though, he took unusual care to keep her presence in his life entirely secret. He withdrew almost completely from Parisian life, finding escape in his new passion and the private art it inspired. (“Give me a vision of a new Picasso,” Rosenberg wrote him pleadingly in the summer of 1927. But the “new Picasso” was dominated by imagery of a young woman he did not want anyone to know about, not even his dealer.[8]) Having a few years earlier been an almost ubiquitous figure at Diaghilev’s ballets and the parties of the beau monde, Picasso had virtually disappeared. “He does not answer letters on principle, and telephone callers are informed that he is not at home,” the Count de Beaumont complained, a few weeks before Alfred and Marga’s arrival in Paris.[9]
By the summer of 1930—three and a half years into Picasso’s relationship with Marie-Thérèse—Picasso was spending less and less time in Paris. That spring, he had purchased a huge, rambling country house, the Château de Boisgeloup in Gisors, forty miles outside of the city. It was run-down and not even heated. But it suited the artist just fine: He would have ample space to pursue sculpture, his new passion, and he could avoid the endless intrusions of Parisian life. Quite clearly, it was also a refuge from not only Olga but also Rosenberg, who soon began to refer to Boisgeloup as Bois Jaloux, the “jealous wood.” For long stretches now, Picasso simply vanished from his dealer. (“You seem to have covered yourself in cubist colors that render you invisible,” Rosenberg complained in one letter to Picasso, recalling the artist camoufleurs of the Great War.) For Alfred, it did not bode well for the show he hoped to pull off in New York.[10]
Nor was Picasso’s bifurcated private life the only domestic crisis playing out on rue La Boétie. For all his recent triumphs, Rosenberg faced personal troubles that, in their way, were as complicated as his wayward neighbor’s. For years, while he poured his energy into his gallery and his artists, his wife, Margot, had become increasingly discontent. The product of an elevated upbringing, she was eleven years younger than the dealer and strikingly attractive. In Picasso’s 1918 portrait of her, she is a radiant young brunette with fine cheekbones, large green eyes, and an elegant Greek nose; despite her loose, informal robe and the young child on her lap, she is wearing a string of pearls and seems exquisitely comme il faut.
But Madame Rosenberg craved a position in society. A lover of opera, she cultivated a large circle of admirateurs. “You were beautiful, everyone found you amusing, you were wooed and desired by many men,” Rosenberg wrote years later.[11] Initially, she had embraced their life in the art world, but she didn’t share her husband’s passion for modern art and quickly tired of his all-consuming work habits. Why couldn’t they live like their neighbors, the Wildensteins? she asked.
Georges Wildenstein’s gallery at 57 rue La Boétie was a late-eighteenth-century neoclassical pile designed by Charles de Wailly, the architect of the Comédie-Française and the Théâtre de l’Odéon. A specialist in expensive Old Master paintings, Wildenstein, like Rosenberg, came from an art-dealing family of Jewish background. But their temperament and character were as different as their taste in art: Rosenberg was small, high-strung, and driven; Wildenstein was large, assertive, and entitled. And while Rosenberg was a man of careful accounts who worked incessantly to the point of endangering his health, Wildenstein led an exuberant social life and managed to stay above the mundane pressures of the art trade. He was also a decade younger than Rosenberg and owned one of the most successful racing stables in France.
Since 1918, the two men had been in a business partnership to market Picasso’s work internationally: While Rosenberg had full responsibility for the artist, Wildenstein provided additional capital and the use of his New York gallery. But the partnership had gone nowhere—it was too soon for Picasso in the United States—and their proximity in Paris exposed other tensions. Wildenstein disdained Rosenberg as a striver who engaged in overzealous salesmanship; Rosenberg regarded Wildenstein as a playboy sustained by his father’s large fortune. But that was not how Margot saw it. “Right before her eyes she had the model of the Wildenstein family,” wrote Rosenberg’s granddaughter, Anne Sinclair.[12]
In an attempt to appease her, Rosenberg resisted his financial prudence and indulged his wife with chauffeurs, cooks, maids, and clothes. He also took her to the fashionable resorts that the Wildensteins frequented. “It’s a shallow existence,” he complained to Picasso from one resort in the south of France. “Only snobs and we among them. But as you know, it’s Margot who likes this.” To keep up with the latest tastes, he also undertook frequent refurbishments of their home. “In addition to my work I have to finish the apartment, not for me, but for my wife, because that’s what [she] wants,” he wrote in another letter to Picasso. And in another, he complained, “Life is monstrously expensive.”[13]
To fund their increasingly ostentatious lifestyle, Rosenberg drove himself harder at the gallery, which only increased Margot’s unhappiness. Then, to his chagrin, she began to take an interest in the horse-racing scene, in which Wildenstein was so prominent. “Margot would like to go to Deauville, I believe, only to see the [grand] prix,” Rosenberg wrote Picasso in the summer of 1927. “I will consent, but with regret.” Rosenberg had always suffered from delicate health, and soon the growing pressures of sustaining his lifestyle had given him ulcers. By now, though, he was too far in to stop, and resolved to build his own racing stable. He also began using the same celebrated jockey that rode for Wildenstein.[14]
A small but iron-gripped Breton, François Hervé had gained immortality in 1928 by winning the Prix du Jockey Club, the French equivalent of the Kentucky Derby, in a torrential downpour. Wildenstein and Rosenberg were soon in intense competition for his talent, and by the spring of 1929, Hervé was racking up victories for both owners. On two April weekends, he rode Rosenberg’s Frelon II to victories at the Saint-Cloud hippodrome, west of Paris; then, on the following two weekends, he triumphed on Wildenstein’s Kantana at Le Tremblay and Wildenstein’s Charlemagne at Longchamp in the Bois de Boulogne. Then, on May 19, Hervé returned to Longchamp to race for both owners on the same day, riding Kantana to second place in the fillies’ 1,600-meter course, and Frelon II to third in the colts’. For a novice owner, Rosenberg was giving impressive chase.[15]
The climax of the racing season, however, was the Deauville Grand Prix in late August, a glittering international social event whose guest list ranged from Arthur Rubinstein to the Aga Khan. The field included horses from many of France’s top stables, including two of the Baron de Rothschild’s. But in the end, Wildenstein, who entered three horses, came away with a rare first- and second-place sweep, attracting front-page headlines in Paris. For Rosenberg, who privately hated the Deauville scene, it must have been infuriating: For all his costly investment in horses, he could not, in the end, keep up with his rival. Shortly after the grand prix, he wrote Picasso that racing wrecked his nerves and that he longed to be looking at Picasso’s Dinard paintings instead. “I must be going through hell to be happily anywhere but here,” he wrote. Nonetheless, he was already planning his next season, suggesting he might name his new horses after his artists. “When a Picasso wins all the races,” he wrote, somewhat desperately, “it will be excellent publicity for your work.”[16]
—
As he set out to meet Picasso that summer, Barr was blithely unaware of the swirling jealousies on rue La Boétie. Nonetheless, he was instinctively wary of the big Paris dealers, and sought to find a way to Picasso that did not involve Rosenberg. An art purist, he believed, rather naïvely, that the museum could establish itself as an independent authority and keep the Paris dealers at arm’s length. He also knew that some of Picasso’s most important art was not esteemed by the market at all, and remained unsold in his studio, as it had back when Roché and Picasso had privately selected works for Quinn. The best way forward, then, seemed to be to connect directly with Picasso and worry about Rosenberg later.
At first, the strategy seemed remarkably successful. A few days after his wedding, Barr approached Jacques Mauny, the artist and correspondent for The Arts who had visited the Museum of Modern Art the previous winter. Self-effacing and discreet, Mauny got on well with Picasso, and unlike the artist’s society friends, remained in frequent touch with him. He told Barr that Picasso would soon be leaving for the summer, but that he would try to arrange a meeting before his departure. To Barr’s surprise, Picasso told Mauny he was glad to meet him, and in mid-June, they went over to rue La Boétie.[17]
By the end of the twenties, Picasso’s studio had become a disconcerting contrast with its fussy surroundings. Not long after he and Olga had settled in the rue La Boétie apartment, he began to feel stifled in the living room studio, and by early 1924, he was going house hunting with the indispensable Roché and contemplating leaving his dealer’s neighborhood altogether. The following year, however, Rosenberg arranged for him to rent a second apartment, directly upstairs from his and Olga’s apartment at 23 rue La Boétie, to use as a studio. It gave him new space and freedom, and he quickly transformed it into his private lair.
When they arrived at the fifth-floor studio, Barr found a series of rooms still outfitted with bourgeois moldings, marble fireplaces, and mirrored mantelpieces, and offering striking views, through a series of windows, of chimneys and rooftops receding back to the Eiffel Tower in the distance. But the place was nearly stripped bare of furniture and filled instead with the detritus of Picasso’s work: piles of books and old newspapers, brushes, paints, pails, scraps of paper, cigarette butts, old mail—and stacks of canvases. On the day of their visit, Barr must have glimpsed a number of the many paintings that Picasso kept around the studio; perhaps he showed them his Crucifixion, a small, remarkable painting he had created that winter—a rare engagement with a religious theme that Barr would come to regard as one of Picasso’s most unusual works. (“Its strange mixture of styles, its violent distortions, its richness of invention and the concentrated intensity of its color suggest that it must have had some special significance to the painter,” Barr later wrote.)[18]
For Picasso, the reticent young American must have presented an unusual figure. “In those early years,” Marga recalled, “[Alfred] was so singular in appearance, distinguished, dark-haired, quiet, yet with a responsive face and eyes that really took in pictures.”[19] It didn’t help that Barr spoke very little and that he and Picasso didn’t share a common language. Finally, with Mauny translating, Barr asked the question: What did he think about doing a major show of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York? Picasso must have been surprised. The new museum meant almost nothing to him. Still, he was intrigued. Following Quinn’s death, his youthful fascination with America and Americans had lived on, spurred by his socializing with Gerald and Sara Murphy, the expatriate Jazz Age hosts, on the Côte d’Azur, and through his exposure to ragtime, tap dancing, Louis Armstrong, and other influences. After his earlier failures, he was also anxious for his work to find a larger U.S. audience. To Barr’s elation, he was very agreeable to the idea and said yes.
As they left the meeting, Barr’s mind was galloping ahead. With Picasso’s support, he could now pursue his leading European patron, the wealthy Swiss-German industrialist Dr. G. F. Reber. Since Quinn’s death, Reber had acquired a huge number of Picassos through Paul Rosenberg, including several that had belonged to Quinn; at his home in Lausanne, Reber had dozens of works by Gris, Braque, and Léger, as well as Picasso, and his collection itself was a powerful symbol of the extent to which the center of gravity of avant-garde collecting had shifted back to Europe. In addition to having a fanatical interest in Cubism, Reber also admired Picasso personally, and seemed likely to support any show the artist was involved in. Barr’s intuition proved correct. When he wrote to Reber, the collector enthusiastically agreed to lend his Picassos to the museum. He also invited the Barrs to visit him in Switzerland before they returned to New York.
At this point, Barr had yet to obtain the support of Rosenberg or any of the other major Paris dealers who handled Picasso’s work. Yet already, he felt that an impressive show was taking shape. With Picasso’s and Reber’s backing, the museum would have access to the artist’s vast personal stock and the greatest collection of his Cubist paintings outside of Russia, which was effectively off limits. On June 17, Barr excitedly cabled to Goodyear: “great picasso exhibition possible picasso lending own collection plus reber plus perhaps rosenberg.” Goodyear didn’t need to be convinced. “think picasso show most desirable,” he cabled back.[20]
For much of the rest of the summer, Alfred would be distracted by the other shows he was planning and had little time to think of Picasso. Before he and Marga returned to New York, however, they decided to make a quick trip to Lausanne. Dr. Reber’s house, the eighteenth-century Château de Béthusy, might have come out of ancien régime France: It was situated in a large park in the heights above the city, and surrounded by orderly, tree-lined allées. While the furniture, crystal chandeliers, parquet floors, and Persian carpets were out of another era, the walls were entirely given over to Cubism: A library contained a series of Gris paintings above the rows of books; a music room included Picasso’s Still Life with Fish, a very large late Cubist work, above the grand piano. There was a huge Léger mural in the dining room.[21] As Reber showed them his collection, they talked about the New York show, and he seemed entirely persuaded. He talked up his close ties to both the artist and to Rosenberg. He also said they could take virtually whatever they wanted from his walls. “reber enthusiastic lending thirty picassos suggests november thirtyone,” Barr cabled to Abbott in New York.[22]
As they left Switzerland, Barr’s careful strategy seemed, almost improbably, to be working. At the start of the trip, he had never met Picasso and had few contacts in Paris. Now he was returning to the United States with pledges of support from both the artist and his most important patron to let him do the first Picasso museum retrospective anywhere in the world. Reber and Picasso had even agreed to a schedule, planning the show for the following autumn. It would give Barr more than a year to prepare, and much of the hard work was already behind him. Surely, with such prominent support, Rosenberg would not want to be left out and would lend him the other works he needed; after all, the Luxembourg Museum was not interested in Picasso and not even Rosenberg could stage the kind of show he was proposing.