24
In the middle of June 1931, almost exactly a year after Barr and Picasso first met, a group of Paris’s most powerful dealers and their wives gathered for a lavish private banquet near the Madeleine. Wearing evening clothes, they sat at an immense table, set for thirty; the dinner was accompanied by multiple vintages, served in crystal glasses of varying sizes. Surrounding them on every wall of the room, just a few feet behind the chairs, were more than a dozen Matisse paintings—riotous and spare still lifes, vivid portraits, reclining nudes, eye-conquering odalisques. Together with more than two hundred other Matisse artworks, they were about to be featured in a new kind of exhibition, one of the largest devoted to any living modern artist ever held. Neither Picasso nor Barr had been invited, but the gala meal—and the enormous show it celebrated—would have profound consequences for them both.[1]
The dinner was hosted by the owners of the Galeries Georges Petit, a large, storied exhibition hall on rue de Sèze, and it marked a new frontier in the alliance between the Paris art trade and the city’s leading artists. Strictly speaking, the Galeries Georges Petit was not a gallery at all, but a for-profit corporation whose shares were traded on the Paris Bourse. In its scale and resources, it dwarfed what even the most ambitious private galleries could do on their own. In fact, it represented a consortium of several of the biggest art traders in Paris and London, and it aimed to transform the way modern art was brought to the public. In essence, the dealers were leveraging their combined market power to assemble huge, museum-like shows of the same artists whom Barr was pursuing in New York. And they were doing so for patently commercial purposes: This was Rosenberg taken to another level.
The guests that evening underscored the ambition of the enterprise. Anchoring one end of the long table was Étienne Bignou, the mastermind of the Georges Petit Corporation and the evening’s host, a compact, mustachioed rue La Boétie man who was known as an art market dynamo. Strategically seated among the guests were his business partners, the veteran dealer-brothers Jos Bernheim and Gaston Bernheim de Villers, who had a legendary inventory of post-Impressionist paintings; the organization’s artistic director, Georges Frédéric Keller, a powerful international market player of Swiss-Brazilian background; and the British dealers Duncan MacDonald and A. J. McNeill Reid, whose gallery, Reid & Lefevre, was London’s leading venue for French modern art. Each of these men had considerable clout of his own, and clients stretching from Central Europe to North America. But here they were joining forces.
At the center of the table was Matisse himself, the man of honor, as inscrutable as ever behind his distinguished white beard and round, thick-framed glasses, an artist literally surrounded by his paintings—and by men who saw them as raw untapped capital. Seated directly next to Matisse, however, was not one of the powerful dealers but a very conspicuous New York couple who had crossed the ocean for the occasion: Chester and Maud Dale.
In the late twenties and early thirties, the Dales were an almost ubiquitous presence in transatlantic high society. Maud Dale was an elegant woman in her fifties who wore cloche hats and haute couture, wrote about art, and organized occasional shows at the Manhattan branch of the Wildenstein Gallery. Chester Dale was a high-flying corporate raider who was seven years younger and several inches shorter than his wife but whose forceful personality, along with his flaming red hair and strong blue eyes, gave him an outsized presence in any room. In New York, they lived on the top two floors of the Carlyle, the city’s most luxurious Art Deco tower; they were known for riding around town in a chauffeured convertible that had been custom-built in Antwerp to Maud’s design. (It had a speedometer in the back so she could watch the driver’s speed.) For Barr, however, the couple were important for another reason: Chester Dale was a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art.
As Barr developed his plans for a pioneering Picasso show, the Dales should have been indispensable. Though they had been buying art for only a few years, they had already amassed one of the most important collections of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French modern art in the country. And while their tastes were not particularly adventurous, they had recently taken a strong interest in Picasso’s early work. They also had enviable connections in the Paris art market: The previous year, they had dropped some $81,000 at Paul Rosenberg’s on a large group of Picassos—an astonishing amount that was nearly equivalent to Barr’s entire annual budget. But as the Matisse banquet now made clear, the Dales had other loyalties in play. Alongside his board seat at the Museum of Modern Art, Chester Dale had taken an ownership stake in the Georges Petit Corporation, and far from being an ally of Barr’s, he would soon prove to be one of his greatest headaches.
—
Departing for Europe a few weeks before the Georges Petit dinner, Alfred and Marga had expected to spend much of the summer selecting art for the big Picasso show they were planning for the fall. Amid the growing economic crisis, there was much at stake in the project. During the spring, there had been a new round of U.S. bank failures, and the financial shock was bearing down on the museum. Already the trustees had largely suspended public fundraising efforts, deeming any such campaign tone-deaf; meanwhile, Rockefeller money had not been forthcoming, causing Barr to complain to Abby Rockefeller about her husband’s “granite indifference” to modern art. While Barr was in Paris to assemble the coming season’s shows, the trustees were trying to come up with a plan just to keep the museum afloat. Citing the “present emergency,” Goodyear warned Sachs that they might have to “discontinue the activities of the museum entirely.” A year and a half after opening, the Museum of Modern Art was on the verge of bankruptcy.[2]
Under the circumstances, Barr recognized that a landmark presentation of Picasso’s work would carry special weight. Goodyear had long warned that they had to keep generating “very striking exhibitions” to justify their existence.[3] Given the controversy surrounding the artist’s work and Barr’s ambitious plan for it, the Picasso show was just the sort of undertaking that could assert the museum’s unique value. In interpreting Picasso’s work, they would be engaging head-on, for the first time, with several of the centermost currents of contemporary modern art. And the trustees had formally given their assent: The show had already been scheduled and they were now expecting it as the main event of the fall season—assuming Barr could come up with the art that he had promised.
When Alfred and Marga checked in to the Hotel Continental, across from the Tuileries, at the beginning of June, everything seemed to be in place. He already had Picasso’s verbal agreement from the previous summer, and during a visit to the United States that winter, Reber had reaffirmed his own enthusiasm for the show and reassured Alfred that the dealers would be forthcoming, too. “We have the support, I believe, of the Wildenstein group, of the Bignou group, and I hope of Paul Rosenberg, so far as the great dealers are concerned,” Alfred had written a few weeks before they left New York.[4] Almost as soon as they settled in, however, Alfred discovered how naïve his assumptions had been. First was the problem of Picasso himself. It was not a question of how many works he was willing to lend them; the artist could not be reached. He did not return messages and calls at rue La Boétie; he seemed to have disappeared. In fact, by now, Picasso was spending most of his time holed up at Boisgeloup, and when he did come back to Paris, he kept an extremely low profile.
Uncertain what to do, and increasingly concerned, Barr cabled Reber in Lausanne. It turned out that Reber had not had further talks with Picasso as he had promised in New York that winter. But with his usual confident manner, he offered to come to Paris immediately to work things out. Soon after he arrived, Reber did make contact with Picasso. But Picasso was apparently distracted and over the next week he failed to make much progress. By now, Barr was getting anxious; the summer was advancing, and they would not be able to make arrangements with other lenders until they had spoken to the artist again. Still, he had the artist’s earlier agreement, and there was no reason to doubt that they would eventually pin him down.
Meanwhile, the Matisse exhibition had opened at the Galeries Georges Petit and was quickly becoming one of the most talked-about events of the season. Featuring 141 paintings and 100 drawings, the huge survey was virtually unprecedented for a living painter; it also was the first Matisse show in Paris in twenty years. Despite his general withdrawal from public life, Picasso was a conspicuous presence at the show, attending the opening and attentively taking it in. Some critics were dismissive of the dealers’ selection, which seemed to emphasize market-friendly works, but in size alone, it was difficult to ignore the commanding statement the show seemed to be making. “It not only confirms the reputation of a painter, that is, of a great painter,” Tériade, the prominent art critic, wrote in L’Intransigeant, “but also that of a whole epoch of passionate experimentation.”[5]
Finally, around June 20, Reber succeeded in having a longer meeting with Picasso. The artist said nothing about the Matisse show, but he was suddenly very definite about the Museum of Modern Art. Under no circumstances, he now told the collector, would he take part in a New York exhibition during the coming year. He was working on an important body of new work, he said, and he needed to complete it before anything else. As Reber recounted the meeting to Barr, he tried to reassure him. Picasso was merely postponing, he said, and would be glad to do the show later. But Reber said he couldn’t lend any of his own paintings to an exhibition that Picasso did not support. Then he returned to Lausanne.
Barr was blindsided. It was just months before the most important show he had ever attempted was supposed to open, and he had now lost his two principal backers. Without Picasso, they would not have the sculptures and collages and many other crucial paintings he kept in his studio. Without Reber, they would lack many of the Cubist works that Barr considered essential to any serious presentation of his art. And if Picasso was against it, Rosenberg would most certainly refuse as well. For all of his carefully laid plans, the show was off. Now he would have to face his trustees, who were expecting the show to anchor the fall season. Indeed, Goodyear himself was on his way to Paris to meet Picasso and help make the final selection of paintings.
As Alfred considered what to do, he was struck that Picasso’s attitude had turned sharply. At the same time, he and Marga had been making frequent visits to the Matisse show and observing its dealer-driven approach and the extraordinary attention it seemed to be stirring up. Turning over the situation in his head, Alfred realized that it might not only be Picasso’s new works that were keeping him from committing to a show in New York: There was also Matisse. For more than twenty years, the two artists had had an almost symbiotic rivalry, with each often responding to the other’s latest challenge. As long ago as the spring of 1907, Picasso had taken the Demoiselles in a radical direction in part to respond to Matisse’s notorious Blue Nude. For Picasso, seeing the huge Georges Petit exhibition—and the way it seemed to crown Matisse as the presiding eminence of the art world—was too much. Even at Rosenberg’s, it had been several years since he’d had a major show of his own. It was silly, childish even, but he could not let such a show stand unanswered.
He needn’t have worried. Bignou and his fellow directors at the Georges Petit Corporation were already looking for their next big play, and within days of Picasso’s pulling out of the New York plan, Bignou offered him a big show of his own. Picasso readily agreed. Rosenberg was not a shareholder in the Georges Petit Corporation, but he knew Bignou and, amid a tightening art market, would be glad to contribute to a Georges Petit show, which would only give his artist greater exposure. Indeed, Bignou was prepared to let Rosenberg and Picasso have a major part in the show’s organization. So Barr was not merely contending with an artist who was not ready. He was also facing a rival institution in Paris whose directors seemed to have considerably more clout with Picasso than he did. Worse, as he soon learned, one of his own trustees was actively helping them.
Among the early board members of the Museum of Modern Art, none was as flamboyant, or as calculatedly self-interested, as Chester Dale. A self-made multimillionaire who never finished high school, he was an unlikely addition to the museum’s board. He had no connection to the genteel world of Blisses and Rockefellers; he also had a volatile personality and a huge ego. Having taken over a number of companies and made them extremely profitable, he had little patience for institutions he couldn’t control. The philanthropist Paul Mellon, who later worked with him, considered Dale a “hard-bitten stockbroker with a crisp turn of phrase and a taste for stiff martinis.” To Henry McBride, he was simply an enfant gâté—a spoiled child.[6] Nonetheless, his large modern art collection made him attractive to the museum, and shortly before the museum’s inauguration, Conger Goodyear recruited him to join the executive committee.
For Barr, the Dales were a maddening conundrum. If anyone could bring around Rosenberg, Bignou, and the other dealers to his projects, they could. But they seemed not in the least interested in the museum. Maud aspired to organize her own exhibitions and had little patience for Barr; Chester could not bear to be an appendage to the main forces that governed the museum. Next to the fawning attention they received in Paris, moreover, the day-to-day affairs of a fledgling institution with no money to spend on art held little appeal. As the summer unfolded, Barr began to suspect that the Dales were not only resisting his plans but actively undermining them: If Picasso was being courted by Bignou, then Dale, as his business partner, must have known about it.
Before Alfred could deal with the Dales’ insurgency, however, he faced an even more pressing crisis. Already, people in the Paris art world were whispering about his Picasso troubles.[7] He needed a suitably ambitious replacement for Picasso as the museum’s main fall event, and it would have to be arranged extraordinarily quickly. Then, one day at the Georges Petit show, he and Marga ran into Matisse himself, who was with his grown daughter, Marguerite. As they chatted, Matisse talked about the United States, where his son Pierre was an art dealer and which he had visited briefly the previous winter. (In New York, he had met the Rockefellers and had been taken aback when Mr. Rockefeller had told him, politely and in perfect French, that despite his wife’s enthusiasm, he had no taste for modern art.[8])
As they stood talking in a room full of Matisses, Barr was struck with an idea. If Picasso was unwilling to do a New York show, why not bring the Matisse retrospective instead? As a matter of principle, he loathed the prospect of a show that originated with dealers: The museum’s mission was to educate the public, not fuel the market. But Matisse was arguably the one artist who could stand up to Picasso, and he knew that he could significantly improve on the Paris show with his own, far more rigorous selection of art. Matisse was delighted. He had not been happy with the dealers’ selection in Paris, and even feared that the show had over-tamed him and tarnished his reputation. He looked forward to Barr’s corrective. Even Bignou was happy to help: A show that had begun at Georges Petit and that would expose Matisse to new buyers in the United States could only be good for him.
Still, before Barr could start the plan he needed the approval of his trustees, and he knew any delay, at this late stage, would be fatal. He was confident that Goodyear would support him, but he needed Abby Rockefeller’s approval to be on firm ground. On June 25—just five days after Picasso’s final meeting with Reber—he dashed off a terse cable to the Rockefeller summer compound in Seal Harbor, Maine: “picasso postpones suggest matisse…are you favorable.” In fact, Rockefeller was in New York City at the time, and the cable, after reaching its initial destination, had to be rerouted to the Rockefeller townhouse on West Fifty-fourth Street. When it was delivered, though, she immediately concurred: If anything, she was more comfortable with Matisse at this point than Picasso.[9]
It was an improbable rescue. Within days of being rejected by Picasso, Barr had lined up the other towering figure of the Paris avant-garde to take his place. The museum would get its first great one-man exhibition after all, a chance to present a full-scale appraisal of an artist whom Barr regarded with virtually the same reverence as Picasso. As early as 1925, he had identified the two artists as leading two opposing strands of modernism; now he could attack the Matissean strand with the same clarifying authority he had envisioned for Picasso. So deft was his countermaneuver that decades later, Matisse’s own biographers were apparently unaware that the landmark show had materialized only as a hasty, last-minute substitute.[10]
As the summer progressed, the show came together with remarkable speed. Unlike Picasso, Matisse was businesslike and organized, and exceptional paintings were not difficult to get. They had far more works than they needed from the Georges Petit show, and they were supplemented by crucial works from Matisse himself, and from other collectors in the United States, Germany, Britain, and elsewhere. Barr didn’t even mind that the Dales refused to lend three of the four Matisses that they had included in the Paris show.
While restricting the presentation to just seventy-eight exceptional paintings—about half the number included in Paris—he sought to offer a far more convincing view of Matisse’s evolving art. Unlike the dealers’ show, he would give prominent emphasis to early Fauvist works and the austere wartime paintings, including the disconcerting Blue Nude (1907)—one of the Matisses that had provoked art students to riot in Chicago nearly two decades earlier—and the boldly abstract Moroccans (1916), which Barr considered among Matisse’s “most magnificent achievements.” He also traced the artist’s experiments in other media, including eleven striking bronzes spanning multiple phases of his career.[11]
By the time the exhibition opened in New York that fall, hardly anyone seemed to be thinking about Picasso anymore. Elegant, carefully distilled, and provocative, it was a formidable demonstration of Barr’s show-making talents, and it met with mostly rapturous praise. As usual, Marga assisted in crucial ways: Along with Alfred’s incisive introductory essay, the show’s catalog, bound in simple pale-red cloth, included her fluid translation, the first in English, of Matisse’s “Notes of a Painter.” (“I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it,” he wrote.) The contrast with the Georges Petit retrospective was not lost on astute observers. “When you see this show, you get a far greater shock than you did in Paris,” McBride wrote, in his New York Sun column. Matisse was not there to see it, but his art dealer son Pierre seemed to agree. “Barr has done his best and succeeded beyond my hopes,” he reported to his father.[12]
—
If the Matisse exhibition had redeemed the museum for the time being, however, Barr could not let go of the events of the summer. He was determined to resume his Picasso campaign, and it was now clear to him that it would be far more difficult than he had anticipated. The artist’s abrupt withdrawal had given him a new understanding of the dealers’ influence, and—combined with their rival Matisse exhibitions—he began to sense that he was engaged in a larger struggle with the Paris market over modern art and its international public. As he had explained to Reber, Bignou had earlier been prepared to support the museum’s Picasso show, because he thought the museum had Picasso and Reber on its side, and he had lacked time to “organize his forces.” Once Picasso postponed, however, he was prepared to form a “temporary coalition” with Rosenberg—perhaps “on neutral ground,” Barr speculated—in order to “secure the balance of power.” The museum, with meager resources and no collection of its own, was at a distinct disadvantage from the Georges Petit Corporation and its powerful alliances. But Alfred had recently read Liddell Hart’s Decisive Wars of History, with its theory of nimble, indirect warfare, which he debated at length with Philip Johnson. (“Strategy and battles interest them both,” Marga observed.) He believed the museum had strategic advantages that could work in its favor.[13]
In mid-December, about a week after the Matisse exhibition closed, he drafted a formal invitation to Picasso to take part in a large-scale show at the Museum of Modern Art. In a calculated play at the artists’ rivalry, Barr called attention to the Matisse exhibition, noting that the museum had organized it only after Picasso had postponed, but that nonetheless the show had been a succès distingué, a “distinguished success,” impressing critics and drawing more than thirty-six thousand visitors. Even so, he continued, this was only a prelude to the succès éclatant, “explosive success,” that the museum was certain now of bringing Picasso. Finally, he stressed that Picasso’s work was far too little known in the United States and had never been properly presented. Clearly, he hoped that the one-upmanship between Picasso and Matisse might work as well in New York as in Paris. If Picasso declined, he implied, Matisse would be allowed to dominate the American field.[14]
But the letter was never sent. While Barr awaited Goodyear’s approval, the museum received confirmation that Bignou was going ahead with a huge Picasso show in Paris that spring, presumably backed by Rosenberg and Dale: a timeline that would preclude the museum doing a show first. For Barr this left the museum in an impossible situation: If it followed the Georges Petit show for a second year in row, it would give the impression that the Paris dealers were controlling the museum. Sharing Barr’s concerns, Goodyear called Dale and told him that if the Georges Petit Corporation went ahead with its Picasso show in the spring, the Museum of Modern Art would regard it as an “unfriendly act.” Dale responded by resigning from the board. To Barr, it was clear that the dealers had won. Despite all of his efforts, the Georges Petit group was preempting the museum with its Picasso show, and there was nothing that he or Goodyear or anyone else could do to stop it.[15]
Barr’s views were not universally shared, however. In fact, except for Goodyear, the trustees did not see significant problems with doing Picasso in New York after the Georges Petit show. After speaking to Sachs and Rockefeller, Goodyear told Barr that “they both feel that…this would not really matter to us.” Evidently, as collectors, they did not share Barr’s curatorial purism and his skepticism of the art market; they also were far less sensitive to the extraordinary power that men like Bignou and Rosenberg had accrued over Europe’s leading artists. By now, Barr himself, beleaguered by the negotiations, was willing to concede that they might have to give in to the dealers and let them go first.[16]
But in the end, even that proved impossible. What finally turned the trustees against the Picasso project was not the Paris dealers but something far closer to home: the global financial crisis. Faced with an increasingly dire economic outlook, the trustees were desperate to shore up the museum’s finances and avoid unnecessary risks. Despite the success of the Matisse retrospective, the prospect of another show that relied overwhelmingly on loans from Europe and would be expensive to produce began to seem ill-considered. Finally, in late January, they delivered their stark decision. As Barr dutifully explained in a formal letter to Picasso, “The president and officers of the Museum of Modern Art asked me to inform you, with regret, that it would be scarcely advisable and practical to organize this exhibition in New York, whether at the museum or anywhere else, during the financial crisis, which has become much more severe over the past year.”[17]
He hoped the museum would be able to resurrect the show “in the future,” he added, but the overall message was unmistakable. The project was indefinitely shelved. Privately, Barr was shattered. After nearly three years of struggle, his effort to stage a landmark Picasso show had come to nothing. Bignou had outflanked him, Dale had sabotaged him, Reber had proven unreliable, and Picasso was indifferent. Then his own trustees had given up on him. It would go down as yet another in a now long list of failed attempts to bring Picasso’s art to the United States. Meanwhile, Barr had alienated his trusted Paris intermediary, Jacques Mauny, who felt personally disgraced by the affair. “I have even avoided to see Picasso ever since,” Mauny wrote him that spring, “and I understand that you should be relieved in not having to continue the very unpleasant intrigues of last year.” Barr was not at all relieved. Nor were Mauny’s closing words reassuring. “You cannot be entirely free from the influence of French dealers,” he said.[18]