27
By the time the Barrs left Europe, the worldwide economic crisis had reached France, too. Among the leading Paris galleries, the heady scene of the late 1920s was a distant memory. Daniel Kahnweiler sometimes went months without selling a painting; Paul Rosenberg’s brother, Léonce, having held on through the twenties, had gone bankrupt. Even Bignou’s Georges Petit Corporation, which seemed so powerful only a year earlier, had folded. For all its high profile and international connections, the consortium had failed to generate any profit with its huge Picasso and Matisse shows. “Berlin is broken, London is down, Paris is nearly desperate,” Bignou had reported to an American contact.[1] Like everyone else, collectors were skittish.
While its international repercussions had yet to be felt, the Nazi regime was also beginning to raise concerns in the Paris art world. For men like Kahnweiler, who had close ties to the country, Hitler’s crackdown on modern art hit particularly close. Already, dealer friends of his in Berlin had been forced to close, and exiled German artists were turning up at his gallery. “I don’t believe these events will be restricted to Germany,” he told the painter Vlaminck.[2] But even for those who did, it was hard not to be unsettled by what was happening across the Rhine. By one estimate, four-fifths of the Paris art trade was Jewish.[3]
For Rosenberg, the international situation added to the profound personal and business turmoil he had weathered in 1932. The Paris-centered activity that had brought him such success in the late twenties had come to an end, and business in Europe was evaporating. Despite overwhelming publicity, very few of the Picassos he had lent to the Georges Petit exhibition had found buyers. By early 1933, the Picasso market had become so difficult that he had traded the artist’s large 1928 masterpiece Painter and Model, an intricate, playfully abstracted late Cubist work, for a small, fairly conventional Matisse interior, despite its decidedly lesser importance. “The Matisse I can sell immediately, the Picasso I wouldn’t be able to sell for thirty years,” he explained.[4]
But while the market was bad everywhere, there was one country that continued to intrigue him: the United States. In the early thirties, he had done a brisk business with Chester Dale, and despite the Depression, new art museums were continuing to open in several American cities. Rosenberg was convinced that there still might be chances to place paintings. Despite his previous failures, he also had never given up on the idea that he could build a broad American audience for Picasso with the right kind of museum backing.
Then an opportunity came his way. The Louvre was planning a large Daumier exhibition in the spring of 1934, and the curators asked Rosenberg, as a specialist in nineteenth-century French art with a wide international network, to assist in arranging loans from American collections. For the dealer, it would be a chance to rebuild ties in the United States, with backing from France’s most prestigious institution. In late November, exactly a decade after his ill-fated 1923 trip, he set out for New York.
Rosenberg found the U.S. market almost moribund. Many collectors had stopped buying and a new austerity was setting in at many institutions. A few weeks earlier, Barr had submitted to his trustees the final draft of his “torpedo report,” with its extraordinary argument for a heat-seeking, world-beating collection of modern art. But at that very moment, the Museum of Modern Art was on the verge of giving up on a permanent collection at all. In early November, Stephen Clark, the steely art collector and Singer sewing machine heir who was one of the museum’s most influential trustees, proposed that they forgo the paintings in the Bliss bequest, because the museum was still, after close to three years, hundreds of thousands of dollars short of the required endowment. Other trustees seemed to support him. Barr was so alarmed he wrote Mrs. Rockefeller a confidential, ten-point letter. “I know I am not supposed to concern myself with money raising,” he told her. “But this is an emergency.”[5]
While Rosenberg found little opportunity in New York, other parts of the country surprised him. “I was in Kansas City,” he wrote Picasso, after flying out with a group of dealers for the opening of the $15 million Nelson-Atkins Museum, an improbably monumental Midwestern acropolis built from Indiana limestone and Pyrenean marble. “The situation here is no better than anywhere else, but…the country remains very rich.”[6] His most interesting discovery, however, came from a smaller city much closer to New York. He knew that the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, had a Daumier he hoped to borrow for the Louvre show, but when he got in touch with the museum, he discovered that the director urgently wanted to see him for another reason—one that directly pertained to Picasso. Rosenberg was immediately intrigued, and a few days before Christmas, he took the train up from New York.
—
By history and scale, Hartford was an unlikely center for modern art. Few Europeans had been there; Picasso had never heard of it. With a population of less than 170,000—a fifth of Boston’s and a tiny fraction of New York’s—the blandly prosperous city was primarily known as the insurance capital of the United States. The city’s social scene was characterized by traditional New England tastes and a certain starchy insularity; the modern-art-hating J. P. Morgan came from an old Hartford family. Though it was one of the country’s oldest public art galleries, the Wadsworth Atheneum, the city’s main museum, had until the late 1920s been known mainly for its colonial furniture, American landscapes, and rare gun collection, donated by the wife of local firearm pioneer Samuel Colt. In many respects, Hartford was a bastion of the East Coast provincialism that John Quinn had fought against a generation earlier.
But that was before the arrival of Chick Austin, the dazzling young museum man who had taken over the Wadsworth in 1927. Arthur Everett “Chick” Austin, Jr., was a tall, dark-haired Bostonian with silent-film-star looks, infectious energy, and a wide-ranging exposure to historic and modern art. He also was a natural entertainer, and seemingly within months of his arrival, he had managed to turn the sleepy museum into one of the liveliest centers for new art in the country. By 1929, when the Museum of Modern Art was cautiously introducing itself with a group of long-dead post-Impressionists, the Wadsworth was screening Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and holding musical performances of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. And while Austin often looked to Barr for ideas, the Wadsworth was far better equipped than the Museum of Modern Art to implement them. The same year Austin was hired, the Wadsworth had received a rare $1 million bequest for acquisitions, allowing him to spend $60,000 or more per year on paintings ranging from Tintoretto’s Hercules and Antaeus to Pierre Roy’s Surrealist masterpiece The Electrification of the Countryside.
Almost exact contemporaries, Barr and Austin had followed remarkably similar trajectories. Like Barr, Austin had been a protégé of Paul Sachs at Harvard and, with Sachs’s help, had been given the reins of a museum at an astonishingly early age: He had been offered the Wadsworth job at twenty-six. Like Barr, he had an unusual interest in modern art—an interest that extended beyond painting to include film, music, theater, and design—and he viewed his job as a chance to reinvent the way art was brought to the public. Austin also shared Barr’s ambiguous sexuality, with many members of their shared Harvard circle finding him spellbindingly attractive. “You’d fall in love with him the minute you’d meet him,” Johnson said.[7]
In almost every other way, though, Barr and Austin were opposites. Where the one was restrained and considered, the other was high-spirited and headlong. Where Barr had a quiet magnetism, awing friends and acquaintances with his clarity and insight, Austin was an electrifying figure, managing always to be at the center of the most exciting new thing. Their differences were also informed by their backgrounds: A product of exceptional privilege, Austin had an innate sense of possibility; for Barr, everything had to be earned. Where Barr complemented his studies with a single threadbare year of travel abroad, Austin was easily bored by scholarship but had grown up in several European countries. With family money and connections, he had supplemented his studies with stints digging up Kushite temples in the Sudan and apprenticing with a master forger in Siena.
These contrasts showed plainly in the way the two men ran their museums. Where Barr was determined to maintain the highest standards of aesthetic merit and lucid presentation, Austin skated headlong from one subject to the next, more concerned about keeping his audience entertained and getting there before anyone else. Usually he succeeded. At the Wadsworth, Austin also benefited from a generally compliant board. A savvy opportunist, he saw that his aggressive acquisitions of stellar Old Masters could assuage more conservative members, even as he continually pushed the museum in far more daring directions. It helped that he had married a cousin of J. P. Morgan who was also a niece of the Wadsworth’s president. (Like Barr, Austin had had a Paris wedding shortly after he began his job, except in his case the festivities included a glittering champagne banquet at the Plaza Athénée and a several-month honeymoon in Belgium and the Veneto, where they studied Renaissance villas on which to base their future house.)
Unlike Barr, Austin had no qualms about involving dealers directly in his museum’s activities. In 1931, Austin presented a pioneering show of Surrealist art that was assembled in significant part by the dealer Julien Levy, who had been planning the show for his own New York gallery. At another point, facing a sudden gap in his exhibition schedule, Austin called up Joseph Duveen, the legendary Old Master dealer, and arranged to borrow some 120 Italian Renaissance works from his inventory. The dealers had a strong incentive to help: The Wadsworth was an important client. “With Chick,” observed Levy, who sold numerous works to the museum, “business and friendship were outrageously, happily, and rewardingly mixed.”[8]
—
At the time of Rosenberg’s visit to the United States, Austin had gotten himself into another last-minute jam, and more than usual was riding on the outcome. He was about to inaugurate a $700,000 museum annex called the Avery Memorial. It was by far the biggest undertaking of his career and was going to feature the country’s first high-modernist exhibition spaces. Behind a severe stone façade, the new building was white, hard-edged, and sleek, with a Bauhaus-like central court surrounded by cantilevered upper-floor galleries and a small theater in the basement. For seating, there were Marcel Breuer stools and beige pigskin benches with chrome legs. Austin’s own office featured Mies-inspired door handles, a white rubber floor, and a Le Corbusier chaise longue. He had even consulted with Philip Johnson on the bathroom fittings. Whereas Barr and his friends introduced International Style architecture through photographs and small tabletop models, Austin could now present his own museum as a working prototype.
So consumed was he with the Avery, however, that he had failed to secure art for the opening show. For the main inaugural event, he had planned the world premiere of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s avant-garde opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. Created more than five years earlier to an almost impenetrable Stein libretto, the work had initially seemed unlikely to reach the stage. But in 1933, Stein had suddenly become a national celebrity with the publication of her breakout bestseller, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Austin, with his usual exquisite sense of timing, saw that a staging of this witty and ostentatiously strange work would draw outsized attention. To make the production as sensational as possible, he brought Thomson over from Paris and the British choreographer Frederick Ashton from London; Thomson asked Manhattan modernist Florine Stettheimer to design the costumes and sets. From Philadelphia, Leopold Stokowski’s deputy was asked to lead the orchestra; from Harlem, an all-Black chorus was assembled to perform the vocal parts.
Still, Austin needed a suitably provocative exhibition to fill the new galleries, and a few weeks earlier, he had belatedly decided on Picasso. After all, Gertrude Stein had a special connection to the artist, and his controversial paintings would provide a particularly apt way to showcase the ultramodern Avery galleries. Austin also was keenly aware that no American museum had staged a Picasso retrospective: It would give him another chance to be first. But he had not laid any groundwork for such a show, and soon found himself in well over his head.
At first he planned to center the show around Stein’s own collection. Surely, with the extraordinary talent they were lavishing on Four Saints, she would agree to send over her paintings. But Austin had failed to take account of Stein’s fierce rivalry with Picasso. For years, as the artist’s reputation soared, she had struggled to get her modernist writing published; now that she was finally getting recognition, she was not about to let a Picasso show upstage her. “I cannot find it in my heart to part with all my pictures,” she wrote Austin. “But you will understand.”[9]
Soon after, Austin approached the Wildensteins. He had done business with their New York branch and thought they would be able to help him. But he was blithely unaware that the Wildenstein-Rosenberg partnership had ruptured, and that Wildenstein no longer had any sway with Picasso. In Paris, Georges Wildenstein promised to do what he could, but it was largely meaningless. Casting around for possibilities, Austin asked the State Department to help him borrow works from the Shchukin collection in Moscow. Though the paintings had never left the Soviet Union and hardly any Westerner had seen them since Barr and Abbott in the winter of 1927–28, Austin thought that FDR’s diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union might pry them loose. He was mistaken.
But then, with his usual luck, Austin learned that Rosenberg—the man with apparently the greatest Picasso inventory in the world—happened to be in the United States. Rosenberg was thrilled to learn of the show, and Austin immediately invited him up to Connecticut to discuss it. By now, the opening of the new Wadsworth building was just seven weeks away; even by the last-minute standards of the day, it was an absurdly short time frame to select and arrange a complicated show of paintings from overseas. Moreover, Rosenberg would need to wrap up his Daumier work for the Louvre and get back to Paris before he could gather his Picassos.
In Hartford, Austin gave Rosenberg a royal welcome. The dealer’s visit was covered in the local papers, and Austin gave him a preview of the new building and its International Style galleries. He also explained about the Four Saints opening. Rosenberg was seduced. Not only did the Wadsworth have a rapidly growing collection of Old Master and modern paintings. It also was unusually innovative in the ways it attracted the public. It was remarkable, he wrote Austin afterward, “to see a curator of a museum capable of infusing so much life into his institute.”[10]
As they discussed Picasso, Austin also made clear that the show would be centered around Rosenberg’s paintings. Here, then, was the American opportunity the dealer had been seeking for more than a decade: a landmark Picasso exhibition at a top U.S. museum, over which he would have significant control. Throwing caution to the wind, he decided to go much further than lending his most important Picassos. He told Austin he would not only personally deliver his best pictures to Hartford; he would also arrange important loans from private collectors in Europe and the United States, as well as from Picasso’s own collection. Even before he had visited Hartford, he had written Picasso urging him to take part. “Interest in the arts is enormous, and there’s a great market for you to conquer,” he wrote.[11]
By the time Rosenberg returned to Paris a few weeks later, however, the situation in France had changed dramatically. During his travels, the French government had been swept up in a corruption scandal, and opposition groups were taking to the streets; there was talk of a coup. Meanwhile, Picasso had no interest in Hartford and categorically refused to send any works from his own collection. Two weeks before the new museum was scheduled to open, Rosenberg cabled Austin: “sorry picasso retracts paintings.” Then, that same afternoon, widespread violence broke out in Paris, with followers of the right-wing Action Française skirmishing with police in front of the Chamber of Deputies and thousands of Communists rioting at the Bastille. By the end of the night, some 750 people had been arrested.
In Hartford, Austin and his assistants began to panic. If Picasso wouldn’t lend and political unrest prevented Rosenberg from getting his own paintings out of Paris, the show would collapse. But they had underestimated the dealer. “soyez tranquille journaux exagérés,” he cabled the next day—“Don’t worry newspapers exaggerating.” He had already crated up the paintings that hung in his dining room, and the Action Française was not rioting on rue La Boétie. As for Picasso, Rosenberg quickly exercised his dealer’s prerogative and bought three additional paintings from the artist to compensate for his refusal to lend. One of them was the 1932 masterpiece that Alfred and Marga had so admired, Girl before a Mirror.[12]
Two days after the riots, Rosenberg departed for New York on the Île de France, bringing with him nearly thirty Picassos, including nineteen of his own, seven from collectors he knew in Paris, and the three new ones from Picasso. He got off just in time. In early February, Paris descended into full-blown chaos, with far-right groups rioting in Place de la Concorde. In the end, fifteen people were killed and two thousand injured before order could be restored.
In Hartford, Chick Austin was too preoccupied with the Stein opera and the new building to give much attention to the Picasso show. Instead, he left much of the work to his brilliant deputy, James Thrall Soby, a genial and restlessly curious young man who had quickly become a secret weapon in Austin’s modern art ambitions at the Wadsworth. The son of a pay-phone and cigar magnate, Soby came from an affluent Hartford family and was a few years younger than Austin and Barr. Had he not stumbled upon Matisse and Derain at a New York gallery in the late 1920s, he might have settled into a quiet suburban life of country clubs and state fairs. But he was quickly bitten by the new art, and to the horror of his neighbors, began buying avant-garde paintings with abandon. In 1932, at the height of the Depression, he spent the enormous sum of $16,000 on Picasso’s Seated Woman, an almost frighteningly potent, curvilinear study of a figure and its shadow. “It scared me to death and I loved it,” Soby wrote. A banker friend of his father’s ordered him to return it, no matter how much he lost on the purchase price. He paid no attention.[13] He also became an avid student of modern art, and soon began assisting Austin at the museum. For the Picasso show, he did what he could to secure other important works and make it into a full-scale retrospective.
By the time Rosenberg and his paintings arrived in Connecticut, though, there was barely enough time for Soby and Austin to mount the show. Calling up as many museum friends from neighboring towns as they could—among them Jere Abbott from Smith College and Henry-Russell Hitchcock—they spent the day before the opening hanging more than seventy paintings and parrying Austin’s continual banter. They finished around midnight.
As the inauguration began, the Stein opera commanded overwhelming attention. To ensure maximum publicity, Austin had filled the opening night audience with people he knew from the art world, mostly from New York. In January, he had written to all his Harvard friends to support the production, which had run over budget, and to buy expensive tickets to the opening. Among them was Alfred Barr, who agreed to bring Marga, but who could scarcely hide his dismay that Austin was plowing ahead with Picasso—on top of a Stein opera. “Either one would be enough for any ordinary mortal museum director,” Barr wrote Austin, incredulously.[14] Austin also invited a large contingent of national critics and society columnists. Though many were baffled by the opera’s nonlinear structure and nonsense lyrics, nearly all of them were were enthralled by the soulful Harlem chorus, Stein’s percussive language, and Stettheimer’s extravagant sets, with their giant orange-and-yellow cloth lions under trees made of cellophane and ostrich plumes. “Since the Whiskey Rebellion and the Harvard butter riots there has never been anything like it,” one columnist wrote; Joseph Alsop, the future Washington insider, found it “at once complicated, amusing and lovely.”[15] For the “picked auditors,” as Alsop called them, who filled the 299-seat theater, the premiere took on a legendary quality, a kind of rapturous American Rite of Spring.
Nearly forgotten in the excited response to the Stein pageant were the Picassos hanging in the galleries upstairs. Immediately following the premiere, Austin invited the out-of-town guests to a champagne party at his house; there was little time to linger in front of paintings. For many who came, the paintings were no more than a curious side show. In the end, the exhibition went unmentioned in any of the national magazines and was confined to a single paragraph in the Times’s account of the new building. Gertrude Stein had gotten her way.[16]
For Barr, it must have been hard not to greet the exhibition with a mixture of envy and schadenfreude. Given the constraints at the time, it was impressive that Austin had pulled off the show at all. But the result was a pale imitation of the sweeping, comprehensive project Barr had envisioned. Missing was not only a sense of the different stages of Cubism and such threshold works as the Demoiselles, but also paintings from Picasso’s personal collection, the sequential high points of his art that Barr had identified. Among the local public, the show did not stir much interest either. After the out-of-town guests went home, the exhibition depended entirely on ordinary people, the bankers and lawyers and insurance executives, the housewives and doctors and schoolteachers, who made up the Hartford middle classes, and enthusiasm was decidedly muted. Many avoided the show entirely. “There were days and days when only a handful of people came to see it,” Soby wrote.[17]
If Four Saints had shown Chick Austin at the height of his magic, his Picasso foray had demonstrated that he was mortal after all. For all his success at impressing his Harvard friends, Austin was not particularly sensitive to mainstream taste in Depression-era America. Even in his own city. Many of Hartford’s insurance executives and society ladies, while they didn’t object to the pathos of Picasso’s early circus pictures, were deeply alarmed by much of his recent work, which struck them as distorted or vulgar or both.[18] And for ordinary people reading about the Wadsworth’s over-the-top opening party, it was difficult not to find confirmation for the view that European modernism was the province of an out-of-touch East Coast elite. That same spring, Thomas Craven, the popular American art critic, published Modern Art, his bestselling take-down of the European avant garde, which would be highly praised in The Hartford Courant. There was “not a single connecting bond,” Craven argued, between Picasso and what he called “the realities of American life.”[19]
Though Rosenberg did his best to put a good face on the venture, it was hardly more successful than his earlier American efforts. Notably, the Wadsworth itself passed up the opportunity to buy a single painting, though it could have had its pick, including Girl before a Mirror. Following the show, Rosenberg briefly presented many of his Picassos, together with an impressive series of works by Braque and Matisse from his stock, at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York. Writing in the Sun, Henry McBride called it “the finest collection of modern art yet to be seen in America.”[20] But hardly anyone else seemed to notice, and Rosenberg soon found himself once again packing up his paintings and taking them back to Paris. For Soby, who had worked even harder on the Hartford show than Austin had, it was one of the more memorable failures of his career. “It seems almost incredible to think that a large, retrospective Picasso show could have been such a flop in 1934,” he wrote. “Those were bitter days for contemporary art.”[21]