2
During the years in which Quinn was getting his footing in New York, American society was a torrent of contradictions. Stirred by its triumph in the Spanish-American War and its growing empire, the United States could now claim world power status. And as the new ruling classes saw it, unlike the leading states of Europe, the United States was not held back by the ways of the past. With its scientific assembly lines, advanced infrastructure, and unbridled capitalism, the brash American republic could vault to the forefront of modern civilization. By 1910, American homes and businesses were connected by some five million Bell telephones; that summer, Quinn gave his friend John Sloan, the Ashcan School painter, his first automobile ride, from Coney Island to Manhattan, prompting Sloan to reflect on how the quick and apparently effortless new machines were bound to give Americans “an arrogant point of view.”[1]
Yet despite the extraordinary pace of change, the American establishment was often parochial, moralizing, xenophobic, and rife with prejudice. The country’s economic foundations had been built on slavery and cheap immigrant labor. Women could not vote. Factory workers had few rights. And in the Jim Crow South, a vast system of racial terror maintained de facto subjugation over some nine million African Americans. As for culture, there was deep unease about the unconventional and the foreign. “You are wide-awake over in America, but it is in politics & practical matters,” John Butler Yeats wrote to Quinn, after the lawyer’s first visit to Dublin in 1902. One had to go to Ireland, he argued, to find a country that was “wide awake in ideas literature philosophy drama.”[2]
Quinn would have been the first to agree. New York, for all its infatuation with global commerce, was a cauldron of ethnic rivalries and intolerance. By 1910, after a decade of record immigration, an astonishing three-quarters of the metropolitan population were foreign-born or first-generation Americans. But the influx had led to a pervasive disdain for the newcomers—Irishmen, Jews, Italians, Chinese, Slavs—and the diseases and unclean habits they were said to bring with them. The more international the city’s inhabitants became, the greater the fears of its leading families that they were being overrun. (Informed by late-nineteenth-century doctrines of racial superiority, they failed to recognize that Anglo-Saxon culture itself had been imposed, with considerable violence, on the American territory over several centuries.)
At the same time, the enduring imprint of Puritan morality tended to make new literature, art, and ideas highly suspect. In New York, the U.S. postal inspector and anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock exerted enormous power through his Society for the Suppression of Vice. Armed with Congress’s broadly worded Comstock Act—which made it a criminal offense to send “every obscene, lewd, or lascivious…book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character” through the mail—Comstock and his supporters censored hundreds of works of literature, from The Canterbury Tales and the Arabian Nights to modern novels by Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Oscar Wilde. They also banned suggestive images, cracked down on suffragists, and confiscated printed material referring to abortion and sex. Other American cities had similar morality squads and could be counted on to shut down any modern performance deemed too radical or risqué. Unsurprisingly, many of the targeted works came from abroad.
Quinn himself was acutely aware of the threat of censorship. A few months after he saw the Picasso show at 291, he helped arrange a U.S. tour for an Irish production of J. M. Synge’s controversial 1907 drama, The Playboy of the Western World. Synge was a leading figure in the Irish literary awakening, and Playboy dealt openly with patricide and infidelity in rural Ireland. In New York, the actors were pelted with vegetables and stink bombs; in Philadelphia, the whole company was arrested for alleged immorality. In the end, Quinn managed to have the charges dismissed—“I skinned them alive,” he exulted afterward—but it was only one in a series of bruising court battles in which his legal expertise would prove crucial to his activities as an avant-garde patron.[3]
The status of foreign art was particularly complex. In contrast to literature and ideas, artworks from Europe were highly coveted. “America was taking a leading place among nations,” the New York society architect Stanford White asserted, “and had, therefore, the right to obtain art wherever she could.”[4] J. P. Morgan was chairman of the Metropolitan Museum, and together with his wealthy friends, set out to make it a temple of art that surpassed Berlin’s Nationalgalerie or London’s British Museum. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago, among other municipal galleries, had similar aims. Between the 1890s and the start of World War I, more great Old Master paintings left the Continent for American shores than at any other comparable span of time in history.
For Europe’s modern artists, this should have been an opportunity. While the United States was building the world’s most advanced economy, France, Germany, and Russia were creating a dynamic new art. For a fraction of the cost of a single Vermeer, an American collector could buy any number of Cézannes or Van Goghs, let alone Picassos and Matisses, paintings whose dazzling experiments with form, color, and perspective, whose explosion of traditional methods and approaches, perfectly matched the forward-thrusting spirit of the age. As the recently expatriated Ezra Pound would tell Quinn, for anyone who wanted, “another Cinquecento” was there for the taking.[5] But the canvases that the new American superpower was bringing across the ocean were the masterpieces of past eras. The same men—and they were mostly men—who were driving America’s breakneck modernization had an almost pathological phobia of modern art.
Confronting this paradox, Quinn found himself increasingly disillusioned. Instead of supporting new art, the country’s wealthiest collectors were seeking paintings that came with links to Queen Christina or Philip IV. In a mercantile world in which everything was judged by its economic value, they preferred to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a Rembrandt or Gainsborough rather than a few hundred dollars on a Cézanne. In turn, a powerful cartel of art dealers, such as the Duveens and the Knoedlers, had acquired an iron grip on the American art market and were reaping enormous profits by bidding up Old Master paintings and discouraging an interest in modern art altogether. In 1907, having returned to the United States after many years in Europe, the novelist Henry James observed that the Metropolitan Museum was in the business of buying civilization, not making it. “Creation,” he wrote, “was to be off the scene altogether.”[6]
By the time of the Picasso show at Stieglitz’s gallery, Quinn had come to view the fashion for exorbitantly priced, and often second-rate, old Dutch and Spanish paintings as a dangerous check on the country’s vitality. While he had yet to see much of the new art for himself, he sensed how hidebound American taste had become. As he complained to his friends, there was no “sport” in chasing the same painters sought by generations of earlier collectors, no sense of “discovery.” Sought after for their social cachet and the air of antiquity they evoked, many of these paintings had been given so many coats of varnish by art dealers—a standard procedure used to protect underlying pigments and create a uniform glossy surface—that their backgrounds were reduced to a dark soup; Quinn likened the effect to “brown gravy.” Indeed, he suspected that many of the “old” paintings on the New York market were fakes. The most damaging consequence of this booming trade, though, was its influence on America’s own artists. From what he saw at the National Academy of Design, Quinn began to fear that the country was churning out painters whose only skill was making bad versions of Hals and Velázquez.[7]
Though his own taste was hardly formed, he had a growing aversion to what he called “dead art.” As with the writers who excited him most, Quinn wanted artists who could express the values and forces of his own time. “A picture is a more living thing than a book,” he wrote one of his Irish friends in 1909. “It represents life or a moment of life.”[8] Painting—or at least fresh, contemporary painting—could change one’s sense of reality in the way that scientific advances were changing the understanding of biology or chemistry. During the first decade of the century, Marie Curie’s discovery of radium had set off international interest in the luminescent substance, with its apparently miraculous potency, and for Quinn it was the mysterious, intangible force he craved in art. “I have a theory that every generation has its own art…painting that is alive and vital and full of radium,” he told his former Harvard classmate Judge Learned Hand. “All of the radium has gone out of many old paintings.”[9]
Yet Quinn was hardly more knowledgeable about modern art than his compatriots. Already, he had amassed a large number of contemporary paintings by English, Irish, and American artists, but until now he had been guided mostly by his instincts, his friendships with artists, and some vaguely formed ideas about color. Around the time of the Picasso show at 291, Durand-Ruel, a prominent French gallery with a branch in Manhattan, presented a small show of paintings by Édouard Manet, the nineteenth-century artist who had been the starting point of the controversial post-Impressionist show in London that winter. For Quinn it was a revelation. He began talking about Manet with his friends; and he tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade one of his wealthy clients to buy one of the works in the show. Eventually, he bought one himself, calling it a “foundation for a collection of modern pictures.”[10] But if Manet’s strong colors and bracing realism were still adventurous in New York, the painter, who died in 1883, hardly took Quinn very far into the present age. Somehow, he would have to find a way to know Paris.