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Alfred Barr did not accompany the Van Goghs on their giddy, yearlong procession around the country. When the exhibition finished its debut in New York in January 1936, he was already holed up in his and Marga’s apartment, trying to finish a far more difficult project. The Barrs had moved into the new Art Deco building at 2 Beekman Place following his leave. Beekman Place had not yet acquired the exclusive cachet of later years, but it was only a few blocks from the museum and offered beautiful light and views of the East River.
In keeping with Alfred’s rigorous design principles, they had arranged the apartment in an austere Bauhaus style. Furniture was limited to a few chairs and tables with tubular steel legs—the American designer Donald Deskey’s knockoffs of Marcel Breuer’s prototypes, which they could not afford. There was also a small, almost bench-like couch with no arms, and some narrow built-in shelves that Philip Johnson designed for them. Alfred generally needed a large, uncluttered space to lay out his ideas, and the well-lit living room floor became his preferred laboratory.
Now he was crouched over hundreds of photographs of artworks that were scattered across the floor: empty de Chirico streetscapes; luminous Kandinsky watercolors; amoeba-like reliefs by Hans Arp; spindly Calder mobiles; “rubbish” constructions by Kurt Schwitters; Duchamp’s insect-like machines; Natalia Goncharova’s iridescent stage sets; Frederick Kiesler’s aluminum lamp; Schlemmer’s geometric ballet costumes. While Marga tried to keep their cat from walking on them, Alfred arranged and rearranged the images, determined to wrestle them into a coherent narrative.
It was a tremendous undertaking. In six weeks, the museum was going to open a show called Cubism and Abstract Art. With nearly four hundred objects in every medium, the exhibition would be the largest of Barr’s career; it was also his most intellectually challenging. Since the museum’s founding, he had engaged with single artists, particular countries or regions, or specific kinds of work, like mural painting or architecture or industrial design. But he had never tried to present the main plot lines of twentieth-century modern art itself, the successive schools and movements and the underlying forces that shaped them. No museum had ever attempted such a feat of cartography, and certainly not in the scope of a single exhibition.
For Barr, it was also a project that had acquired special urgency. One result of the failure to do a Picasso show in 1931 and 1932 was that the museum had never engaged with the birth and development of Cubist art, despite what he regarded as its central importance to the course of twentieth-century painting. (Paraphrasing Picasso, he would later describe Cubism as a new language, one that was “dealing primarily with forms.”[1]) The museum had also neglected Russian Constructivists, Italian Futurists, and French Surrealists, among other movements. For most Americans, Juan Gris’s newsprint collages and Kazimir Malevich’s floating white squares were no more approachable in 1935 than they had been in 1929. Despite the influence of Cubist ideas on many American painters, even knowledgeable critics regarded Cubism as a “discarded aberration” that had little bearing on the art of recent years.[2] To the broader public, it was almost as if one of the most essential achievements of modern art had never happened. Drawing on his own thinking going back to his lectures at Wellesley, Barr wanted to reclaim Cubism’s importance in a story that began well before it and continued out of it.[3]
But something else, too, was driving him as he bent over the images on his living room floor: the threat of politics. In Germany and Russia, he had witnessed two of the world’s most advanced art and design cultures be crushed by authoritarian regimes. In both countries, the movements and artists that the show was tracing had been silenced before his eyes. Now the far right was beginning to menace Western Europe as well. In Paris, Kahnweiler was warning his artist friends that “Fascism…will stop us all from working, or showing our work.”[4] And even in the United States, notwithstanding the breakout success of Van Gogh, modern art was still viewed with suspicion and even seen as anti-American. Increasingly, it was hard to find a place where avant-garde painters were not under pressure. Despite his formalist approach, viewing modern art as a development of style apart from the world, Barr increasingly recognized that the movements he was tracing had their own part in the gathering battle between democracy and totalitarianism. As Lewis Mumford—one of the few American writers alert to the Nazi art purges—observed, “in certain circumstances, a bowl of fruit by Braque might feel like the Statue of Liberty.”[5]
In an effort to awaken the public to the larger story of modern art in the twentieth century, Barr had conceived of a pair of huge, wildly ambitious shows. The first, Cubism and Abstract Art, would present the Cubist movement not as an aberration but as an evolving force at the center of one of the two main currents in modern art. The second, to follow in the fall of 1936, would be devoted to the other, opposing current, Surrealism, Dada, and what Barr liked to call Fantastic Art. Taken together, the shows would offer a clear, sequential narrative—a demystifying cause and effect relationship—to explain the course of advanced art and why it mattered.
From the outset, Barr knew that the shows would be controversial, since much of the material was difficult and since they would be writing a history where none had existed. He also knew that both shows would depend on the work of one artist in particular: Picasso. What he hadn’t anticipated was that he would face an entirely new obstacle to getting access to Picasso’s work, one that had nothing to do with the art market at all.
—
Alfred’s new troubles with Picasso began in the summer of 1935, when he and Marga arrived in Paris after their Van Gogh work in Amsterdam and The Hague. Their plans were to spend an intensive six weeks gathering loans for the Cubism show, and at first, everything seemed to go smoothly. “By now the existence of the museum is no longer unknown, and artists are mostly expectant,” Marga observed when they got there. After six years, Alfred’s innovative shows had begun to acquire growing notoriety in Paris, and both the pioneering generation of artists and their younger followers—artists like Joan Miró and Alberto Giacometti and André Masson—were keen to participate in the show. For the first time, Alfred and Marga began to enjoy the kind of access to artists that John Quinn had had a generation earlier.[6]
In Montparnasse, they met the well-tailored Dutch abstractionist Piet Mondrian, who had turned his spare geometric painting into a way of life. Like one of his artworks, his studio was carefully whitewashed, devoid of all extraneous objects, and accented only by a few primary colors; he also followed the Hay diet, which compartmentalized all food into several basic categories. (“One eats meat with vegetables, or starch with vegetables, but never the three at once,” Marga noted.) For Barr, Mondrian’s rigorous art traced a crucial shift from ideas taken from observable reality to what he called “pure” abstraction. “The cows and seascapes and dancers which lurk behind the earlier abstract compositions…have no significance save as points of departure from the world of nature to the world of geometry,” he wrote.[7]
Their visit with Alberto Giacometti, the Swiss sculptor, was equally potent, but in a different way. Rumpled, with an unruly shock of thick dark hair, Giacometti showed them his cramped, messy studio, lit by a single light bulb dangling from the ceiling and filled with splattered plaster and clay. Affiliated with the Surrealists, Giacometti took impulses both from his imagination and from life and had begun to make crucial breakthroughs in what Barr called “biomorphic abstractions.” For the show, he offered them his aptly titled plaster Head-Landscape.
Occasionally, the darkening political situation in Europe crept into view. The long-exiled Russian artists Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, aware of Barr’s direct knowledge of Soviet Russia, were deeply moved by his efforts to trace the fate of the Russian avant-garde. They were doubtful they would be able to return to their country.
For the most part, however, artists were simply content to show their art. At his studio, Miró let them watch him work on a new canvas. (“He paints as if he were embroidering in black silk on a pale blue ground, putting one ornament after another into the outline of his half-length figure,” Marga noted.) When they ran into Jacques Lipchitz, the French Lithuanian abstract sculptor, on a Paris street, he offered to drive them to his studio himself.
The older generation was no less welcoming. They found Braque at his townhouse and studio near the Parc Montsouris—the elegant modern retreat he had financed with Rosenberg’s robust sales in the late 1920s. He maintained his usual Norman reserve, but he agreed to lend Guitar, an early masterpiece showing his journey from the lessons of Cézanne into Cubism. By contrast, Fernand Léger was jovial and exuberant. After showing them his work, he invited them to a noted bistro near his studio. “He loves to eat and drink,” Marga observed. “He speaks loud and clear, unhindered by the language barrier.”
Then they went to see Picasso and Rosenberg. At the time, Alfred had every reason to assume the artist and his dealer would support his plans. After all, such a show had never been attempted, and by presenting the first step-by-step account of Cubism and its influence on subsequent art, Alfred would be positioning Picasso’s work—and that of Rosenberg’s other artist Braque—at the headwaters of one of the primary streams of twentieth-century modernism. He sought, among other things, some of Picasso’s little-known collages and sculptures, together with Cubist paintings from his personal collection.
In reconnecting with the artist, he also hoped to resurrect the long-postponed Picasso show, which the museum had put on its list of prospective exhibitions for the coming year. In many ways, Cubism and Abstract Art—as well as its twin, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism—would provide ideal preludes to such a show, giving viewers the background that had been missing in earlier attempts to present Picasso’s art in the United States. Here, then, was an excellent moment to take stock of his most recent work, with a view to a larger collaboration to come.
At his gallery, Rosenberg greeted them cordially. By now, despite Barr’s qualms about dealers and Rosenberg’s skepticism about the museum, the two had a growing respect for each other. And Rosenberg had become an increasingly indispensable source of loans. For Cubism and Abstract Art, he agreed to share his great Léger masterpiece, Le Grand Déjeuner, as well as an important prewar Braque still life. Yet the dealer was unusually keyed up. Finally, Barr asked about Picasso. Rosenberg looked up at the ceiling and sighed. “Imagine,” he said. “He has stopped painting!”
Then, while they were talking, Picasso walked in. It was true, Marga thought, something was not right. He seemed nervous; he was a pale imitation of the genial, flirtatious Iberian who had led her through the Galeries Georges Petit a few years earlier. Afterward, she wrote that he appeared to be in a “disturbed state of mind.”[8] Nonetheless, he was eager for them to see his studio next door, and they followed him out.
First he took them to his apartment. From previous visits to Paris, they knew that Picasso and Olga had long led an elegant existence on rue La Boétie, with a housekeeper and nanny for their son; having visited Picasso’s studio in his first summer as director, Alfred had some sense of the haut-bourgeois setting. But nothing had prepared them for what they found when Picasso unlocked the door. The apartment was completely deserted and the furniture was in disarray, as if someone had searched it. Then they noticed the string. In every room, closets, cupboards, and drawers were tied shut; nothing could be opened or moved. The strings were stamped with official seals, in large clots of red wax. It almost looked like a crime scene. “Look what they’ve done to me!” Picasso exclaimed, as he led them from room to room.[9]
Unwittingly, the Barrs had arrived in Paris at the peak of Picasso’s divorce crisis. Pressure had been building since the spring. Six months earlier, Marie-Thérèse had told him she was pregnant. Unable to bear the prospect that the child would be illegitimate, Picasso promised her he would divorce Olga and marry her. In the spring, he had obtained a lawyer and begun formal proceedings. But he had failed to account for Olga’s wrath. For years, she had learned to look past his philandering, his absences, his abusive silences, the chaos that had always engulfed him. She was prone to violent outbursts, strange illnesses, chronic depression. But she had endured. Now, overcome with anger, she obtained her own lawyers, determined to make any settlement as difficult for Picasso as possible.
Days before the Barrs’ arrival, the case had finally gone to court. In the preliminary hearing, Olga’s lawyers asked the court to inventory their joint assets, but Olga was not prepared for what she had unleashed. When the bailiff appeared at their front door to inspect their apartment, she fainted, and Picasso had to send him away. Shortly afterward, she took Paulo to the Hôtel Californie, a few blocks away. She never returned. Meanwhile, the court moved to restrict all of the contents of the apartment until a settlement was reached.
But that wasn’t all. There was the house in Boisgeloup and other personal assets. But for Picasso, the greatest threat hanging over him was the fate of all the paintings that remained in his possession. According to French law, half of them could be turned over to Olga when the divorce—initiated by Picasso—went through. Picasso was distraught. Going back to the days when Roché had come over to examine the “piles of paintings” in a corner of his studio, he had always held on to many of his favorite pictures. In laying claim to them, the court was depriving him of a crucial part of his identity: “Look what they’ve done to me!” was also his way of telling the Barrs that he was being robbed of his art.
No one understood what was at stake better than Rosenberg. After all, the dealer had preferred to remain in an unhappy marriage rather than contemplate the destruction of his own vast stock of paintings. Nor could he help getting drawn into Picasso’s mess. “As a dealer, he is involved in the personal affairs of his artists,” Marga noted. With his unparalleled knowledge of Picasso’s work, Rosenberg had agreed to make the inventory of Picasso’s paintings required by the court. Despite his own displeasure, he felt he had to go through with it. “You understand very well that I had no more desire than you did to accomplish this work,” he told Picasso, as he came to the end of the report.[10]
Soon the case would become bogged down in court. But even without a final settlement, in many ways Olga had already won. After Picasso showed Alfred and Marga the apartment, he took them to his studio upstairs. The windows were unwashed and there were clouds of dust everywhere; the big, unfurnished rooms were filled with old canvases, lined up with their faces to the wall. Clearly, the place hadn’t been used in months. Rosenberg was right: He had stopped painting.
For an artist who, for more than thirty-five years, had never stopped, it was a startling break. But he had no idea what he was getting himself into. Seeking escape, he had instead found himself in a trap of his own making: separated but not yet divorced, his son taken from him, his home under court supervision. And he still lacked the freedom to wed Marie-Thérèse—or even to formally recognize her—before she gave birth. His own lawyer had warned him that as long as the case was in court, he shouldn’t live with Marie-Thérèse. How could anyone paint under those circumstances? It must have been a peculiar sort of vindication for Olga, whose face and body had often been cruelly disfigured in Picasso’s work. Picasso later described it as “the worst time of my life.”
As news of Picasso’s marriage crisis spread in Paris, there was growing speculation about why he had stopped painting. Picasso claimed that he had decided to become a poet. But it was also clear that he couldn’t tolerate the idea that anything he painted might be claimed by the court. “He is in a state of absolute depression, in between fits of euphoria more painful to witness than the depression,” Kahnweiler wrote to Gertrude Stein, a few weeks after Alfred and Marga’s visit to rue La Boétie.[11] In fact, Picasso hadn’t quite given up making art. He continued to work on his great, roiling psychodrama of an etching, the Minotauromachie. It was, in its tortured way, an expression of everything that he was going through. Later, he would give a rare signed proof of the etching to Barr as a token of his appreciation. For the moment, though, he was not working, and his existing paintings and sculptures—at least those in his personal possession—were off limits to the Museum of Modern Art or anyone else. In the end, Alfred and Marga were forced to depart Paris without Picasso’s help for the Cubism show.
—
Back in New York that winter, Barr spent long evenings on the living room floor. In an astonishing six-week effort, he assembled the entire show and the 249-page catalog, a work that would present a sweeping new vision of the past half century of modern art, a through line that went from the sources of Picasso’s earliest Cubist experiments up to the Merzbau construction of Schwitters, the spontaneous forms of Miró, and the mingling shapes of Calder. For all the chaotic diversity of the show’s content, he offered an almost positivist vision of formal development that could somehow account for it all. He also came up with a theory to explain it. The entire course of modern art, he posited, or at least this crucial central strand, could be traced to a fundamental problem that artists had confronted at the beginning of the century. “The pictorial conquest of the external visual world had been completed,” he wrote. “The more adventurous and original artists had grown bored with painting facts.”[12] The result was Cubism and a broader movement toward abstract art. Not content merely to describe his theory in words, he decided to diagram it in an enormous flow chart, which he put on the cover of the catalog. Beginning with the four foundational artists, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Seurat, the chart split into two pathways as it moved forward in time, both ending in abstraction: On the right-hand side was “Geometrical Abstract Art,” which started with Cézanne and Seurat and evolved through Cubism, Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and many other movements; on the left, “Non-Geometrical Abstract Art,” which started with Gauguin and Van Gogh and developed through Fauvism, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism.
Barr’s vision was seductive. It also was highly controversial. In later decades, the effort to impose such order out of the inherent chaos of modernism would appear an act of extraordinary hubris. Even at the time, critics took issue with his deterministic formalism, and Barr seemed to be aware of the impossibility of what he set out to do. As he acknowledged in the catalog, “often, of course, these two currents intermingle, and they may both appear in one man.”[13] He might have been referring to Picasso, whose works he sorely needed, not only for the Cubism show but for the Surrealism show that would follow it.
Despite the scientific framing of the show, Barr could not help acknowledging the international situation in which it was playing out. As he wrote in the catalog, there was a concerted campaign under way against modern art and modernist culture in both Russia and Germany, the two countries where modern art forms had most widely flourished; in assembling the show, he was also making an urgent defense of abstract art as a form of political liberty. Not least was the fact that nine artists in the show had been forced to leave Germany since Hitler rose to power—a number that he raised to twelve by the time of the catalog’s second edition. “This essay and exhibition might well be dedicated to those painters of squares and circles…who have suffered at the hands of philistines with political power,” he wrote.
Cubism and Abstract Art had an extraordinary impact on both popular and critical understanding of modern art. It also gave new weight to abstract art at a time when it had been marginalized in the United States. What it did not do, though, was bring much new attention to Picasso. In the end, Barr managed to compensate for the artist’s nonparticipation with twenty-one Picassos from various private collections. Yet the show was unable to include the Demoiselles, whose Paris owner refused to lend it, and the only Picasso collage in the exhibition was shown in a photograph, because the original was unobtainable.
The Cubism show was not the only one that suffered from Picasso’s absence. For Barr, there remained the nagging problem of the larger Picasso show, which would have to be postponed yet again. Even as the Cubism show was opening, Barr had warned the trustees that doing a Picasso show was highly unlikely for the foreseeable future. As Goodyear summarized the situation to Rockefeller, “It is probably quite doubtful, that we could count on getting the Picasso pictures, which are tied up by his divorce proceedings, in time for an exhibition next season.”[14]
At a time of growing political and ideological conflict across Europe—a time when artists were fleeing into exile and their paintings were being removed from museums—what was keeping Picasso’s work from getting to the United States was not politics or censorship but affairs of the heart. “It was the divorce that kept him from painting,” Barr later wrote. “Not rheumatism, not melancholia, not the Spanish War, not fallowness—but the drive to keep his wife from laying hands on more of his creations.”[15]
Thanks to his pending divorce, Picasso could not take up the central part in the story of modern art that Barr had been laying out on his living room floor. What was not yet clear, though, was that the larger forces confronting Europe were about to dramatically redirect that story—and Picasso’s place in it.