30
One afternoon in late September 1936, Marga and a young friend walked into the Café de Flore and found Picasso at a table alone. The encounter was not altogether unexpected: In the year since his marriage crisis, Picasso had reembraced the Left Bank scene, and the Flore—long a hangout of the Surrealists—had become a regular part of his routine. Often, he would sit on one of the red leather banquettes smoking Gauloises, an untouched glass of mineral water in front of him, while members of his circle came and went. “Do you prefer your solitude?” Marga greeted him ironically. He gestured the two women to join him.[1]
For Marga the meeting was a crucial opportunity. In December, Alfred was opening his huge Surrealism show—the equally ambitious sequel to Cubism and Abstract Art—and he had left her in Paris to settle the final loans. In particular, he wanted her to get an important group of disquieting bronze figurines, as well as several paintings, out of Picasso. But Marga had another motive as well. The war in Spain had begun two months earlier; already, Hitler and Mussolini were backing General Franco’s rebels with planes and artillery. Artists and writers were clamoring to join the International Brigades to defend the Republican government, and Spanish officials, in an effort to call world attention to the war, had just taken the unusual step of naming Picasso as director of the Prado, Spain’s national museum. The Prado announcement was an important turn in the alliance between modern artists and the anti-Fascist front, and Marga wondered if Picasso would be going to Madrid to take up the cause.
As they began talking, however, Picasso seemed strangely indifferent. “I guess we’re in the same business now,” he replied, archly, when she asked about the Prado. Just like everyone else, he’d heard about the appointment through the newspapers. He also had no intention of going to Madrid. Marga was incredulous. After all, there had been blood in the streets of Barcelona, where Picasso’s mother and sister lived in a flat near the city center. And a few weeks earlier, Franco’s forces had begun a vicious bombing campaign over Madrid. Even now, the Prado’s treasures—the Velázquezes, El Grecos, Zurbaráns, Murillos, Goyas, and hundreds of other masterworks—were at serious risk. “Can’t you use your authority just for an hour and see that the pictures get safely stored?” she asked. “Start writing, start wiring but get something done?” Picasso shrugged. The paintings were safe, he said, and if they got wrecked, “I can always paint new ones.”
Picasso’s blasé attitude was disconcerting given his friends’ constant talk of the war. At the Flore, they were soon joined by Miró’s dealer, Pierre Loeb, who told them that Miró was in Spain trying to get his family out. Then came Christian Zervos, the Cahiers d’Art publisher, and his wife, Yvonne, who were planning a trip to Barcelona and Madrid to document art and monuments threatened by the conflict and to investigate the situation of the Prado. Still Picasso showed little interest. Instead, after Marga and her friend left, he began telling the Zervoses about his nocturnal prowls that summer in the Midi. “The Zervos[es] were disgusted,” Marga reported to Alfred. “In Spain they’re killing each other & he wallows in brothels.”
By the summer of 1936, Picasso’s life had become increasingly unmoored. The previous fall, Marie-Thérèse had given birth to their daughter, Maya; with his paternity still officially unacknowledged, he had appeared at the baptism as her godfather. But around the time of Maya’s birth, he had been struck, at the Deux Magots, by a grave, dark-haired young woman with pale eyes and a fixed gaze. Dora Maar was a fiercely intelligent Croat French photographer and Surrealist, exactly half his age; when they were finally introduced that winter, she quickly became his latest amour fou.[2] Now he was dividing his time between Dora and Marie-Thérèse and his infant daughter. All the while, his costly legal battle with Olga continued, and his return to art making had been languid at best.
That spring, Rosenberg had astutely papered over Picasso’s fallow period by staging a high-profile show. There were huge crowds, and the event played to all of the dealer’s strengths. “Rosenberg, exuberant, danced about from group to group shaking hands, listening to questions, taking care of everybody and giving constant orders to his assistants,” Jaime Sabartés, Picasso’s faithful Spanish secretary, wrote. Even Kahnweiler seemed to acknowledge Rosenberg’s magic, calling Picasso’s new work “Michelangesque.” In reality, though, the twenty-nine works in the show had all been created before the marriage crisis. Picasso didn’t even attend, and before it was over, he had fled to Juan-les-Pins. Even as Rosenberg was trumpeting Picasso’s “new” canvases, the artist wrote Sabartés half jokingly, “I am giving up painting, sculpture, engraving, and poetry, to devote myself exclusively to singing.”[3]
When the fighting in Spain began that summer, Picasso had again gone away, this time to Mougins, in the south of France. He was with Dora Maar and a group of his Surrealist friends, and the war was constantly on their minds. Maar and Paul Éluard were committed anti-Fascists who fervently supported the popular front; Roland Penrose was planning his own trip to Barcelona to build British support for the struggle against Franco. In Mougins, they were also joined by the Zervoses, who were if anything even more militant. “No one can remain indifferent,” Dora’s mother wrote her during the holiday. “Poor poor poor people!”[4] Picasso’s main impulse, however, was to seek escape in beach swims, constant flirtation, and clownish humor. One day at lunch, while the group was discussing the latest events, he picked up a black toothbrush, held it to his upper lip, and raised his right arm, in a spoof of Hitler.[5]
But Picasso had never been politically engaged. Kahnweiler, who knew him as a young man, often said that he was the least political artist he had ever met; in the early 1930s, while some of his Surrealist friends were getting into trouble with the French government for their radical politics, Picasso was written off by the Soviet embassy in Paris as a bourgeois. In Spain, he had been courted by the right-wing Falangists before the war; as late as the spring of 1937, he felt it necessary to set the record straight that he was not, as sometimes rumored, pro-Franco. Indeed, there was little in his art that betrayed a political consciousness of any kind.
For Alfred and Marga, Picasso’s disengagement presented an awkward reality. In his own museum work, Barr instinctively shared Picasso’s apolitical outlook. Just as Picasso’s art seemed to exist outside the realm of current events, Barr had long viewed the story of modern painting as a continually evolving interplay of styles and forms that unfolded largely on its own terms. Yet Barr was acutely aware of the extent to which modern art had been drawn into the defining ideological battles of his time. Not only had he witnessed, firsthand, the ways that democratic freedoms and advanced modernism had been squelched in Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany. He was also immersed in the fraught debates of Depression-era America, including on such matters as social housing and even race relations. In 1935, Barr joined a group of prominent New Yorkers who sponsored an important anti-lynching exhibition organized by the NAACP; two years later, while traveling with Marga in the Jim Crow South, he insisted on sitting in the nonwhite section of the bus.[6]
Despite his formalist training, Barr’s thinking about art and politics was shifting. Though his initial approach to museum work had been shaped by the establishment inclinations of Harvard insider and former banker Paul Sachs, by the mid-1930s, he was having regular arguments with the brilliant young art historian Meyer Schapiro, who was deeply involved in radical politics. In a study group that sometimes met at Schapiro’s Greenwich Village apartment, Barr encountered many of the leading figures of New York’s anti-Stalinist, anti-Fascist left, who viewed art and culture as another weapon in the defense of progressive democracy. In an influential essay, Schapiro took issue with Barr’s notion of abstract art as a “purely aesthetic activity” driven by an internal evolution of style, arguing instead that modern art, no less than other art forms, was crucially shaped by the social and political forces around it. In response to Barr’s Cubism show, he wrote, “There is no ‘pure art,’ unconditioned by experience.”[7]
While Barr did not abandon his approach, he increasingly recognized that Hitler’s campaign to wipe out modern art provided a crucial opening to change American attitudes. Instead of subversive foreign influence, avant-garde art could be promoted as an embattled symbol of advanced democracy. “Why do totalitarian dictators hate modern art?” Barr later wrote. “Because the artist, perhaps more than any other member of society, stands for individual freedom.” But this argument could only go so far as long as Europe’s preeminent modern artist remained detached from the growing conflict with Fascism.[8]
Given what Marga had witnessed, Picasso seemed less an emblem of Spanish Republicanism than of Parisian decadence; at fifty-four, living on his earlier renown and sitting in Left Bank cafés while his own country was torn apart, he was at risk of becoming the self-indulgent bohemian of conservative American caricature. Hearing him joke about making new paintings for the Prado, Marga felt nauseated.
As so often in the past, it remained uncertain how much of Picasso’s work the Museum of Modern Art would be able to get. Having made no progress at the Flore, Marga was running out of time. Finally, on the eve of her departure for New York, she phoned Zervos’s wife, Yvonne, who told her they were expecting Picasso at the Cahiers d’Art offices that afternoon and urged her to join them. She rushed over, and soon after, Picasso turned up, wearing a bright tie and yellow socks. “Aren’t you handsome,” Marga said. “En effet,” he answered—“Indeed.” The room broke out in laughter. He sat down next to Marga on the Zervoses’ couch, and they began to talk. Eventually, she brought up the works Alfred was hoping to borrow. “Will you lend?” This time, with Zervos and others watching, Picasso couldn’t refuse, and suggested several important paintings he would be glad to offer her. But when she went to meet him the next morning to finalize the arrangements, he stood her up. She would have to return to New York empty-handed.[9]
Paradoxically, Picasso’s evasion meant that, for star power, Alfred would have to rely on the works of Salvador Dalí, whose Francoist sympathies were at odds with almost the entire modern art world. “Picasso’s breakdown…means that Dalí will have to lend & lend importantly,” Marga wrote Alfred.[10] Perhaps it was Picasso’s increasingly byzantine personal affairs and his unresolved divorce; perhaps it was his resistance to a huge group show. Whatever it was, Picasso seemed no more interested in taking part in Barr’s Surrealism show than in engaging with the war in Spain. The world would have to wait.
—
Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, Barr’s most radical exhibition to date, would prove to be hugely controversial. Among the hundreds of works were Duchamp’s Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy?, a birdcage filled with marble “sugar” cubes, which was lent by John Quinn’s old friend Henri-Pierre Roché; Magritte’s The False Mirror, a painting of a giant eye whose pupil is a cloud-filled blue sky; Man Ray’s huge painting of the disembodied lips of his former lover Lee Miller, floating over a landscape; and, most sensationally, a fur-clad teacup and tea set by the young Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim.[11] Equally provocative was Barr’s inclusion of “comparative material”—nonartistic sources that ranged from Walt Disney’s Wolf Pacifier from The Three Little Wolves to children’s drawings and Rorschach inkblots. There even was a section of “art of the insane”—drawings by psychiatric patients that he felt were an important source for the Surrealists.
Fueled by sensational press coverage, the show drew more than fifty thousand visitors, but it was hardly the reverential interest that had greeted Van Gogh. While Dalí, with his by now famous “wet watches,” was an inevitable crowd pleaser, much of the attention was sniggering. Journalists gleefully reported couples in hysterics over sculptures made of household utensils and animal detritus; one columnist wrote that the Museum of Modern Art had been turned into a “penny arcade.” In the New York Herald Tribune, a group calling themselves Defenders of Democracy and claiming to have sixty thousand members denounced the show as a Communist plot. Even some of Barr’s fellow modernists took issue with his inclusion of psychopathic drawings and children’s art, at a time when the Nazis were condemning all modern art as “degenerate.” “Personally, I considered it very dangerous for our American public,” the avant-garde patron Katherine Dreier told him.[12]
Most worrying was the reaction of the trustees. Goodyear, known for his adventurous tastes, found the show so embarrassing that he feared it had done serious damage to the museum. “It includes a number of things that are ridiculous and could hardly be included in any definition of art,” he wrote to Abby Rockefeller. She was even more troubled than Goodyear, and for the first time expressed serious misgivings about Barr’s leadership. “I feel that he is neither physically nor temperamentally fitted to cope with the intricate problems of the management of the museum,” she told Goodyear. It was time, she said, for some higher authority to start vetting his shows. She added, “We should from now on have a director who directs.”[13]
For Barr, it was an ominous turn. Almost since the day she had hired him, Rockefeller had been one of his most loyal supporters. She had often been awed by the breadth of his knowledge and the impact of his shows; she stood by him during his breakdown, provided him with doctors, granted him a year’s leave at the height of the economic crisis. She approved his bold expansion of the museum into architecture, film, and photography and solicited his advice in her own collection. But he was a hopeless manager, and in his zeal to embrace the most experimental new work, he was starting to lose her. Even as he pushed the museum to the forefront of the art world, he had opened a new rift with its principal founder.
—
By the winter of 1936–37, Europe’s first military confrontation with Fascism had grown increasingly dark. Even before the opening of Barr’s Surrealism show, Franco’s forces had begun the siege of Madrid, with vicious street fighting and German bombers pounding the city. As Marga had predicted, not only civilians but also prized artworks were threatened. In early November, Spanish officials began evacuating the Prado’s most important paintings to Valencia; shortly afterward, the museum was hit by multiple incendiary bombs. “See the builders of ruins at work,” Picasso’s friend Éluard wrote in a major protest poem, breaking the Surrealist taboo on poetry about current events. Then, in early February, Franco’s forces overtook Málaga, Picasso’s city of birth. From his Spanish friends, like the poet José Bergamín, he was also receiving alarming reports from the front lines.[14]
Despite these events, Picasso’s attitude had changed little since the summer. Contrary to what has often been written about the artist, and despite the intense involvement of many of his friends, there is very little evidence of his political engagement during the first nine months of the war.[15] He now spent weeks mostly in Paris with Dora Maar, followed by long weekends with Marie-Thérèse and Maya, who was now a year and a half old, at Vollard’s farmhouse in Le Tremblay, an hour’s drive west of the city. Meanwhile, he continued to frequent his usual spots and spend long hours at the café. In Spain that fall, Zervos and his wife had visited Picasso’s mother in Barcelona and sent him vivid accounts of watching young soldiers leaving for the front lines. “There is no public display, no tears, no sign of sadness, only a great dignity that grabs you deep in the gut,” Zervos reported in one letter. Yet when they returned to Paris, they found Picasso as emotionally detached from the war as ever. “For a long time he fought his own feelings,” Zervos wrote.[16]
Despite his official position at the Prado, Picasso hadn’t been involved in the evacuation, and apart from the satirical comic strip he had started but not finished, called The Dream and Lie of Franco, and an unusual portrait of Dora waving a Spanish flag, there was hardly a trace of the war in his work. Four days after the fall of Málaga, he painted an absurdist scene of two robot-like nudes playing with a toy boat on the beach. “Picasso was joking, trying to shock, playing at contradictions,” the critic John Berger wrote. “But this was because he didn’t know what else to do.”[17]
Then, one afternoon in late April, while Picasso was sitting at his usual table at the Flore, the Spanish poet Juan Larrea jumped out of a taxi and accosted him. Larrea worked as an information officer for the Spanish Republic and had been part of a committee that had persuaded Picasso, a few months earlier, to create a very large mural for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair that summer. Picasso had been reluctant to accept the commission, and for months he had done very little work on it. But now Larrea brought some shocking news. The Basque president had just announced on the radio that something unimaginable had happened in northern Spain. “German airmen in the service of the Spanish rebels have bombarded Gernika, burning the historic town that is held in such veneration by all Basques,” he had said. There were still few details about the attack, but it appeared that the entire town had been reduced to smoldering ruins. Larrea urged Picasso to take up the bombing as the subject of his mural.[18]
Picasso was noncommittal. It was not the kind of theme he dealt with; he wasn’t even sure what a bombed city looked like. It also wasn’t clear what had happened. But the atrocity wouldn’t go away. That evening, Ce soir, a newspaper edited by Picasso’s friend Louis Aragon, described it as “the most horrible bombardment of the war.” The next morning, the Communist daily L’Humanité, also one of Picasso’s regular papers, ran the startling headline: a thousand incendiary bombs dropped by the planes of hitler and mussolini reduce the city of guernica to ashes. And on the next day: only five houses left standing in guernica! Then, finally, the first shocking photographs began to appear in Le Figaro and Ce soir.[19]
As more details emerged, it became clear that the bombing was meticulously planned and unspeakably awful. In fact, Mussolini’s planes were not involved, but the initial news contributed to an overwhelming sense of Fascist terror. Timed for the afternoon of a market day, when the streets would be full of people, the attack had involved waves of Heinkel warplanes, alternating with larger and slower Junkers, blanketing the town with incendiary bombs, and strafing fleeing civilians with machine-gun fire, until the entire area was reduced to rubble. The remains of the town had burned for three days. Hundreds of people were killed and thousands more were uprooted. Here was all the horror of the Spanish war compressed into a single, terrible event.
That weekend, Picasso didn’t join Marie-Thérèse and Maya in the countryside. He stayed in his studio and began to sketch. On May 1, he completed six drawings; soon there were a dozen: a woman holding a lantern; a majestic, terrified, writhing horse; a woman, twisted and upturned in agony, grasping the limp body of a young child; a fallen warrior; an appalling pile of twisted limbs; a menacing bull; a petrified bird. For nearly two weeks, as he furiously drew, L’Humanité published new photographs of the grim aftermath: burned buildings; dead animals; refugees fleeing Guernica on foot, some of them carrying infants.
As he worked, Picasso was in a rage. Dora was struck by what she called his “indignation.” Man Ray had never seen him react so violently to world events; Bergamín, his poet friend, described it as “Spanish fury.”[20] This was an almost unrecognizable Picasso from the man of previous weeks and months. Everyone around him noticed it: Something about this particular tragedy, this attack on an entire people, had shaken him out of his passivity. The emotional dam that had protected him from the war had suddenly broken.
In almost every way, the project was a departure for him. He had never made a political painting; he had never made a public mural. Indeed, for all his decades as an artist, for all his restless experimentation, there was hardly anything about the format that related to any previous work. In scale alone, the challenge was formidable: The canvas was twenty-five feet long and eleven feet high; somehow, he would have to project his repertoire of intimate human and animal images onto a surface that was far larger than any person or beast. And it would have to have a unifying vision. “I know I am going to have terrible problems with this painting,” he told Dora. “But I am determined to do it.” He added, “We have to arm for the war to come.”[21]
After ten days of nonstop sketching, he drew his first full design on the canvas; already, much of the final conception of the painting had taken shape. Then, in subsequent phases, the central motifs of an immense, dark, claustrophobic tableau began to emerge, restricted to the same unremitting gray-black-and-white colors of the newspaper photographs that had inspired him. In the end, it didn’t matter what a bombed city looked like. The human violence ran deeper. “The military caste,” as Picasso would soon put it in a rare public statement, had “sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.”[22] To convey the horror he needed the full range of his art: Goya, Athenian tragedy, medieval Catalan art, bullfighting, Crucifixion iconography, Cubist collage, Surrealist biomorphism, the endlessly transposed Minotaur series.
As he worked and reworked the canvas, Dora watched and photographed. Providing a riveting, start-to-finish record of the painting’s creation, her images captured not only Picasso’s developing vision, but the extraordinary pace at which he executed it. Each day, the canvas, with its contorted limbs and faces and animals in agony, evolved; in thirty-five days, it was finished. For any painter, it would have been a breakneck project. For a middle-aged artist who two years earlier had almost ceased painting altogether, it was an astonishing, athletic feat of self-reinvention. Having insulated himself from the events in Spain for so long, Zervos noted, Picasso now let his paintbrush explode with “distress, anguish, terror, insurmountable pain, massacres, and finally peace found in death.”[23]
As he was immersed in making the huge painting, Picasso also thrust himself into the Republican cause. He donated the payment he received for the mural commission to Spanish war relief. He decried the destruction by Franco’s forces and began to take an intense interest in the Prado. And likely with significant help from Éluard and his Spanish friends, he also made the first political statement of his life. “The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom,” he declared, in a text he provided the American Artists’ Congress, the anti-Fascist artists’ front in New York. Suddenly, Picasso was identifying himself with the democratic values that Barr championed. But his most important statement would be the painting itself.[24]
The Spanish Pavilion of the Paris Expo should have provided an ideal setting for the giant work that would soon be titled Guernica. Designed by the young Catalan architect Josep Lluís Sert, the building was a simple, steel-framed glass box, and its exhibit provided a bold combination of high modernism and pro-Republican propaganda. Along with Guernica and several Picasso sculptures, it featured another mural, by Miró, and a fountain by Alexander Calder, as well as photographs and documents about the war and a film program organized by the avant-garde filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Overall, the presentation seemed designed to show that art could be both aesthetically advanced and politically urgent. And it would have an unparalleled world audience.
Almost from the moment the pavilion opened, however, Guernica was distinctly unloved. Though millions of international visitors attended the Expo, few seem to have paused very long in front of the huge, dark, unsettling mural; fewer still appear to have appreciated it. “They looked at this thing and they didn’t understand it,” Sert, the architect, said. “I watched them pass by.”[25] Many were put off by the painting’s limited palette. Others disdained its abstract imagery and its lack of direct reference to the town itself or the Fascist aggressors. The journalist Emily Genauer, one of the few Americans who commented on it that summer, noted that it was “incomprehensible to most people who see it.” According to Le Corbusier, the mural “saw only the backs of visitors, for they were repelled by it.”[26]
Spanish officials were hardly more enthusiastic. The Basque delegation in Paris pointedly snubbed Picasso’s offer to give the work to the Basque people, while the Basque artist José María de Ucelay was more blunt: “As a work of art it’s one of the poorest things ever produced in the world.”[27] Picasso’s friend Juan Larrea listened to Spanish officials in Paris describe it as “antisocial.”[28] So reviled was Guernica among the pavilion’s own staff that several officials suggested taking it down and replacing it with a different work. Buñuel, who had helped install the mural and was an avowed modernist himself, said that he and several others at the pavilion hated everything about it. “Indeed all three of us would be delighted to blow up the painting,” he said.[29]
With few exceptions, the French press ignored Guernica altogether. Amid almost daily coverage of the Expo, Excelsior, L’Intransigeant, Le Temps, Le Figaro, and Le Matin made no mention of the work; nor did Le Populaire, the socialist newspaper that had often appeared in Picasso’s Cubist paintings. Even the Communist L’Humanité, which had done more reporting on the bombing of Guernica than any other French paper, made only glancing reference to the mural. Not wanting to criticize Picasso directly, his friend Aragon, who was director of Ce soir, avoided any comment about Picasso or the painting. Intended as an overpowering statement about the war, Guernica had instead met with silence.
It did not help that one of the most careful observers of Picasso’s work was not in Paris at all that summer. For Alfred Barr, Picasso’s political turn should have carried dramatic importance. But in 1937, in a rare exception to their usual summer routine, he and Marga had stayed in the United States: Marga was pregnant. For years, they had been ambivalent about children, but Marga was now in her midthirties and had been determined to try; in October, their daughter, Victoria, was born. During the final weeks of Marga’s pregnancy, a Paris friend of theirs sent them a postcard from the Spanish Pavilion with a picture of Guernica on it. But amid pressing matters at home, there is little evidence that Alfred gave it much thought.[30]
Still, there were Zervos and his friends at Cahiers d’Art, who had closely followed the genesis of Guernica and fervently wanted the painting to reach the world. Picasso scholars have long maintained that the influential magazine, bucking the French press, gave the giant anti-war mural instantaneous international acclaim in a now celebrated double issue. “A powerful defense of Guernica…was almost immediately marshalled by the artists, writers, and poets of the Cahiers d’Art circle…heralding a painting virtually unknown except to Picasso’s friends,” the late-twentieth-century scholar Herschel B. Chipp, one of the work’s leading chroniclers, wrote.[31]
But this is mistaken. Although the special “Guernica” issue of Cahiers d’Art is undated, the magazine’s account books make clear that it was not published until October, a full three months after the painting’s unveiling and nearly at the end of the Expo itself; many readers did not see it until weeks after that. All indications are that the magazine had almost no effect on the painting’s abysmal reception in Paris.[32] Paradoxically, one of the only mass-circulation publications to take up the painting at the time of the opening was the official Nazi guidebook to the Expo, which predictably called it “the dream of a madman, a hodgepodge of parts of bodies that a four-year-old child could have painted.”[33]
As a personal political awakening, Guernica marked an astonishing turn. For a group of Picasso’s friends, it was also the most powerful work of his life. As a rousing call to defend the Spanish Republic, however, the painting had gone nowhere. Among those who noted the lack of response was Jean-Paul Sartre, who was teaching at the Lycée Pasteur in Paris at the time and had just written an acclaimed short story about the war. “Does anyone think it won over a single heart to the Spanish cause?” he later asked.[34] For much of the summer, all that Picasso’s giant mural seemed to have achieved, on a popular level, was to rile the enemies of modern art. When the Expo closed that fall, though the painting officially belonged to the Republican government in Spain, it was returned to Picasso’s studio. Based on its disastrous debut in Paris, it seemed possible that Guernica might soon be forgotten.