31

“Such a Painting Could Never Again Be Had”

“FOR HEAVENS SAKE, do not mention to anyone,” the dealer wrote to his counterparts in the United States. “Do not show photographs to anyone, and do not mention pictures to anyone.” Written by a prominent Paris art trader, the September 24, 1937, letter concerned a very large Picasso that was about to travel across the Atlantic on the S.S. Normandie. It was not Guernica.[1]

While Picasso’s great anti-war mural was perplexing visitors to the Spanish Pavilion in the Trocadéro Gardens, a different monumental painting—created decades earlier, yet virtually unknown to the public—had quietly been extracted from the private collection on the outskirts of Paris where it had long been kept. With France now in full-blown economic crisis, the dealer thought his best chances for a high price would be in the United States. Such was the legend surrounding the work, moreover, that he wanted to keep it completely under wraps until its unveiling in New York.

But Alfred Barr soon found out anyway. The mysterious painting was Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the nearly eight-foot-tall, discomfiting brothel scene with which Picasso, at twenty-five, had thrown away the rules that had governed painting for nearly five centuries. In avant-garde circles in Paris, it had a cultlike status; Barr regarded it as the first Cubist picture, a painting that was to earlier art what Einstein was to Newton. “In few modern works,” he would argue, “is the arrogance of genius so powerfully asserted.” Yet as far as he knew, in its thirty-year existence, the Demoiselles had never been exhibited. Only a year earlier, he had desperately wanted to borrow it for his landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. The widow of its longtime owner, the Paris fashion designer Jacques Doucet, had refused. Now, however, the painting was being unpacked at Seligmann & Co., a prominent gallery less than five minutes’ walk from the museum. And it was for sale.[2]

Barr was excited, and apprehensive. If there was a single work that embodied the insurgent spirit he was trying to capture at the museum, the Demoiselles was it. Here was a painting that could define the collection, a painting that Barr could, in essence, bring into the greater world. It was an almost unfathomable opportunity. But Seligmann had priced it at an ambitious $30,000. While that price hardly seems extravagant to a twenty-first-century reader—adjusted for inflation, it would amount today to about a half million dollars, a moderate sum for a premier work by a leading contemporary artist—the amount was considerably more than was being asked for almost any contemporary painting at the time. It was also more than all the money the museum had spent in the art market combined.

Not least was the question of its content. Fueled by the Federal Art Project, the New Deal’s public art program, the dominant style of large-scale painting in America continued to be a socially engaged realism. In the fall of 1937, artists were decorating post offices, libraries, and government buildings across the country with murals of farmers and factory workers, scenes from American history, and ordinary people experiencing the vicissitudes of American life. Here, by contrast, was a stomach-turning semiabstracted scene from a European whorehouse. As it was, the unbridled rule breaking of Picasso’s execution quite literally masked several of the five prostitutes and their lurid precoital poses: scandal eclipsed by revolt. Still smarting from the fallout of his Surrealism show, Barr had reason to doubt that the trustees would go for either quality.


In fact, the unexpected arrival of the Demoiselles on Fifth Avenue couldn’t have come at a more critical juncture for the museum. In his shows, Barr was finally starting to bring the avant-garde movements of Europe to a broad public. He had expanded the scope of modern art to include everything from low-income housing to buzz saws. And after years in makeshift quarters, he and his staff were finally on the cusp of getting a very modern permanent home. Thanks to a curious marital transaction, the trustees had acquired a series of Rockefeller-owned properties on West Fifty-third Street. John Rockefeller, Jr., refused to donate the land to the museum, but he was willing to sell it for $250,000; Abby Rockefeller, using her own funds, gave the museum the money to buy it from her husband.[3] (When it came to modern art, the question of biens conjugaux seems to have been as crucial for the Rockefellers as it had been for Picasso and Rosenberg.) The board had even agreed to build the museum in the International Style—though they swatted away Barr’s strenuous efforts to hire Mies van der Rohe, opting instead for a tamer design by their trustee Philip Goodwin, and his young American partner, Edward Durell Stone.

Yet amid this remarkable success, Barr had made embarrassingly little headway on his most central aim: the assembly of the first great museum collection of twentieth-century painting and sculpture. Well before the museum’s first show, he and the founders had announced that their “ultimate purpose” was to build a “collection of the best modern works of art.”[4] This was the utopian ambition that, working from his own instincts, John Quinn had set out to accomplish with Henri-Pierre Roché a generation earlier; it was also the project that Barr had turned into a programmatic vision when he began drawing torpedoes in Stuttgart. As he had long argued, only with a sequence of exceptional creations by the greatest artists—works that continually looked forward to the “ever advancing present”—would the museum be able to tell the unfolding story of twentieth-century art in a durable way.

But while the trustees supported Barr’s collection-building concept, they showed very little interest in paying for it. As early as 1930, he had tried to get Seurat’s masterpiece Parade as a foundational work. “Buildings may be had for money,” he told one board member, “but such a painting as this…could never again be had.” The trustees were unmoved. Over the following years, an extraordinary series of avant-garde paintings became available for Depression-era prices—not just important works but defining, essential contributions to the development of modern art. Again and again, Alfred found his hands tied. One of Chagall’s greatest paintings for $1,500? He couldn’t raise more than $1,000. Giacomo Balla’s Dog on a Leash, a high point of the entire Futurist movement, for $600? Impossible. Six thousand for the incomparable Cubist masterpiece of Roger de La Fresnaye, whose work Quinn had introduced to New York more than two decades earlier? “Needless to say the museum cannot afford it,” Marga noted dryly.[5]

Alfred did no better when he staged successful shows of the artists in question. After his landmark Matisse retrospective, the trustees failed to acquire a single painting for the museum. The pattern held for Diego Rivera and many other exhibitions. “The Museum has been borrowing works of art but never buying,” Marga observed as late as 1935. Even after the breakout success of Van Gogh, Alfred was unable to persuade the trustees to purchase Starry Night, one of the preeminent modern paintings. Though the exhibition itself had generated a rare profit for the museum, the money, he was told, was needed for other purposes.[6]

The trustees seemed to assume that gifts and donations would take up the slack. It was true that, after strenuous lobbying on Barr’s part and a stark reduction in the endowment requirements, they had belatedly taken possession of the Bliss Collection in 1934. But most of her paintings—Cézannes, Degases, Gauguins—were from the late nineteenth century; her single Cubist still life by Picasso and rather mild Matisse interior were hardly the beginnings of an avant-garde corpus. Meanwhile, the smattering of contemporary gifts that had come in also showed how much was lacking. Around its fifth anniversary, the museum was given two significant works from the late twenties: Brancusi’s ethereal bronze Bird in Space and Picasso’s The Studio, a distinguished, if not quite epochal, abstract painting inspired by his experiments with wire sculpture. At almost the same moment, Abby Rockefeller also donated thirty-six paintings and dozens of watercolors, mostly by American artists. It might have seemed that the ground was at last being laid for the great collection that Alfred sought. But John Quinn had once owned dozens of Brancusis and Picassos, along with his incomparable Seurats and Rousseaus and hundreds of paintings by American modernists.

Picasso was a special sore point. In 1934, Barr learned that Reber, the Swiss-German collector who had backed his initial Picasso plans, had suffered catastrophic losses on the Paris Bourse. “I’ve now got all the dope on Dr. R,” one of Barr’s European sources told him. “He is said to be in a very bad financial state…I believe that everything he has is for sale.”[7] The news alone was tantalizing: Reber had perhaps the premier collection of Picassos at the time, along with huge numbers of Grises, Légers, and Braques. He also owned one of the two versions of Three Musicians, the twin Fontainebleau paintings that were the majestic culmination of Picasso’s long road through Cubism during the war. When Barr learned that Reber might be prepared to sell Three Musicians for as little as $7,000 or even lower, he launched an all-out offensive to get it.

First he tried Stephen Clark, one of the few trustees who was actively buying art during the crisis. In a series of letters and calls, Barr plied him with blandishments, praising his taste and his earlier efforts on behalf of the museum. Reporting what he had learned about Reber, he told him that “one of the greatest twentieth century paintings” could be bagged for “an astonishing bargain.” So innovative was Three Musicians, he added, that its purchase alone would silence critics who faulted the museum for “not being sufficiently modern.” At the same time, he wrote to Abby Rockefeller to see if she might contribute funds to the effort. The hard-nosed Clark—who had already almost derailed the Bliss bequest—was not impressed. He was not averse to the painting, but it was a buyer’s market and there were two versions available. He was in no hurry. For her part, Rockefeller, distracted at the time by the wedding of her son Laurance, apparently didn’t respond.[8]

Unwilling to give up, Barr opened a second front with the man who owned the other version of Three Musicians and was, as usual, at the center of all things Picasso: Paul Rosenberg. Despite a collapsed market, the dealer had clung to his high prices, initially asking up to four times Reber’s figure for his painting, which was slightly larger. Rosenberg clearly wasn’t selling much, though, and through intermediaries, Barr learned that he was open to negotiation. The following winter, Barr persuaded Rosenberg to lend the painting for the museum’s fifth anniversary exhibition; trying to get the trustees’ attention, he also described it in the show as Picasso’s “greatest Cubist composition.” But Rosenberg was unwilling to go below $20,000, and the efforts went nowhere.

Finally, as the summer of 1936 approached, Alfred made a new campaign for Reber’s painting, which was miraculously still on the market. He decided he would persuade Rockefeller to jointly buy the painting with Walter Chrysler, Jr., the adventurous young automotive heir who had just given Picasso’s The Studio to the museum. The talks extended from New York to Paris, including a meeting with a lukewarm Rockefeller at the very ancien régime Hôtel de Crillon. (“She is neither encouraging nor discouraging,” Marga noted.) But in the end Alfred was only able to raise $4,800 and soon after, a rival collector scooped up the painting. Alfred called the whole affair “the worst disappointment I have had in seven years as director.”[9]


It was now a full year since the Three Musicians fiasco, however, and the trustees were facing a looming test. Having committed to opening a costly new building in the spring of 1939—a building that would nearly triple the museum’s current gallery space—they were now at risk of appearing house poor. Where were the star pieces? The quarter million Abby Rockefeller had given her husband for the land alone was the same amount that a decade earlier could have netted hundreds of the most important paintings in the Quinn collection. But though they were spending lavishly on the new museum, they still had only a handful of exceptional twentieth-century artworks to put in it. A collection dominated by Lillie Bliss’s post-Impressionists and Rockefeller’s Americans was hardly going to put the museum at the forefront of modern art. Amid their many missed chances, Barr’s warning that buildings, but not artworks, could always be had for money was starting to seem prescient.

Still, the Demoiselles presented a formidable challenge. Seligmann’s asking price was the same amount the museum had refused to pay for Starry Night only a year earlier. If the trustees were unwilling to spend $30,000 on a classic work by the crowd-pleasing Van Gogh, it seemed unlikely they would spring for the radical painting that Picasso himself liked to call mon bordel. So profane was the subject matter that Jacques Doucet, the painting’s only previous owner, had expressed reservations at the time he bought it: Madame Doucet, he had told Picasso, wouldn’t abide a group of giant naked whores in the living room. (In the end, after briefly considering his Art Deco bathroom, the collector had mounted the painting in the stairwell of his top-floor studio.) Nor was the critical reaction promising: Soon after the painting was unveiled, not only the conservative New York Herald but also the Times had dismissed it, with the Times’s art critic suggesting it should be “tucked away in the reference files.”[10]

To have any chance of getting the painting, Barr needed a plan of battle. First, he would go to the Advisory Committee. Notwithstanding their opposition to the Van Gogh show, this group of mostly younger enthusiasts generally had his back and were far more likely to rally around such an unusual painting. Though they had no voting power, they could make formal recommendations to the board. About a week after the Demoiselles went on view, he made an impassioned case to the committee. He stressed the work’s unique importance as the roiling birthplace of Cubism, its radical use of non-European source material, its startling new answers to the age-old problems of representing space and volume and multiple points of view on a flat surface. As Barr would later argue, the painting even showed—in the dramatic shift from the figures on the left to the almost savagely abstracted figures on the right—Picasso’s ideas emerging “right before our eyes.”[11]

After Barr made his case, there was a great deal of debate. It would be a very big purchase. But then someone pointed out that the museum was “so frequently criticized” for not acquiring important paintings. Someone else noted the public expectations that would come in 1939 with the new building and that a number of museums were “visited by thousands of people annually” because of one or two standout artworks. A few members were so persuaded by Barr’s arguments that they suggested the Demoiselles might be “the most important painting of the 20th century.” In the end, they passed a resolution recommending purchase.

The trustees were another matter. They had an exceedingly poor track record when it came to making bold purchases; they also had a history of ignoring whatever the Advisory Committee suggested. Rockefeller and Clark had already failed to rally around the far more modestly priced Three Musicians. Still, Barr had another card to play. In the fall of 1929, just a few weeks before Doucet’s death, Conger Goodyear had been in Paris and had received an invitation to the designer’s townhouse; he was among the very few Americans who had seen and admired the painting before its arrival in the United States. Goodyear had also weathered his own Picasso hurricane when he had bought John Quinn’s La Toilette for the Albright Art Gallery and was not particularly concerned about scandal. Barr knew that in this instance he could count on Goodyear’s strong support, and it was Goodyear who would be leading the meeting.

Two days after the committee’s recommendation, Goodyear convened the trustees. Armed with Barr’s arguments and the committee’s overwhelming endorsement, he had a forceful case. And in the end, Barr’s fierce conviction carried the day. Here was a work, the trustees concurred, that would be essential to the museum’s very purpose. Along the way, hardly anyone seemed to have noticed what the Demoiselles was really about. (In fact, it would take thirty-five years before the art historian Leo Steinberg, in a barn-burning essay in Art News, decisively shifted public attention to what he called Picasso’s “naked problem,” the dramatic scene of carnal encounter at the heart of the painting.) “If possible,” the board resolved, “the Demoiselles d’Avignon should be acquired for the permanent collection as an epoch-making work, a turning point in 20th century art.”[12]

There was still a catch. Having convinced the trustees of the painting’s exceptional importance, Barr still needed to find a way to pay for it. Even with pledges of support from the gung-ho Advisory Committee, adequate funds were no more available than before. Would the Demoiselles slip through their fingers anyway? It was at this point that he and Goodyear hit upon an ingenious plan. Though it had never been exercised, Lillie Bliss had added a farsighted clause to her bequest: Paintings from her collection could be traded for more important works as the museum saw fit. There were numerous nineteenth-century Bliss paintings the museum didn’t need, and it didn’t take long for Alfred to find a Degas horse racing scene from 1884 that no one would miss.

Having had no success finding a private buyer for the Demoiselles, meanwhile, Germain Seligmann was open to a cashless arrangement with the museum. He accepted the Degas as $18,000 toward the purchase price, which he now reduced to $28,000; then, in an unusual gesture, he and his associate agreed to “donate” the remaining $10,000 of the painting’s purported market value to the museum. (In reality, this “gift” was entirely hypothetical, given that Seligmann had paid just 150,000 francs, or about $6,000, when he bought the painting two months earlier. He and his associate were still making a threefold profit on the Degas trade alone.) The gallery still needed to sell the Degas before the museum could take ownership of the Demoiselles, but in principle they had a deal.[13]

It was a remarkable coup. At last, they were acquiring a work that could live up to Barr’s bold vision for the museum. For the moment, nothing could be said publicly about the Demoiselles, pending the Degas sale. But the arrangement for the first time suggested the potential of Barr’s torpedo, hurtling forward to absorb crucial new works while discarding old ones in its wake. Here was the “metabolic” museum that he had long imagined—both permanent and evolving at the same time. Amid the improbable victory, however, was another truth: The trustees’ attitude toward the collection had not fundamentally shifted. They were glad to see it grow but remained unwilling to spend large sums on it. He would need to find other ways to get more such works.

A few weeks after the Demoiselles deal, Alfred was sitting in his office when a spritely older woman with pince-nez glasses walked in. Though they had never met, she told him she came often to his shows. She also said she was hoping he might choose a painting that she could buy and give to the museum. It could be anything he wanted, she said, provided it was a “masterpiece.” Alfred was taken aback; as far as he knew, the woman had no personal ties to the museum. The unknown benefactor turned out to be Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, sister-in-law of museum founder Solomon Guggenheim and aunt of flamboyant art patron Peggy Guggenheim. It was the beginning of one of the most important patron relationships in museum history—Mrs. Guggenheim providing the cash and Alfred Barr choosing the art.

For almost anyone else in Barr’s place, having just secured the Demoiselles, it might have been an ideal opportunity to acquire an exceptional Matisse. Or the great Seurat or Van Gogh they still lacked. Or perhaps Max Beckmann’s astonishing triptych Departure, which captured, in unsettling allegory, the Nazi rise to power and which had just arrived at a gallery in New York. With such a landmark Picasso in hand, the museum could now concentrate on one of the other great pioneers whose work it sorely needed. Not Barr. Even now, he felt, Picasso was more important. Like Quinn before him, Barr had a driving sense that the collection needed to be anchored around the greatest works of Picasso, because of his central importance to the new art of the twentieth century. There also was a fresh opportunity.

Paul Rosenberg had recently sent Girl before a Mirror to Valentine Dudensing, the New York dealer with whom he sometimes worked. This was the painting that Alfred and Marga had admired above all others at the 1932 shows in Paris and Zurich. For Alfred, it was one of the artist’s four or five essential works. Just as Three Musicians was in relation to Picasso’s Cubism, Girl before a Mirror, he felt, was the highly complex end point of the curvilinear style the artist had developed in the early months of 1932. It was precisely the kind of eclipsing work he sought in his quest to map out the successive high points of modern art.

Not everyone agreed. To many viewers, the girl embracing her own reflection was a disturbing puzzle. Exquisitely designed in almost phosphorescent yellows and greens and orange-reds, the painting had a rich, almost Matissean patterning. Yet it was also rendered with a disorienting multiple vision in which geometric abstraction combined with unsettling psychological tension and sexual puns. As Barr observed, the woman was clothed, unclothed, and x-rayed at the same time. It was not exactly what Mrs. Guggenheim had in mind when she said “masterpiece.” Still, Rosenberg was willing to sell it for $10,000, and Mrs. Guggenheim dutifully obliged. The sale was quickly concluded.

Within the space of a few weeks, Alfred had managed to anchor his fledgling collection with two of Picasso’s most important paintings. After years of setbacks, he could finally signal to the European art world that the museum was more than just a staging ground for loan shows. But it was not time to celebrate yet. When he got home and told Marga about the purchase of Girl before a Mirror—a painting laden with personal meaning for both of them—she exclaimed, “Aren’t you happy? Isn’t it wonderful?” He was silent. Already there was another great, controversial painting that troubled him. And like the Demoiselles, it had long been hidden in a private collection in Europe.[14]


Alfred and Marga arrived in Zurich five months after the purchase of Girl before a Mirror. At the train station, they were met by a Swiss museum friend of Alfred’s, who drove them to the small village of Küssnacht about forty kilometers away. An affluent enclave on the north shore of Lake Lucerne, Küssnacht was primarily known as the place where William Tell killed the Austrian tyrant Albrecht Gessler with a crossbow, paving the way for Swiss independence in the fourteenth century. But as Alfred had recently learned, it was also home to a mysterious painting that he had been thinking about since his early twenties.

Among the most disconcerting outcomes of the breakup of the John Quinn estate was the fate of Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy. Picked out for Quinn by Picasso, Roché, Brancusi, and his other friends in the final months of Quinn’s life, the nocturnal encounter of the huge lion and the dreaming woman had seemed to form the magical key to all of his paintings. Barr himself fell hard for the painting at the John Quinn memorial exhibition in 1926, and then, when it arrived back in Paris to be auctioned at the Hôtel Drouot, it had captivated the Parisian public. In his encomium to Quinn, Jean Cocteau called the painting “the heart of the wheel, the center of the center, the place where speed sleeps in place, the eye of the storm, the sleep of sleeps, the silence of silences.”[15]

But then the painting had abruptly fallen into disrepute. At the time of the sale, there was apparently a quarrel between the winning bidder, an art dealer named Henri Bing, and a rival dealer; then, in the months after the sale, there were murmurings in Paris that the picture was a fake. There were even rumors that Picasso or perhaps Derain had painted it as a joke. Since The Sleeping Gypsy had been entirely unknown at the time Quinn bought it—and even Kahnweiler, who sold it to him, seemed to know very little about its provenance—it was easy to give credence to these claims. Soon the painting was discredited, and it all but vanished. Almost as quickly as it had been discovered by Quinn’s friends, it seemed to recede back into the obscurity from which it had emerged.

Along with a handful of people who had seen it in New York, Alfred refused to believe the stories. He was certain that the painting was authentic. Like Quinn, he considered it one of the most important works of the modern era. After he had become director of the museum, and was traveling often to Europe, he began to ask about the painting; occasionally, he would encounter a fellow enthusiast who remembered it, from New York or Paris. Eventually, he learned that The Sleeping Gypsy had ended up in a private collection in Switzerland, though, as he noted, a cloud continued to hang over the picture on the one or two occasions it had been shown in a Swiss museum. Finally, during that spring of 1938, he had decided to track down the painting’s owner, a Madame Ruckstuhl-Siegwert, who apparently lived in Küssnacht. Shortly after he and Marga arrived in Europe that spring, he wrote to the woman, asking if he could come look at her painting. Then Alfred and Marga had set out for Switzerland.

When they arrived at the address in Küssnacht, they encountered a curious, absentminded woman who lived alone in a dark chalet and seemed to have emerged from an Edgar Allan Poe story. According to Marga, Madame Ruckstuhl-Siegwert was a “rather confused middle-aged widow.” Eventually she led them into the room where the painting was kept. Filling the center of the room was an elaborate crystal chandelier, something clearly designed for a ballroom or grand dining room with high ceilings. Here, it hung down to within a few feet of the floor, largely blocking the view of the wall behind it where the painting was hung. “The picture was very hard to see,” Alfred wrote.[16]

But there they were: the woman and the lion, the barren desert, the night sky. For Alfred, seeing the painting again, after twelve years, was a flash of thunder. The widow was reluctant to part with the painting, but she was also flattered by Alfred’s interest, and after some persuasion, she agreed to lend it to the museum for the opening of its new building the next spring. If all went well, Alfred hoped to persuade Mrs. Guggenheim to buy it from Madame Ruckstuhl. He knew that the trustees would have heard the stories and would likely regard it with suspicion. But while it was on loan, they would also have a chance to see it. Not long after the painting arrived at the museum, the trustees met to discuss its possible acquisition. Alfred himself was surprised by their reaction. “They were so impressed by it,” he wrote, “that…they were willing to approve its acquisition, even if in the end it should turn out not to be by Rousseau.” Thanks to Alfred’s yearslong fixation, this repudiated painting was going to get a second chance in the art world; at last, he was beginning to reassemble the collection that New York had forsaken at the death of John Quinn.[17]

If you find an error or have any questions, please email us at admin@erenow.org. Thank you!