33
As Europe went to war, Barr was consumed by a new battle of his own on West Fifty-third Street. At the time the new building opened in May, Abby Rockefeller’s son Nelson had replaced Goodyear as museum president. He had ambitious ideas about making the museum more corporate and efficient, and while Alfred and Marga were away in Paris arranging the Picasso show, he had ruthlessly reorganized the administration. Several staff members were purged, among them the museum’s chief finance man, who had worked closely with Alfred and who was replaced by someone loyal to Nelson Rockefeller. When Alfred returned, he found staff morale at a new low and was forced to come to terms with a significant waning of his own authority. Amid this crisis, and the rapidly unfolding events across the Atlantic, Alfred was uncharacteristically slow to process Dan Rich’s anxious telegram about the fate of the exhibition.
On September 11, 1939—ten days after the Nazis invaded Poland, eight days after France and Britain had entered the war, four days after French divisions began their land offensive in the Saarland, three days after Hitler annexed a large part of Polish territory into the Third Reich, two days after the British War Cabinet announced that it expected the war to last “three years or more”—Barr finally cabled Rich his reply: “seventy european loans here including picasso’s, rosenberg’s, callery’s. thirty more possibly unobtainable…” He added: “carrying no war insurance.”[1]
Rich was stunned. It was clearly not everything they wanted, but, improbably and despite the outbreak of war, the core components of a show—the main shipment of works from Picasso and Rosenberg—were in place and in New York. It was all the more impressive that Barr had persuaded them to forgo war insurance, which would have been prohibitively costly for the two museums. “You are more of a general than even I suspected,” Rich wrote back the next morning.[2]
In fact, Barr had even more than he let on. He had secured many of Rosenberg’s best paintings from the 1920s and 1930s. From Picasso’s own collection, he had nearly a dozen works that had never been seen before anywhere, as well as Three Dancers (1925), a painting of almost volcanic psychological energy and violence that was unlike anything that had come before it. Barr called it “a turning point in Picasso’s art almost as radical as was the Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Meanwhile, he’d persuaded Justin Thannhauser, the dealer who’d fled Germany for Paris two years earlier, to lend Moulin de la Galette (1900), the culmination of Picasso’s early Toulouse-Lautrec phase. And from Marcel Fleischmann—a Zurich connoisseur who had sought the museum’s help in bringing his small but important collection to New York for safekeeping—he also had Ma Jolie (1911–12), the analytical Cubist masterpiece that Picasso created as a coded tribute to Eva Gouel at the height of their love affair.
And yet the “thirty more” in Barr’s message to Rich hinted at a battle still being fought. Having gotten this far—and after so many years of trying—he couldn’t bear the idea of doing a Picasso show that lacked a quarter or more of the European loans he was aiming at. And many of the remaining paintings and other works filled in crucial gaps in the sequence of works he had already secured. Now, with barely two months to go until the November 14 opening, and with a war breaking out across the Continent, he would have to find new ways to continue his all-out campaign for the most important Picassos in Europe.
On his list were further pieces from Picasso and Rosenberg themselves, including a large group of sculptures from Picasso and Rosenberg’s version of Three Musicians, the 1921 Cubist masterpiece that Barr had spent much of the thirties fruitlessly chasing. To his chagrin, earlier in the summer Rosenberg had lent Three Musicians to a show in Buenos Aires—another part of the dealer’s effort to get as many paintings as he could out of Europe—but Barr still hoped they could somehow have it sent to New York in time for the show. Gertrude Stein had not yet decided whether she would lend the artist’s breakthrough 1906 portrait of her. Alphonse Kann, the legendary French connoisseur who had once discussed the ideal modern art collection with John Quinn, owned a 1915 Harlequin that Barr regarded as one of Picasso’s greatest wartime paintings. Still other paintings he hoped to get from, among others, the widow of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli, and the Chilean socialite Eugenia Errázuriz, in whose villa Picasso had spent his honeymoon.
As Alfred set out in mid-September to capture these remaining works from afar, he faced daunting new challenges. Already within hours of the British and French declarations of war, a German U-boat had torpedoed the British ocean liner S.S. Athenia off the coast of Ireland. Like the ship Marga had taken only a few days earlier, it was a civilian vessel bound for North America. Of its 1,418 passengers and crew, 117 were killed, including 28 Americans. Over the next few weeks, numerous other British and French ships would be sunk by mines and torpedoes. These were the same shipping lanes that any additional artworks coming to New York would have to traverse, and it made it even harder to persuade lenders to take the risk.
In Paris itself, it was an extremely inopportune moment to be tracking down paintings. Shops were closed. Men were being mobilized. Families were busy storing their possessions in cellars and underground vaults. Many who could had moved to the countryside, and those who remained were adjusting to the unsettling reality that Paris might, for the second time in the twentieth century, be in the sights of the German military. Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas lingered in Bilignin, the country house they had long been going to in the southeast of France. Mary Callery courageously stayed put in the capital and signed up to be an ambulance driver if and when the actual fighting started.
For many European collectors, concerns about art had already been supplanted by more existential problems. Already on September 6, just three days after France entered the war, Christian Zervos wrote a plaintive letter to Barr. His wife was staying in Vézelay, in Burgundy, he reported, while he waited in Paris to be called up for military service. Cahiers d’Art, he said, was virtually bankrupt. He asked Barr to try and sell “as fast as you can” the small Picasso they had lent to the show, and to send the money directly to his wife, who had none. “Keep working for the cause of modern art,” Zervos added. “It is more necessary than ever, for here it is going to be stopped for a long time.”[3]
The conflict in Europe meant that even more was riding on the Picasso show and the exceptional opportunity it offered to reshape American opinion about modern art. While modernism was being squelched on the Continent, Barr couldn’t afford to have anything less than an utterly convincing defense of it in the United States. And Picasso would likely present the last chance the museum would have to assemble a large-scale show of a European artist for years to come. It made him all the more determined to make it as complete as possible. “The war has come making picture exhibitions seem unimportant,” he wrote Rosenberg on September 12, “yet in a way we must believe that painting is more important than war.”[4]
As he reapproached other European collectors, he was sensitive to the threat of a Nazi invasion. “Although there may be some risk in shipping pictures,” he wrote to Gertrude Stein, “you may feel that your portrait would be safer in America for the duration of the war.”[5] Already, Picasso, Rosenberg, and Callery had agreed to keep their loans at the museum until hostilities had ended, and Barr offered similar arrangements to Stein and other lenders. In addition to safeguarding the paintings themselves, he also began to see that having so many extraordinary Picassos marooned in the United States would be a rare opportunity. “If the war should continue and you wish to have your pictures held here,” he wrote Thannhauser, “will you give us permission to exhibit them in other museums, with of course full insurance coverage?”[6]
Some of Barr’s appeals went nowhere. At the end of September, the French dealer Pierre Loeb, who owned several important Cubist collages Barr had been hoping to get, cabled: “impossible to send picasso paintings gallery closed i can’t do anything.”[7] A week later, Jacqueline Apollinaire informed him that, much as she wanted her husband’s memory associated with the show, the prospect of losing one of Picasso’s precious portraits of the poet to a German submarine was too much to contemplate.[8] Kann in the end declined to send his exquisite Harlequin—a decision he would come to regret when the Nazis reached Paris the following summer.
Meanwhile, Gertrude Stein apparently lost her nerve about the portrait, despite Alfred’s monthslong charm offensive. At the time, Scribner’s had just published Stein’s small book on Picasso and asked the museum if it would publicize it in connection with the show. “Reviewers have said this is much more understandable than most of Gertrude Stein’s books,” a Scribner executive assured the museum.[9] Alfred had agreed to mention the book, and Stein’s importance as an early patron of Picasso, in connection with the show, but she remained disdainful of the Museum of Modern Art. (According to Marga, it was during their visit with her that summer in Paris that she made her now famous quip that “you can be a museum or you can be modern but you can’t be both.”[10]) To the end, the American writer who had more than any other patron been at the center of the Paris avant-garde remained stubbornly apart from efforts to bring the art she supported to the United States.
Still, Alfred’s unrelenting tenacity yielded other gains. In mid-October, the S.S. Washington, an American liner, brought six important Picassos from Roland Penrose, the British Surrealist. Having spent much of August vacationing with Picasso and Dora at Antibes, Penrose had returned to London just as the war was starting. Greeted by air raid sirens, he immediately arranged to put his art collection in safe storage near Norfolk, but since Barr had already requested his Picassos, he decided to take his chances and send them to New York instead.[11] One of them was Head of 1914, an abstract, pasted-paper collage that was as radical as anything that Miró or the Surrealists were doing twenty years later. (“As a head,” Barr observed, “it is so fantastically far-fetched that it easily meets the surrealist esthetic of the marvelous.”[12])
By this point, there was less than a month to go before the opening, and Barr was running out of time. He knew there was at least one final crate of paintings that the museum’s shipper in Paris was still trying to send to New York. There also remained open questions about other works, such as Rosenberg’s Three Musicians from South America and Picasso’s sculptures. Despite the uncertainty, he needed to go ahead with the catalog for the show, one of the largest the museum had ever done. He also needed to begin working on the installation, which was going to fill up much of the new museum galleries and would require a comprehensive vision of the artist’s entire career.
To his great relief, Guernica reached the museum more or less on schedule in mid-October, by express train from the Midwest. With the immense painting were seven accompanying study paintings, some fifty drawings, and The Dream and Lie of Franco, the two comic-strip-like etching sequences that Picasso had completed in the winter and late spring of 1937. As Barr had arranged with the Spanish Refugee Relief Campaign, the Guernica group had been shown briefly at several venues across the country to raise money for the victims of Franco. Along with the Valentine Gallery in New York, the stops had included a gallery on Wiltshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and at the Arts Club of Chicago, before finally returning to New York to join the other Picassos in the show.
For Barr, it was an enormous coup to have Guernica, but the fundraising tour offered scant reassurance about American readiness for Picasso. By 1939, Guernica had finally begun to acquire international notoriety, and the Spanish Relief effort was backed by a prominent group of intellectuals and cultural figures. (In Los Angeles, the sponsors included Bette Davis and George Cukor.) But while these showings of the painting generated considerable attention, they were anything but a popular success. In L.A., a total of 735 people came to see the painting; the total fundraising proceeds of all four cities amounted to $700.
Press coverage was even more disheartening. The Los Angeles Examiner called the painting “revolting”; another West Coast paper described it as “cuckoo art.” The critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, while making an effort to understand Picasso’s iconography, concluded that “some of these heads resemble the drawings of the insane.” In Chicago, the Herald and Examiner announced Guernica’s arrival with the headline, bolshevist art controlled by the hand of moscow.[13] Here were all the old charges of the antimodernist camp resurfacing yet again. Given that Guernica had been created as a response to a bombing by the Fascist regime that was itself trying to silence modern art, Barr realized he would have to work even harder to shape a new American understanding of the artist.
Even as Guernica arrived at the museum, other troubles emerged. First was the apparent disappearance of an entire crate of Picassos. For weeks, Barr had been awaiting news from the museum’s trusted Parisian shipper, R. Lérondelle, about the final group of paintings and drawings from Paris. For security, the museum insisted that only an American boat be used, but by October, there were very few U.S. liners making the crossing. Finally, at the end of the month, Lérondelle found a boat. He reported that eleven more Picassos would be leaving France on the S.S. President Roosevelt, among them additional early Picassos from Thannhauser; three additional charcoals from Callery; and Schiaparelli’s important 1937 still life Birdcage and Playing Cards, which the designer had agreed to lend after all. It would just allow enough time for the museum to receive them and include them in the installation.
When the Roosevelt reached New York on November 4, it was absolutely packed with passengers. With many people trying to get out of Europe and few neutral boats running the Le Havre–New York line, demand for passage was extremely high. When the ship was finally unloaded, however, the Picassos were nowhere to be found. Barr was frantic. “shipment not on roosevelt cable immediately…urgent,” the museum cabled Lérondelle.[14] The paintings had definitely been delivered to Le Havre and consigned to the boat; somehow they had not been loaded. After a search in Le Havre, the missing crate finally turned up: Amid the chaotic boarding, the Picassos had been inadvertently left on the dock. Barr was relieved not to have lost the paintings, but now they would have to wait for another American ship, and as a result of new neutrality legislation in Congress, U.S. shipping lines were curtailing their services even further. The next boat, a freighter, was not scheduled to depart France until early December, several weeks after the show’s start.[15] Luckily, none of these paintings were among the show’s essential works.
Unsurprisingly, one of the greatest problems in the run-up to the show was dealing with Picasso himself. Going back to his initial vision of the show, Barr had wanted to include a large and important group of sculptures, which he regarded as central to Picasso’s art. Among other things, though Picasso had made sculptures his entire career, they had rarely been exhibited, and remained widely unknown to the public. During their initial talks in Paris, Picasso seemed enthusiastic about sending a group of sculptures, but he also said that he wanted to have a new series of casts made before making his choice. Then he and Dora had gone to Antibes.
Feeling none too reassured, Barr wrote Dora in August, asking her to “use whatever influence you can” to get Picasso to select the sculptures by the end of September, so that there would be time to get them to New York.[16] After the outbreak of war, Barr also wrote to Rosenberg and Zervos for help. “Since Picasso almost never writes letters, we hope that you will send us some word of him too,” he wrote to Rosenberg. “We still hope there may be some chance of receiving sculpture from him.”[17] But the dealer was no more in contact with Picasso than anyone else, and since the start of the war hardly anyone in the artist’s own circle had heard from him. “Picasso has disappeared, two weeks of mail await him at rue La Boétie,” Callery reported in the third week of September.[18]
Meanwhile, the museum had been trying to reach Picasso for another reason: The trustees wanted to invite him to New York for the opening. Barr knew this was extremely unlikely. Already during the summer, he had asked Picasso if he might consider coming to New York, and Picasso had simply shaken his head, smiled, and shrugged.[19] And that was before the war had started. Still, the trustees felt it was important to try, and in late September, a long formal invitation was cabled to “Mr. Pablo Picasso” signed by Nelson Rockefeller. Unsurprisingly, it had been met with silence.
Picasso was up to his usual vanishing act, but this time it was driven as much by international events as by caprice. In the final days of August, after Hitler and Stalin’s nonaggression pact was reached and France ordered a general mobilization, the town square of Antibes had filled with troops. Picasso hated war and was spooked by the prospect of a German air campaign. He also had bitter memories of the seizure of his paintings from Kahnweiler’s gallery back in 1914. Racing back to Paris, he tried to secure his scattered possessions. “He was a worried man, seeming helpless, not knowing what to do,” recalled the photographer Brassaï, who had known him since the early thirties and ran into him in Saint-Germain-des-Prés.[20]
In the end, he gave up trying to pack up his things and abruptly left the city with Dora, Sabartés, and his dog, Kasbek, by car. This time, they did not head back to the Mediterranean. Instead, they drove all night to Royan, the small town north of Bordeaux, on the Atlantic coast, where he had already sent Marie-Thérèse and Maya in July. In choosing the town, flight had clearly been on Picasso’s mind: Bordeaux was a major seaport for Atlantic crossings that could offer some possibility of escape. Sabartés later talked about Picasso’s “tragic mood” about the “events that drove him from Paris.”[21] For the time being, however, he was not contemplating escape so much as a kind of internal exile, and, with his two mistresses and young daughter, he quickly settled in to a new, reclusive wartime existence.
As a result, during the entire, frantic ten-week stretch in which the most important show of his four-decade career was being assembled, Picasso was completely unreachable. “Picasso has disappeared,” Mary Callery reported in late September.[22] A month later, Zervos wrote to Barr that he had been to the foundry and seen the casts of Picasso’s new sculptures but had lost touch with the artist himself.[23] “I truly regret that Picasso left these sculptures at the foundry instead of sending them to you,” Zervos wrote. “They are magnificent pieces.” By now the exhibition in New York was less than three weeks away, and all hopes of contacting Picasso before the opening had to be abandoned. Neither the sculptures nor Picasso himself would make it across the Atlantic. In fact, not even Rosenberg, who ordinarily would have come immediately for such an event, was able to attend, fearing that his son might be drafted in his absence. “If I had no son, which [sic] might be called if war lasted too long, I certainly would sail to the States,” he wrote Barr shortly before the opening.[24]
—
Picasso: Forty Years of His Art opened at the Museum of Modern Art on a cool Tuesday evening in mid-November. The previous day, one French and four British ships were sunk by German mines and torpedoes; that same week, The New York Times reported that “the bulk of the German Army…is in the West ready to take the initiative.”[25] In Manhattan, though, events in Europe seemed far away in a season filled with other distractions. “When we tune off the war broadcasts,” a contributor to Harper’s Bazaar wrote,
we tune in on Alex Templeton, the blind pianist, with his malicious musical take-offs…Féfé’s Monte Carlo is open again. There’s the new Martinique, with two crack Latin bands, voodoo gyrations, and drum pounders….Carmen Miranda is ay-ay-aying at the Waldorf. Downstairs in the St. Regis, all is Hawaiian now….The Met promises the most glamorous opera singer that New York has seen in years—the Czech soprano, Jarmila Novotna. And the balletomanes are discussing furiously Dalí’s “Bacchanale,” the new Massine symphonic ballet, “Rouge et Noir,” to the Shostakovich First, and Dick Rodgers’s “Ghost Town.”[26]
—
And yet, for the some seven thousand guests who attended the show’s opening night, the shadow of world conflict hung over much of what they experienced, starting with the museum itself. Designed by American architects, the new building boldly proclaimed the arrival of the International Style in Midtown Manhattan. Yet the horizontal factorylike structure—a vivid departure from the city’s upthrusting Art Deco towers—had been directly inspired by the Bauhaus, long since proscribed by the Nazi regime. Indeed, the two most prominent Bauhaus architects, Gropius and Mies, had recently arrived in the United States after fleeing the Third Reich. (If Barr had gotten his way, one of them would have designed the museum.) As much as the building suggested an emerging new style, it also reflected a Europe that was rapidly disappearing.
But it was the museum’s contents that captured this tension most strongly. After passing through the building’s signature revolving doors, the guests were greeted by three floors of some of the most astonishing paintings created since the century began, a great many of them brought over from France just weeks earlier: giant standing nudes reinterpreted through the burly, squat volumes of West African sculpture; violins and guitars that seemed to disappear entirely into a profusion of intersecting lines and planes; comic stock characters from Baroque opera rendered with the exquisite realism of Velázquez—or the mind-bending geometries of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle; corpulent bathers transposed into a fugue of curves, eyes, and breasts; shrieking, contorted shapes of animals, women, and children filling a huge wall with primal expressions of terror. Here was modern art at its most concentrated and clamorous, rescued in the nick of time from impending doom.
Barr had made a point of stressing the show’s comprehensiveness, and faced with more than 360 works of stupefying variety, many viewers found the presentation overpowering. (So much for the smaller show Rosenberg thought he was getting.) Yet the exhibition was not merely a novelty show or a grab bag of avant-garde tricks. With his usual taxonomic zeal, Barr had arranged the art in an improbably lucid progression of styles and idioms, initiating viewers in stepwise fashion into the new and difficult. Beginning with Picasso’s earliest paintings, the show continued chronologically, culminating, at regular intervals, in a series of defining moments: the early Moulin de la Galette; the Blue period Old Guitarist and Rose period La Toilette; Two Nudes, and, bringing to culmination the first floor, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Later floors took viewers through the “hermetic,” “analytical,” and “synthetic” stages of Cubism, through the monumental women of the early 1920s, Three Dancers, and the rapturously colored Marie-Thérèse paintings; and finally, through the tortured Minotaur period to the apocalyptic horror of Guernica. On every wall was a continuing struggle between form and the way to express it, but also an exhilarating search for beauty.
The show was not without gaps. Apparently not yet over his old falling-out with the museum, Chester Dale had refused to loan The Saltimbanques, perhaps the very greatest of Picasso’s early circus paintings. Gertrude Stein’s portrait, though Barr had optimistically put it in the catalog, was no more present here than it had been in Chick Austin’s show in 1934. There were all the sculptures that Picasso had failed to send, thus omitting a crucial dimension of his art. And then there was Rosenberg’s Three Musicians, still missing on a boat somewhere en route from Buenos Aires. Even now, the painting continued to elude Barr. (It finally turned up in New York a month into the show’s run, and would be hailed as the last picture to be hung.)
But few viewers noticed. In Barr’s clarifying sequences, even a work as difficult as Guernica could gain powerful new coherence as the end point of many works before it. Because of its immense size, the painting was given a long gray room of its own, where it could be taken in from a proper distance, lit by hidden ceiling fixtures; adjacent galleries contained dozens of sketches, drawings, and study paintings as well as Dora Maar’s thrilling photographs of the work itself in eight successive stages, offering rare insight into how Picasso created it. If nothing else, few viewers in this setting could walk away indifferent, or in reflexive disgust.
Here was Guernica’s true debut. Though the war that provoked it had already been lost, it was all too prescient of the one that had just begun. It would be Barr’s 1939 show—rather than the Paris Expo in 1937 or any of the Spanish relief shows that had come after it—that would finally sear Guernica into the public consciousness and definitively establish it as one of the century’s most enduring statements.
Having worried to the last if the show would come off okay, Barr himself was surprised by how feverishly it was embraced. Going into the exhibition, he had reason to fear a mixed reception: There was the longstanding fickleness of the American public with avant-garde art, and the checkered experience of previous Picasso shows, from Stieglitz in 1911 on up to Hartford in 1934. There was the hostile reaction that had greeted Guernica as recently as that same summer. And yet amid the backdrop of war, and the publicity about all the paintings the museum had gotten out of Europe, the show had electrified the city. People were lining up to get in to the museum in numbers that surpassed all previous records. Suddenly Picasso seemed to be everywhere—in newspaper headlines, on the cover of magazine supplements, even in shopwindows. Almost overnight, it seemed, the artist had been transformed from controversial Paris provocateur into New York fashion icon.
Indeed, some of the most immediate echoes of the show came in the realm of couture. In Vogue, Frank Crowninshield, the longtime Condé Nast editor and founding Modern trustee, argued that Picasso’s art captured the “strange and wholly new order” of feminine beauty in contemporary society. In Fifth Avenue window displays, the advent of Picasso-themed clothing was already taking place. To show off its winter 1939 collection, Bonwit Teller matched Cubist-faced mannequins with replicas of paintings from different phases of Picasso’s career: The Blue period Absinthe Drinker was paired with a Persian blue coat and furs; in another window, the multihued Girl before a Mirror inspired a “stained glass” patterned evening dress. Bergdorf Goodman went further, borrowing seven actual Picassos from Walter Chrysler, Jr.—lesser paintings from the artist’s Blue, Rose, and neoclassical periods—to hang next to ermine and sable coats. Whether Picasso’s work was understood or not, the onetime enfant terrible of the bateau-lavoir had, apparently overnight, become a mainstay of department store chic.
As the show continued its run, however, there were also signs that the paintings were tapping into deeper currents in American life. “It is his vital will to change…which reflects the most profoundly characteristic urge of our time,” the young critic Andrew C. Ritchie wrote in Burlington Magazine. Titling his take in the Partisan Review “Picasso: 4000 Years of His Art,” George L. K. Morris argued that the show “demonstrates how the accelerated tempo of today has compressed a whole cultural cycle into a single life-time.” In an unsigned editorial, even The New York Times weighed in, with clumsy discomfort, on what Picasso meant to twentieth-century culture. “Modern art, with all its baffling affirmations, its sloughs into chaos and unintelligibility…is the logical, again the inevitable, product of our time,” the Times’s editors wrote. “And so Picasso—although we are certainly not called upon to approve everything he does, and may well turn in dismay or frank disgust from some of his art’s grotesque phases—Picasso should be given his due.”[27]
For viewers prepared to take on the full measure of Picasso’s work, the show seemed to hold out the prospect of a new turn in American culture. In a letter published in the New York Herald Tribune, one reader called it “the most important art event in America since the armory show,” chiding the paper’s own critic for not grasping its significance. “This stage of art is merely a step toward abstract art,” the reader added with uncanny prescience.[28] In fact, several of the future leaders of the Abstract Expressionist movement found the exhibition overpowering. Willem de Kooning called the presentation “staggering”; Roy Lichtenstein, who was still in high school when the show opened, would keep going back to Barr’s exhibition catalog for years after. Louise Bourgeois, at the time a recent arrival from Europe herself, found the show so entrancing that she was unable to paint for a month: “Complete shut down,” she wrote.[29]
For many of these artists, the show seemed to throw down a challenge. For years, a handful of American painters, including Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, and John Graham, had been arguing that Picasso needed to be contended with. “All painting after Picasso is after and can not be before,” Graham had said in the early thirties.[30] But they were in a minority, and for much of the thirties, as the American art world went elsewhere, few had paid much attention. Now it was clear for all to see: Artists in the United States would have to take account of what Picasso had done and find a new direction. “Another artist cannot begin at the point at which Picasso ends,” concluded the art historian Robert Goldwater, who was also Bourgeois’s husband, in a widely read review of the show.[31] Goldwater’s insight would, in various ways, come to haunt the painters who came to maturity at midcentury. Years later, Jackson Pollock’s partner, Lee Krasner, recalled how Pollock once picked up his dog-eared copy of Picasso: Forty Years of His Art and threw it across the floor of his studio in frustration. “God damn it! That guy missed nothing!” he shouted.[32]
But it was not in New York that most ordinary Americans would feel the show’s impact. That happened when the Picassos left West Fifty-third Street and, as Barr had foreseen, were unable to return to Europe.