34

Escape

Picasso returned to Paris on the evening of November 12, 1939, two days before the opening party in New York.[1] Having spent the fall holed up in Royan, he had missed—or ignored—all of Barr’s efforts to get in touch with him during the run-up to the show. Shortly after the war began, he had made a single, hurried overnight visit to Paris with Dora and Sabartés to update his residency papers, but the few hours they had spent there had been interrupted by an air raid siren, which had sent them briefly into a bomb shelter. “At ten in the morning we arrived at rue La Boétie, just in time to hear the sirens,” Sabartés wrote. Still, Picasso had had time for Brassaï to take pictures of him having lunch at the Brasserie Lipp.

Now, however, the situation was calm and he was spending a longer stretch at rue La Boétie. And he was there when the first cables from New York arrived later that week, all saying essentially the same thing: “picasso exhibition immense success. new york and all of america is paying homage to you.”[2]

Soon news about the show began to spread in France. After the initial weeks, the museum released attendance figures, and even Matisse was envious. “I know that art in New York is flourishing,” he wrote his son Pierre. “More people attended the Picasso exhibition than the Van Gogh one.”[3] Picasso, though, made no response to the museum. To gauge his reaction, Barr had to rely on Callery, who was seeing him often. “He is in good form and very happy about the exhibition,” she wrote, five days after the opening.[4]

But Picasso had not come to Paris to get news of the show. He had come to continue the unwelcome work he had abandoned when the war started. He and Sabartés needed to secure all the art he had left behind. It was difficult and time-consuming, since there were huge numbers of paintings, drawings, and other pieces of art scattered among his different studios and living spaces—the apartment and studio on rue La Boétie, his rue des Grands-Augustins studio, the big house at Boisgeloup, and the farmhouse in Le Tremblay. Rising early each day, he and Sabartés were racing around the city, stashing everything they could gather in a series of safe rooms he had rented in the Banque de France under the Boulevard des Italiens.[5]

One day, Callery came with him to the bank vaults to watch him work. “He had a great corridor to himself, with rooms leading off of it,” she later wrote. “And in those rooms the paintings and drawings were stacked in their familiar order.”[6] Sometimes, he pulled out something to show her, a work that, for one reason or another, he had never exhibited. Now, it would be even further out of sight. It was hard not to taste the irony: While in New York his paintings were being celebrated by tens of thousands of people, in Paris, Picasso was hiding them deep underground.

As France awaited the Nazi invasion, uncertainty hung over Paris. No one was ready to give up on the city, yet few thought that it was safe, either. Kahnweiler kept his gallery open and tried to do whatever business he could. But he was also determined to avoid a repeat of 1914, and he sent 154 paintings from his stock to his brother-in-law near Limoges.[7] Later that fall, Fernand Léger came back after three months on his farm in Normandy, intent on working in Paris again. But as he told Rosenberg, the atmosphere was so subdued it seemed like a “provincial town.” Amid his art gathering, Picasso found time for a regular afternoon pause at the Flore. “The days passed as always,” Sabartés wrote. But the tension was pervasive.[8]

Few felt it more than Rosenberg. He had watched the progressive stages of Nazism in Germany, the growing persecutions, the dramatic purging of modern art. He had also seen what happened to Kahnweiler in the previous war, and as a man of Jewish background who dealt in modern art, he was acutely aware of the dangers he faced. Already during the summer, amid his negotiations with Alfred and Marga, he had begun preparing for a German attack, hiding paintings in vaults and in the country, and sending as many of them as he could abroad. Not only did he have nearly all of his best Picassos now in the United States; he had also sent other works, like Three Musicians, to exhibitions in South America and even Australia. Having spent the early fall near Tours, he now moved his family again, to a big house in Floirac, a small town across the river from Bordeaux that was well positioned for a possible escape.

And yet the dealer was as committed as anyone to staying in France and continuing his business. After all, none of his artists were going anywhere, and they needed him. In October, he arranged new one-year “war” contracts with Matisse and Braque, confirming his right of first refusal on their work and the prices he would pay.[9] Then there was Margot, who couldn’t imagine living anywhere else but France, and Alexandre, who was eighteen and would likely soon be drafted. Under the circumstances, leaving seemed impossible.

It was during this uneasy calm, a few weeks after the Picasso opening in New York, that Rosenberg received an important request from Barr. In the face of the overwhelming response to the show, requests had been pouring in from other museums hoping to take it after Chicago. Already he was in talks with museums in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco. According to Barr’s astute “war loan” arrangements, Rosenberg and Picasso—as well as Thannhauser, Callery, Penrose, and the other major European lenders—had agreed to allow their Picassos to stay in New York for the duration of the war. Now Barr was asking Rosenberg and the other lenders if they would agree to let the Modern circulate their paintings to these other cities.

For Barr, it was an extraordinary opportunity. The Van Gogh show had already demonstrated the potential of a touring exhibition, and for once, it seemed, the country might be ready. With the start of the war, museums were cut off from the usual sources of loans in Europe and particularly eager for material. And with all the Picassos from Paris already in New York, Barr could count on sending, along with its own masterpieces, Les Demoiselles and Girl before a Mirror, nearly all of the primary works in the original show, including Guernica and its accompanying studies. In a rare alignment of institutional demand and geopolitical circumstance, the Picasso show could turn into a truly national event.

Reading Barr’s letter, Rosenberg was enthusiastic. An extended tour would bring his paintings to a potentially huge American audience; and since many of his loans were also for sale, it also could lead to new collector interest. As long as he was in France and the paintings were in the United States, it made sense for them to be exhibited. In mid-December, he wrote to Barr that he was glad that “during war time my pictures are lent to various museums in the United States.”[10] What Rosenberg couldn’t know at the time was that his participation in the Picasso tour would soon become a matter of existential importance to his own future.

For the time being, however, Rosenberg had other distractions. Throughout the fall, he had been dealing with another divorce crisis—this time Matisse’s. Once again there were messy questions about the division of artworks and assets, and the dealer was centrally involved. At the same time, with the prospect of an invasion less imminent, Rosenberg began to develop new plans in France. In January 1940, he visited Picasso in Royan and came back with five new paintings. Margot hated them, but his son, Alexandre, found them entrancing. “He’s hung it in his bedroom,” he wrote Picasso, of one portrait of a woman’s head with a spiral-shaped nose. “Howls from his mother and the housekeeper.”[11] Then, a few weeks later, Rosenberg visited Matisse in Nice and acquired a group of new works from him too.

Meanwhile, by early spring, as the Picasso show in the United States left Chicago and moved on to St. Louis, life in Paris was picking up again. There were ambitious productions at the Comédie Française and the Opéra; Left Bank bistros were full. “For the first time since October,” the art connoisseur and French army medic Douglas Cooper wrote, “children were playing in the Tuileries and the Luxembourg Gardens.”[12] Amid the thaw, Picasso came back to the city for a longer sojourn, and Rosenberg began to plan a return to rue La Boétie. “I’m going to reopen the gallery with a show of 5 new Matisses, 5 Braques, 5 Picassos,” the dealer wrote Matisse, in early April.[13]

But the show never happened. On April 9, Hitler began his assault on Scandinavia, and Rosenberg stayed in Floirac. At first it seemed unclear how quickly the war in the West would progress. Beginning in mid-May, though, the Nazis’ rapid conquest of the Netherlands and Belgium made clear that Paris was now under threat. Over the previous two years, Rosenberg had organized exhibitions in several of these countries. He had sent nearly a hundred of his Braques, Picassos, and Matisses, along with Guernica, to museums in Oslo and Copenhagen in 1938; and in the spring of 1939, he had organized Picasso shows in Amsterdam and Belgium. Now, while many of those same Picassos were touring the American Midwest, Northern Europe had fallen to a regime that hated modern art.

Still, Rosenberg’s artists were not going anywhere, and he did not see any immediate need to act. In late May, Braque and his wife had visited Rosenberg, and the dealer helped him store some of his paintings in a bank vault next to his own in Libourne, a nearby town. Braque told Rosenberg he intended to stay put in Normandy. Then Matisse also visited the dealer, together with his secretary and longtime model, Lydia Delectorskaya, the woman who had pushed his wife to divorce. Rosenberg bought a few more paintings from him. But Matisse too, despite having his son Pierre in New York and various invitations to come to the United States, was determined to remain in Nice. “Whatever happens, I’m not leaving,” he wrote Pierre a few months later. “If everything of any worth runs away, what will remain in France?”[14] Meanwhile, Picasso and Dora had left Paris and returned to Royan. Even if his paintings had to be locked up or sent overseas, Picasso was no more prepared to go into exile than Braque or Matisse.

By the second week of June, however, the Nazis were rapidly closing in on Paris. Faced with the imminent arrival of the German Wehrmacht, the city and surrounding areas experienced one of the largest human upheavals in France’s thousand-year history. The government made clear that it was no longer prepared or able to defend the capital, and on June 14, it fled to Bordeaux, just as it had at the beginning of the previous war. It was soon followed by some two million Parisians—by some estimates as much as two-thirds of the city’s population. For hundreds of miles on the roads leading south and west out of the city, an endless stream of cars inched along, many with furniture and mattresses strapped to the roof; crowding among them were people on bicycles, or pushing heavily laden baby carriages and makeshift carts, or simply trudging along on foot. With gasoline supplies requisitioned by the army, the roads were littered with abandoned cars. During the flight, an estimated ninety thousand children became separated from their parents.

Watching a desperate situation unfold across the river from Floirac, Rosenberg was unsure what to do. Over the first two weeks of June, the population of Bordeaux swelled from less than three hundred thousand to more than a million. Thousands of people were camped out in parks and public squares while others slept in their cars. Not only Frenchmen but refugees from all over Europe were trying to reach this haven on the Atlantic coast. And with the arrival of the French government in exile, which quickly commandeered the major hotel and offices, it was even more difficult for Bordeaux to cope with the influx. Still, Rosenberg knew that flight, at this point, would be very difficult. He also had still not come around to the idea of abandoning his country and his artists. It was Rosenberg’s brother-in-law Jacques Helft who finally persuaded him otherwise.

In Floirac, the Rosenbergs had spent much of the year with the two Helft brothers, Yvon and Jacques, who were also involved in the Paris art trade and were also Jewish. In early June, Jacques was staying near Paris, arranging his affairs, and when the Germans approached the capital, he somehow managed to get back to Bordeaux. As soon as he returned, the family gathered at the house in Floirac. Rosenberg and Yvon wanted to stay put, but Jacques, who had witnessed the exodus from Paris himself, was adamant that they flee immediately. “My father was a very quiet person. It was the first time I saw him in a fit,” Jacques’s son, Jorge, who was then six years old, recalled in a 2016 interview. “He started shouting that he had read Mein Kampf twice, and that he could vouch that all Jews would be exterminated.”[15]

By the summer of 1940, options for getting out of Europe were extremely limited. The United States had severely restricted the number of Jewish refugees it was bringing in. Cuba and South America were possibilities, but that required paperwork as well, and the economic prospects in these places seemed far more doubtful. Even if one could get visas, moreover, there were by now very few boats crossing the Atlantic. Still, staying in Nazi-occupied France seemed untenable, and Rosenberg and Yvon gave in: They would all leave together, bringing whatever financial assets they could get out with them.

From Bordeaux, the most plausible escape route was overland to Portugal, where there were still boats plying the Atlantic. Together, the three families were a large clan—fifteen people—and they would need Portuguese visas. They would also have to move quickly. The same day they decided to leave, the French war cabinet resigned and Marshall Petain was appointed prime minister, virtually assuring an imminent capitulation to Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, they had heard that the Portuguese consulate in Bordeaux was besieged with refugees. Jacques’s wife, however, had a friend who worked high up in the French government, now in Bordeaux, and, armed with a special referral, went to the consulate with the stack of passports. “My mother was getting ready to line up at the Portuguese consulate for maybe a couple of days,” Rosenberg’s nephew recalled.[16]

The rumors turned out to be true. Since the first week of June, there had been thousands of people camped out in front of the Portuguese mission, which was on the Quai Louis XVIII in central Bordeaux. Faced with an onslaught of refugees, António Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, had passed harsh new border controls, and the foreign ministry in Lisbon had ordered its foreign consuls not to grant visas to Jews, or anyone else, under any circumstances, unless the applicant had a personal sponsor in Portugal. Unknown to Rosenberg or his Helft in-laws, however, the consulate was in the midst of a full-scale revolt.

The Portuguese consul general was a man named Aristides de Sousa Mendes, a portly, white-haired man in his midfifties from an old Catholic landowning family. An able if undistinguished diplomat, he was chronically in debt, a result, in part, of maintaining a household that had come to include eight sons, four daughters, and several servants. In the twenties, while he was serving in San Francisco, the family had lived in a big, rambling house in Berkeley. By the time he was sent to Antwerp, in 1929, there were so many children that he commissioned a local Ford factory to build a minibus designed by one of his teenage sons. Then, in 1938, he was accused of financial irregularities by Salazar’s Foreign Ministry and transferred to Bordeaux, at the time a backwater.[17]

With the German invasion, however, Bordeaux had become one of the chief gateways out of Europe. Sousa Mendes knew that many of the refugees streaming into the city faced dire consequences if they remained, but with his government’s orders, his hands were tied. As the crowd outside the consulate became increasingly unruly, he became violently ill. “Here the situation is terrible, and I am in bed with severe mental exhaustion,” he wrote to his brother-in-law on the day Paris fell to the Germans.[18]

Three days later, Sousa Mendes finally emerged from his room. His nephew, who was staying with him at the time, remembered the consul marching into the offices and going out to address the crowd. He would be issuing everyone visas, he said, regardless of religion or political belief. Over the next few days, just blocks away from where the French government was preparing to surrender to the Third Reich, Sousa Mendes signed visas from morning till night. He began abbreviating his signature to save time.

When Mrs. Helft arrived at the consulate with her large stack of passports, there was a huge throng outside the building. But she showed her letter from the government and was quickly whisked inside. Within ten minutes, the consul had stamped and signed the visas. For decades, neither Rosenberg nor his in-laws would know that the man who had approved their entry to Portugal had been acting on his own, against the orders of his government, in a heroic effort to save as many people as he could. In the end, Sousa Mendes would issue thousands of visas in the space of a few days. When the Portuguese government discovered what he was doing, they sent agents after him and finally shut him down. Recalled to Lisbon, he was expelled from the diplomatic service and consigned to financial ruin. He would die in obscurity in the early fifties, a broken man. Today he is regarded in Israel as a hero of the Holocaust era, a Portuguese Wallenberg.

After receiving their visas on June 18, the Rosenbergs and Helfts packed into their family cars as quickly as they could and drove south to the border town of Hendaye. There was already a huge column of refugees waiting to cross; after spending two nights in their cars, inching along, they finally reached the Spanish frontier on the afternoon of June 20. At the time, the Franco regime permitted Portuguese visa holders to cross through the country, provided they didn’t stop along the way. Rosenberg and his brothers-in-law, already exhausted from their journey to the border, negotiated permission for two overnight stopovers along the way. At the border, however, French police called out Rosenberg’s son, Alexandre, and two of his Helft cousins, who had all reached military age: They would not be permitted to leave and would have to stay behind and enlist. It was a wrenching separation, and Margot was distraught.[19]

The day they received their visas in Bordeaux, however, Charles de Gaulle, who had secretly escaped to London, had given a fiery speech calling on French soldiers to form a resistance army in Britain. Alexandre and his cousins were determined to fight, and soon after, they managed to sneak onto a Polish troop ship headed for England, where they joined de Gaulle’s forces. Alexandre would go on to train French resistance forces in Africa and fight in the Allied offensives in Europe later in the war. It was the last time Rosenberg and Margot would see him until Germany was defeated more than five years later.[20]

Crossing Franco’s Spain proved to be a hair-raising experience. After nearly three years of brutal civil war, the country was deeply scarred. In some places, Rosenberg’s nephew said, the roads had been so severely bombed that they had to drive in the fields alongside. The first night passed without incident, but on the second night, when they checked in to their hotel, they discovered, to their horror, that it was filled with Gestapo agents. Miraculously, the owner, a Republican who hated Franco, immediately recognized them as Jewish refugees and warned them to stay in their rooms. They left early the following morning without eating breakfast.[21]

Rosenberg and his relatives finally reached the Portuguese border on June 22, the day France formally surrendered to Nazi Germany. Senior Portuguese officials had alerted Salazar to Sousa Mendes’s rogue operation, and had sent agents to France to shut it down.[22] Had word reached the Spanish-Portuguese border, Rosenberg and his relatives might have been turned away. But the visas were accepted, though they were told they couldn’t stay in Lisbon, which was already overflowing with refugees. They were required to go to Sintra, about fifteen miles west of the city, where they found lodgings in a hotel.

Rosenberg made it out just in time. On July 4, 1940, less than two weeks after his arrival in Portugal, the Vichy government turned over the names and addresses of the city’s fifteen leading Jewish art dealers to the German embassy in Paris, including, along with Rosenberg, the galleries of Seligmann, Bernheim-Jeune, Wildenstein, and others. German officials immediately issued instructions to remove any art found on their premises; the French police provided vans to transport it. At gallery after gallery, the Nazis seized any artworks that had not been secured and “aryanized” businesses that had had Jewish owners.[23]

A couple of galleries, however, managed to escape largely unscathed. One was the gallery of Rosenberg’s old neighbor and nemesis on rue La Boétie, Georges Wildenstein, who managed to make favorable arrangements with German officials by which he was able to immigrate to the United States, leaving his gallery in charge of a non-Jewish associate. The gallery continued to do a flourishing business during the war—with the French and with the Nazis. It would add one more element to Rosenberg’s lifelong loathing of Wildenstein.[24]

Another Jewish-owned gallery managed to escape in a different way. Kahnweiler, opting to stay in France, had fled with his wife to the unoccupied zone, but since his French business partner was also Jewish, he, too, was vulnerable to seizure. Unlike in 1914, however, this time Kahnweiler was ready. In the spring of 1941, he managed to arrange for his daughter-in-law, who was French and Catholic, to take over ownership of the gallery. It was left untouched. As momentous as was Rosenberg’s decision to leave, Kahnweiler’s decision to stay was equally so. If he could survive the war, he would now have new opportunities with the artist he had lost to Rosenberg more than two decades earlier. Overall, though, the great era of modern art that had flourished in Paris since the end of the last war had inexorably come to an end.

Stuck in Sintra, Rosenberg tried to figure out what to do. By the summer of 1940, Lisbon was an unsettling, chaotic city, filled with Allied and Nazi spies and increasingly overrun with exiled Europeans, from royalty and prominent businessmen to anti-Nazi resistance fighters and ordinary civilians. Everyone in the city, it seemed, was trying to escape from Europe, and even for those who could get visas to a foreign destination, boats were extremely scarce. Cut off from his paintings and his artists, there was little Rosenberg could do, and, like other refugees, he was fearful of his status. Still, he imagined that he would be able to travel on to the United States. After all, he had done business there for many years and had visited there multiple times without difficulty. With so many of his paintings already in the country, and numerous contacts with American dealers and collectors, he assumed it would be a formality to gain visas for his family. Entry would be easy, provided they could find a ship.

At the U.S. consulate in Lisbon, Rosenberg discovered how wrong he was. “I am trying hard to come to the States, but the consulates are invaded [sic] by demands,” he wrote to his American friend, the art dealer Edward Fowles. No demonstration of his long record as a prominent international businessman seemed to make much difference. “I have shown affidavits of support by very rich friends of mine in America, shown that I possess still a large amount of cash,” he wrote. “It is not enough and they have asked for an order of Washington!”[25] By now, Rosenberg was increasingly desperate. In Portugal, he had no paintings and knew no one; they would have to go somewhere else. He explored going to Argentina.

The dealer also couldn’t help but see the absurdity of the situation. While he waited in endless visa lines in Lisbon, halfway around the world, a huge mass of people were lining up to see his Picassos—along with Guernica and the other paintings from Europe—at the opening of the Picasso show in San Francisco. His paintings were now touring around the United States, having already attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Boston. For the first time in his career, after years of trying, the works of the artist whom he had backed for more than twenty years were reaching a huge American public. Yet he himself was in Portuguese limbo, reduced at times to taking handouts from a British refugee relief agency.[26] He would need a new strategy.

—

At the Museum of Modern Art, the effects of the fall of France were felt almost immediately. After a decade of nearly constant transatlantic activity, Alfred Barr was known in Europe as one of the main conduits of modern art in the United States. In the summer of 1940, he began receiving requests from dozens of art world refugees asking him to assist them in getting U.S. visas. It was a difficult and costly task, involving not only extensive documentation but also some kind of personal sponsorship to show that the applicant could be gainfully employed. Alfred, consumed by the museum as always, had no time to deal with these requests, and he turned over the work to Marga. Eventually, Marga was able to help a number of artists get to the United States, including Yves Tanguy, André Masson, Piet Mondrian, Jacques Lipchitz, Max Ernst, and Marc Chagall. At the same time, though, Alfred had decided from the outset that they would have to strictly limit whom they would try to rescue. As Marga noted, “Only artists, not critics, scholars, or dealers.”[27]

While Marga was launching the museum’s refugee effort in New York, Rosenberg was shifting strategy in Lisbon. Alarmed by his cold reception at the consulate, he realized that he would need to show that his expertise in modern art transcended the realm of the international art trade. In effect, he needed to demonstrate that he was a person of exceptional value to American culture—that he could make unique contributions to the American art world and that it was therefore in the national interest of the United States to allow him to immigrate. It was a difficult argument to make, since his own activity in the United States had been largely commercial. As a result of the Picasso tour, however, which had already gone to five different museums and counting, he now had a distinguished roster of museum directors who were, during this same season, benefiting enormously from his loans.

Quickly, Rosenberg cabled as many museum directors as he could about his predicament. He asked if they would be willing to write to the consul general in Lisbon on his behalf. In Lisbon, the telegrams began arriving almost immediately. Walter Heil of the De Young Museum in San Francisco referred to the dealer’s “unmatched reputation” in the field and invited him to give a series of lectures on French art in the fall, which he said would draw “immense interest.” The president of the St. Louis Museum, which had hosted the Picasso show that spring, invited Rosenberg to come to St. Louis. Henry McIlhenny of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who had just bought a big Picasso still life from Rosenberg that he had seen in the show in New York, wrote that the dealer’s presence in America would be “of inestimable value for American museums.” In his cable, McIlhenny asked the consul how he might assist in getting “visas for him and his family immediately.” From Chicago, Daniel Catton Rich, Alfred’s co-sponsor of the Picasso show, had already invited Rosenberg to come lecture at the Art Institute the following winter. He wrote that the dealer’s admission to the United States would be “excellent for the art of this country.”[28]

To these voices was added, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Barr’s old mentor Paul Sachs, who had known Rosenberg for many years. Sachs telegraphed that he was hoping to bring Rosenberg to Harvard to speak to his museum class. Finally came Barr’s own cable from New York, in many ways the most impressive. Addressing the consul general himself, he wrote, “delighted paul rosenberg, the eminent french connoisseur and dealer of modern art come to this country in order to be advisor to our museum.—alfred barr director museum of modern art new york.”

Barr was effectively calling him an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art. Despite his vow to limit his European rescue efforts to artists; despite his decade-long struggle with the big Paris dealers and his concerns about involving them in the museum’s affairs; despite years of tensions with Rosenberg himself, tensions that had, as recently as the spring of 1939, nearly derailed the Picasso show—despite all of this, Barr was intervening decisively to get Rosenberg out of Europe.

The cables had a dramatic effect. When Rosenberg returned to the consulate a few days later, he was no longer a mere art dealer who had done business in the United States. He was now an “eminent French connoisseur” whose expertise was in demand from museums across the country as well as from Harvard University. His application still needed to pass some final vetting, but the consul general indicated that an answer would be forthcoming. Two days later, he awarded visas to the dealer and his extended family. Rosenberg was stunned—by the generous and immediate help he had received from his American colleagues, and by the consul’s response to it. After nearly twenty years of trying to bring Americans around to Picasso’s work, he had finally done it—without being there himself. In a final, jubilant letter to Fowles, he looked forward to his arrival in New York and to the task of creating, as he called it, “a great art center in the States.”[29]

—

The Rosenbergs arrived in New York harbor on September 20, 1940. The crossing had not been particularly calm. They had left Portugal during the height of the Blitz, on one of the few American liners that was still plying the Lisbon–New York route, and the war at sea put even neutral shipping at some risk. The dealer was also leaving a great deal behind: His gallery and house in Paris. His artists Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. And the hundreds of paintings he had stored in vaults, in Paris, Tours, and Libourne.

In the end, his precautions would prove far too little. His Paris inventory would be ransacked; later, German agents working for Hermann Goering would seize the 162 paintings he had stored in Libourne, as well as the ones that Braque had stored adjacent to his. (In their dark exactitude, while Nazi bureaucrats designated the art belonging to “the Jew Paul Rosenberg” for sale or trade, they ultimately released Braque’s paintings because he was “an Aryan.”[30]) And in the spring of 1941, Nazi officials went further, transforming Rosenberg’s gallery into the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question, a Gestapo-financed organization whose sole purpose was the dissemination of anti-Semitic propaganda. Around the same time, the Paris police began their first roundups of Jews. Rosenberg’s own French citizenship would be revoked.

Yet as important for Rosenberg were the paintings that he had already gotten out. Awaiting him in the United States were not only the dozens of prime Picassos that he and Alfred Barr had astutely sent to New York the previous summer, but also a series of prominent museums that were clamoring to show them and a large new American audience that was eagerly absorbing them. Not least was the fact that the Picasso show had turned Rosenberg himself into one of the more sought-after figures in the American art world.

While Rosenberg was still in Portugal, Henry McIlhenny, the young Philadelphia curator, was one of the first to pick up on the dealer’s feat. After months of waiting, while the Picasso tour continued, McIlhenny was impatient to get the big, challenging 1931 still life, Pitcher and Bowl of Fruit, that he had bought from Rosenberg after seeing it in the Museum of Modern Art show. “I am terribly keen to have it,” he wrote one of Alfred’s assistants. Then he added: “Rosenberg has been in Portugal, but is, I hear, coming to this country. The Picasso show certainly has helped him out.”[31]

—

Somehow the war had saved the exhibition, and the exhibition had saved Rosenberg. Transformed into a national tour by the disintegration of Europe, the show not only fulfilled, in spectacular fashion, Barr’s longstanding ambition to bring the full force of Picasso’s art to the United States. It also finally brought to America the man who had built and shaped his international reputation since World War I. With Paris’s most emblematic painter captivating audiences from Boston to the upper Midwest, and its most influential dealer now in New York, it was hard not to sense that a tectonic shift was under way. Rosenberg would soon be joined by many other members of the European art world. Two months after his arrival, Fernand Léger made it to the United States; and in early January, Justin Thannhauser, the dealer who had introduced Picasso to Germany and lent important works to the Museum of Modern Art, also gained entry.

By the following summer, with the help of the Barrs and others, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and a number of other artists would also have escaped. Meanwhile, the Picasso show itself would continue its tour, now going, in a new season, to Cincinnati, Cleveland, New Orleans, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh. In many ways, the unending Picasso show seemed to provide a backdrop to the new émigré avant-garde scene that was taking root alongside it.

Among those who never did cross the ocean was Picasso himself. While his paintings traveled from city to city around the United States, the fate of the man who made them remained a mystery. For much of the war, the artist’s existence in Vichy France remained largely unknown, even to Alfred Barr. (He had ultimately gone back to Nazi-occupied Paris, where he defiantly continued his wartime existence.) Yet Picasso’s absence was curiously beside the point. Already his work, helped now by Rosenberg in New York, was gaining a new market in the United States, and from now on, Americans would be his most enthusiastic audience—and his most avid buyers.

It was a quarter century late, and it took two World Wars to make it happen, but the prediction that Quinn confidently made in 1913 had finally come true. From now on, the story of modern art— the collectors who acquired it, the scholars who studied it, the museums that showed it, and the ordinary people who waited in long lines to see it—would be written in America.