In February 1945, Frank Kleinholz, the host of the weekly radio program Art in New York, decided to interview the veteran art critic Elizabeth McCausland. In her columns for the Springfield Republican, McCausland had long been one of the most astute observers of contemporary art in the United States. She also had a deep interest in artists’ engagement in politics, and in the great ideological battles of the time. On his show, Kleinholz wanted to ask her about one artist in particular. Over the past few years, the United States had been fixated on an aging painter in Nazi-occupied Paris. The artist did not speak English and had never set foot in this country. His art was often challenging and difficult. And until American forces reached the Champs-Élysées in the summer of 1944, almost nothing was known about his fate during the previous four years—or even whether he was still painting. And yet, since the war began, the artist had acquired a peculiarly central place in American culture.
Despite his remoteness and mystery, Kleinholz noted, Pablo Picasso had become a household name, and even more unexpectedly, a potent symbol of American values. Defiantly staying in Paris during the darkest days of Vichy, he was regarded as a hero of the anti-Fascist resistance, a man whom American soldiers were dying to meet. At the same time, having aroused suspicion for years, his exuberantly modern work was suddenly being embraced by hundreds of thousands of people across the country, from the traditional art centers of the Northeast to cities in the upper Midwest, from college towns in the Deep South to farm communities in the Central Valley.
When Kleinholz asked McCausland to account for this curious phenomenon, she began to talk about the influence of a single institution in New York. “The past fifteen years have seen a tremendous change in aesthetic values,” she said, “just because of the education, propaganda, call it what you will, carried on by the Museum of Modern Art.”
“But what does this have to do with Picasso?” Kleinholz asked.
“Everything,” she said.[1]
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By the end of the war, Picasso: Forty Years of His Art had become one of the longest-running, and most talked-about, modern art shows in history. Interest in the show had grown steadily throughout the first winter of its run. In New York, the show drew fifteen thousand visitors a week during its first month, a record that surpassed even that of the Van Gogh exhibit four years earlier. At the Art Institute of Chicago, people came from all over the Midwest to see it. “The Picasso exhibit in Chicago is great fun,” a writer for The Nebraska State Journal wrote after making the trek. “It’s amazing. It’s overwhelming even when taken in two jumps.”[2] In conservative Boston, the show alternately fascinated and flummoxed viewers, with the Boston Globe critic conceding that everything else in the Museum of Fine Arts looked “rather tame and drab” afterward; during three and a half weeks in St. Louis, nearly fifty thousand people squeezed into the City Art Museum to see Les Demoiselles, Girl before a Mirror, and Guernica.[3] Then it reached the San Francisco Museum of Art, where interest was so intense that some people had to be turned away. In early August, on the final day of the show’s run there, more than a thousand people sat down on the floor of the galleries and refused to leave, in what may have been the country’s first protest for modern art. The museum was forced to stay open long after its ten o’clock closing time.[4]
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By the fall of 1940, museums across the country were aggressively competing for the show, and a second, more crowded season began. New Orleans was so intent on getting Picasso: Forty Years of His Art that it formed a Picasso Exhibition Committee backed by all the main arts groups—museum, art school, art club, and college—to raise the necessary funds to sponsor it.[5] After reserving the show for four weeks in early 1941, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts spent months preparing viewers for the artist it called “the storm-center of discussion on two continents,” noting that “over 307,000 people in eight American cities” had already seen these formidable paintings.[6]
In the summer of 1941, the show returned to the Museum of Modern Art, according to the Times, “in response to hundreds of requests from teachers and students…as well as from New Yorkers who were unable to visit the exhibition during its first run.” Then it was back on the road again. By the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the show had traveled to eleven cities; when the Allies began their invasion of Italy in 1943, the number had doubled. Among the stops in these later iterations of the show were not only such major urban centers as Kansas City and Portland but also smaller cities like Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Durham, North Carolina.[7]
Not to leave out more far-flung regions of the country, Barr and his staff at the museum sent Picasso’s La Coiffure, a decidedly demure portrait of two women and a young child from 1906, on a solo tour of its own to more than a dozen smaller venues, including a women’s college in upstate New York and a historical society in Stockton, California, a town that was primarily known as the birthplace of the modern tractor. “I believe more persons brought notebooks and carefully studied the [Picasso] than any other exhibition we have ever held,” the director of the San Joaquin Pioneer Historical Museum in Stockton reported to one of Barr’s colleagues in New York.[8]
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Finally, in early 1944—more than four years after the New York debut of Picasso: Forty Years of His Art—the Museum of Modern Art arranged to send several dozen Picassos to Mexico City in an armored Pullman car, for the launch of a new modern art society backed by a group of leading Mexican art patrons. Though the paintings were held up in Laredo, Texas, for several weeks while they awaited border clearance, the show was a wild success, and the organizers begged New York to extend the loans. “It’s difficult to describe the strong reaction the show has produced in Mexico,” one of the organizers wrote. “The work of Pablo Picasso has served as a kind of healthy bomb in a place that was dull and complacent.”[9]
But it was the fate of the paintings themselves that perhaps best captured the show’s most durable legacy. Of all the Picassos that crossed the ocean back in 1939, many of them never returned to Europe. Some of the Paris loans, like Pitcher and Bowl of Fruit, acquired by McIlhenny, and Girl with Dark Hair, bought by Museum of Modern Art trustee Edgar Kaufmann, were purchased right off the walls of the show. (“Will you kindly send us the prices of the works…which are for sale,” a curator at the Chicago Art Institute had written Barr, in response to demand there.) Others found permanent homes in museums and private collections across the United States in the years after the tour finally ended. Picasso himself, though he remained in Paris, did not reclaim the paintings he had lent the museum until the 1950s. And as Franco’s dictatorship became increasingly entrenched in Spain, Guernica became one of the longest “war loans” ever—becoming a cornerstone of the museum’s permanent galleries until it finally went back to Spain in the early 1980s.
After the show, the Modern’s own collection of premier Picassos, from its dramatic start in the late thirties, now began to grow at an ever accelerating pace. In 1945 came Ma Jolie; four years later, with Mrs. Guggenheim’s checkbook, the museum finally managed to snare Rosenberg’s Three Musicians. Later still came several more Quinn pictures, by now hardly controversial. Having for years struggled to get by without a permanent collection at all, the museum amassed so many Picassos that in the early 1950s one trustee estimated that 20 percent of its wall space was devoted to the artist.[10] In 1968, despite everything else that was happening that year, Life magazine devoted a special double issue to Picasso and the huge shadow he cast over American culture. To its seven million readers, the magazine wrote, “The revolution he generated, sweeping far beyond artist studios, has helped shape the geometries of cities, concepts and techniques of movies and TV, the graphic idioms of advertisements, the homes we live in and the clothes we wear.”[11] Once the Picasso juggernaut had finally started, it could not be stopped.
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Yet it might easily have been otherwise. Again and again, for more than a quarter century, efforts to show Picasso’s art in the United States failed to captivate the public. Had it not been for John Quinn’s determined pursuit of Picasso and his fellow Paris rebels back in the teens and early twenties, the seeds of the Museum of Modern Art—and its specific orientation to the Paris School modernists—might never have been planted. Had it not then been for Alfred Barr’s own fascination with Quinn, and his decade-long tauromachy with Picasso and his dealer to bring his work to New York, it is unlikely that Picasso’s art would have reached a broad American audience until the war was over. Had Rosenberg, for all his false starts in the United States, not been willing to risk his best works on Barr’s show, the project might once again have been stopped in its tracks. And even then, it was an accident of war—and personal necessity—that finally made the show possible and that gave it such lasting power.
In the end, it was a curiously tiny number of people who fought Picasso’s War for the United States.
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John Quinn: By the time the Picasso show opened in 1939, the Irish American attorney had been almost completely forgotten. Not only had his collection been widely dispersed, but his extraordinary correspondence, including many thousands of letters to leading artists, writers, critics, and statesmen, was placed under seal for a decade and then under a publication ban for another fifty years, leaving his enormous imprint on modernist culture largely unknown.[12] It is strange to imagine what Quinn might have made of a museum in New York avidly chasing down the paintings he had once owned and the artists he had once befriended. Knowing Quinn, he would have been bemused. “It is sad to think that the paintings that I buy now, Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Dufy, Rouault…may seem ‘old hat’ in ten or twenty years,” he wrote to W. B. Yeats in 1915. “But what is one to do?”[13] New York in 1939 did not find Picasso and Matisse old hat. Nor did New York in 2003—ninety years after the Armory Show—when the Museum of Modern Art devoted a revelatory exhibition to the relationship between Picasso and Matisse.
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Paul Rosenberg: Following his harrowing escape from Bordeaux in the summer of 1940, the dealer arrived in New York just in time to capitalize on an exploding American market. Quickly reestablishing himself in Manhattan, a few blocks from the Museum of Modern Art, he was soon selling Picassos—a number of them right out of the show—to a new crop of American collectors. He was also sought after by museums around the country. In 1941, seven years after it had passed on the opportunity, he persuaded the Modern to acquire Van Gogh’s Starry Night—the first Van Gogh to enter any New York museum. It would soon become, alongside The Sleeping Gypsy and the Demoiselles, one of the most celebrated paintings in its collection.
If Rosenberg’s Picassos had gotten him out of Europe, however, they also separated him definitively from his artist. After the war, he began corresponding with Picasso again and even, for the first time, began addressing him with the informal French tu; by now they had two wars and nearly thirty years of history between them. But despite his efforts, Rosenberg never resumed his old relationship with the artist. In Europe, he spent years trying to track down paintings stolen by the Nazis, and from time to time he called on Picasso. But they were separated by an ocean now, and Rosenberg himself—despite his wife’s constant desire to return to Paris—refused to move back to the country that had betrayed him. In the final months of the dealer’s life, an important curator in Europe asked to borrow the artist’s Harlequin with Violin (Si tu veux), the great Cubist work that had once belonged to John Quinn. Uncharacteristically, Rosenberg refused. No matter how important the show, his son, Alexandre, wrote, Rosenberg could not let out of his sight a painting for which he had, for decades, felt an almost “tyrannical attraction.”[14]
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Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler: In a stunning reversal of what had happened in the previous war, this time it was Rosenberg who fled into exile and had some of his paintings seized, while Kahnweiler stayed in France and benefited from his absence. Patient as always, Kahnweiler rode out the war in the free zone of occupied France, first in Limoges, and then, after narrowly averting arrest by the Gestapo, in a nearby hamlet, where he and his wife lived under false names. As soon as Paris was liberated, he made contact with Picasso; by October 1944, he had moved into a new apartment on quai des Grands-Augustins, around the corner from Picasso’s rue des Grands-Augustins studio. And with Rosenberg gone, he was perfectly poised to take up the role he had lost more than thirty years earlier, as Picasso’s dealer. He and Picasso had always remained friends, and the two immediately reached an understanding. He was helped by Rosenberg in another way too. As Rosenberg built up a lucrative new market for Picasso in the United States, it was Kahnweiler, in Paris, who could now sell Picasso’s newest paintings to American buyers at extraordinary prices. At last the tenacious Mannheimer could enjoy the fruits of his youthful wager. Having been cruelly denied his inventory—and his premier artist—for more than two decades, he was getting the last word.
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Alexandre Rosenberg: After parting with his parents on the Spanish border back in June 1940, the dealer’s son and erstwhile philosophy student escaped to England and joined de Gaulle’s resistance army. Soon he was dispatched to the French Congo, where he trained African troops; then he made his way north to fight the Germans in North Africa, and finally took part in the liberation of France itself. In the late summer of 1944, his unit was sent to intercept the final German train leaving Paris filled with French war loot. On the train they found crates of paintings belonging to his father, taken from the rue La Boétie gallery. After the war, he joined his father’s New York business—reluctantly—and, marrying an American woman, became a prominent art dealer in his own right. Fifteen years after his father’s death, he would finally allow the Cleveland Museum of Art to acquire Harlequin with Violin (Si tu veux), bringing to end the odyssey of a painting that Quinn had first brought to the United States in 1920.
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Alfred Barr: In October 1943, even as his Picasso triumph continued to play out, Barr was summarily fired as director of the Museum of Modern Art. After fourteen years of Herculean labors for the museum, he was informed by Stephen Clark, the museum’s steely chairman, that he was not writing enough. Allegedly, for all his extraordinary shows and deeply researched catalogs, Barr had not been producing enough scholarship; in reality, the trustees, or some of them, felt that Barr was a poor “executive” and his tastes too radical and risqué for an increasingly corporate institution. Barr was unbowed. Relegated to a small cubicle in the museum’s library and demoted to an advisory position at half salary, he began working on a huge new book on Picasso.
As the war reached its climactic battles in the fall of 1944 and the spring of 1945, Barr used a network of museum curators turned GIs in Europe to help him research his book. When it was published in 1946, Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art quickly became the definitive midcentury work on the artist. Barr submitted it to Harvard, where it was accepted for the Ph.D. he had never completed when he left to run the museum seventeen years earlier. In his dedication, Barr wrote: “For my wife Margaret Scolari-Fitzmaurice, advisor and invaluable assistant in the Picasso campaigns of 1931, 1932, 1936, 1939.”
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Marga Barr: With the outbreak of war, Marga found herself for the first time cut off from the Europe she loved. “There were no more ‘campaigns’ and we were stuck in America,” she said. But she quickly found another way to engage with the Continent, assisting Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee in its efforts to help modern artists flee the Nazis. Along with all the Picasso paintings that were now stuck in the United States, the remarkable influx of refugee artists like Ernst, Lipchitz, Tanguy, and Léger would fundamentally transform the American art world. Still, there were a few artists they never heard from. “We kept always thinking, would Picasso want to come?” she recalled. She and Alfred did not learn until late in the war that the Germans hadn’t dared touch him. After the war, when Alfred’s European campaigns resumed, Marga returned to her indispensable work as interpreter, adviser, and all-purpose charmer. But it didn’t get any easier with Picasso. When they finally managed to meet him again, in Vallauris in 1952, Picasso kissed Marga and asked her, “Why didn’t you send me a postcard?” Then he turned to Alfred, who had recently published a major study on Matisse, and said, “You did a great book on Matisse!” He had not a word to say about Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art.[15]
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Pablo Picasso: Confounding to the last, the artist continued to live at odds with his own reputation. Just months after he was greeted by American GIs in Paris as a Resistance hero, he was recruited to join the French Communist Party, despite Stalin’s stance against modern art. In fact, by the 1950s, the FBI kept an active file on Picasso’s activities as a possible Communist agent, and he never did visit the United States. Leaving Dora Maar during the war, he took up with Françoise Gilot, his next conquest, with whom he settled in Vallauris, in the south of France, where he became fascinated by ceramics and had two more children. When Barr, who was now director of collections at the Museum of Modern Art, prepared Picasso’s seventy-fifth anniversary exhibition in 1957—a show even bigger than the one in 1939—Picasso designed him a necktie, which Alfred wore to the opening. Picasso stayed in France.
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Henri-Pierre Roché: In the years after Quinn’s death, Roché continued his very active social life in Paris, and eventually found himself advising the young Maharajah of Indore, an Oxford-educated prince, whom he introduced to Brancusi. During the Nazi occupation, he took refuge in a small town in the free zone in southeastern France, where he taught English and gymnastics in a school for refugee children. In 1953, just six years before his death, Roché would at last enjoy the literary success that had eluded him for decades, with Jules et Jim, the bestselling novel he based on his experiences with Franz and Helen back at the time he knew Quinn.
After the war, Roché kept up his friendship with Picasso, just as he did with everybody in Paris. But, like everyone else’s, his letters mostly went unanswered. One day in 1946, however, he was determined to get through. On a large sheet of paper, he wrote Picasso a series of questions, each one followed by a blank for Picasso to fill in. “Since you are a very lazy writer,” Roché wrote, “I’ve enclosed an envelope with my address.” At the end of the letter, he asked, “I would like to see you again, just once by yourself, amid your paintings, as back in the days of Leo Stein, Erik Satie, John Quinn, Doucet—but will it ever happen? ___________.” This time the ploy worked. Picasso wrote on the blank line: “Me too. When I return.” Then he sent the letter back to Roché.[16]
FOR MY GRANDMOTHERS, JEAN GIBSON EAKIN AND JEANNE NEWHALL SHEPARD