4
Quinn’s first journey to Paris began with a desperate woman and a revolver. It was the beginning of September 1911, and he was waiting for Augustus John, the prominent Welsh painter, at Charing Cross Station. Having arrived in London a week earlier, Quinn had persuaded John to cross the Channel with him and introduce him to some galleries and artists in the French capital. According to their plan, they would spend four or five days in Paris; then they would drive to the south of France, to take in the Provençal landscapes and light that had inspired Van Gogh and Cézanne.
In theory, John should have been an ideal guide. Though his own, fairly conventional portraiture did not quite live up to his extravagant reputation—Virginia Woolf had named a new era in British culture after him—he was knowledgeable about the new art and had been going regularly to Provence to paint. He also had connections in Paris: Four years earlier, he had met Picasso at his studio, and probably saw Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. (Picasso was clearly amused by the velvet-clad, earringed Welshman, whom he called “the best bad painter in Britain.”[1]) But John was a complicated character with a decidedly raffish streak. While courting attention and patronage from the Bloomsbury intellectuals, he led a dissolute, nomadic existence with various women and wives and unintended children. He also had a habit of leaving a trail of chaos wherever he went.
On the day of their departure from London, the particular chaos in question was Frida Strindberg, the neurotic Austrian second wife of Swedish playwright August Strindberg. A spurned paramour of John’s, Madame Strindberg had a vivid sense of drama, and as Quinn and John met on the platform, they found her waiting for them, firearm in hand. She insisted on going with them to France, or, she said, she would take her own life. Apparently, it was not the first time she had made such a threat, and after a struggle, they managed to escape her. But Quinn was terrified. (“Carnage,” he scrawled in his journal.) Then, when they reached the ferry, they discovered that she not only was very much alive but had somehow managed to rejoin them. It was a harbinger of what was to come.[2]
In Paris, Quinn hoped they could escape Strindberg and plunge into art. But he was immediately detained by one of his most important legal clients, a large, elderly southerner named Thomas Fortune Ryan, an insurance magnate who needed him on an important business errand. Like many other American millionaires, Ryan enjoyed Paris but had no taste for modern art. Instead of going to see the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Quinn and John ended up taking Ryan to the Bal Tabarin cabaret, whose dancers Lautrec had once painted. (Ryan chewed on an unlit cigar in mild amusement as he took in the entertainment, while John promptly picked up an Algerian woman.) In the end, they managed only hurried visits to a couple of art galleries. And although Quinn was fascinated to hear about Gertrude and Leo Stein and their art-filled home—he wrote in his diary that they collected “nothing but new men”—he and John made no attempt to visit.[3]
An even greater missed opportunity was Picasso himself. After all, Quinn had been asking John about Picasso throughout the spring, even as he tried to make sense of the perplexing drawings he’d seen at 291. It’s tempting to imagine what Quinn might have made of an encounter with Picasso at a point when he had yet to buy a single avant-garde painting: Nearly all of his previous art buying had involved English, Irish, and American painters he had a personal connection with. Apparently, though, John, who by now relied on Quinn’s heavy purchases of his paintings, was not particularly inclined to steer the lawyer to work that was far more advanced than his own. In fact, it would take another decade before Quinn finally met the artist whose work would one day occupy the center of his vision of modern art.
But Paris was not a total loss. One day, John took him to see Ambroise Vollard, the shrewd, inscrutable post-Impressionist dealer, who was a towering presence in the Paris art world. To Quinn, he must have seemed formidable. A few years older than the lawyer, Vollard was tall and somewhat lumbering, and had a curious way of shutting one eye. He had been a mentor to several generations of artists and had been an early supporter of Picasso. He was also notoriously cagey, especially with people he didn’t know. Though he had an extraordinary collection of Cézannes and early Picassos, they didn’t, during their visit, get much beyond Renoir and Monet. Still, Quinn was intrigued, and left with a sense of unfinished possibility.
For now, though, they had run out of time. With Strindberg having discovered their hotel, John was in a hurry to get out of Paris, and they set out for the south of France in a big 75-horsepower Mercedes, which they had borrowed from Ryan, along with his German driver, Ewald Brenner. “We shall throw her off the scent by means of the car,” John said.[4]
It was not a trip that afforded much time for reflection. There were hurried stops in cathedral towns along the way, and they argued—and often disagreed—about Baudelaire, Wagner, Oscar Wilde, and the fifteenth-century frescoes of Avignon. (Quinn was awed by the murals’ fresh and luminous colors—“paint looks like tar compared to them,” he told John—but John dismissed any relevance to contemporary art.) Unused to such intense company, John was quickly worn out, while Quinn was frustrated at how little they managed to see. To keep John happy, Quinn found himself plying him with “champagne for lunch, champagne for dinner, liqueurs of all kinds, vermouth, absinthe, and the devil knows what all.” When they reached Provence, John took Quinn to his usual haunts, including, at one point, a whorehouse, which Quinn found squalid and repulsive: “No kick,” he wrote.[5]
The woozy tour was not helped by Brenner’s driving. One night, while descending a mountain road in the Cévennes, they encountered a dense fog, and Quinn lost his nerve. Convinced they were heading off a cliff, he opened the door and flung himself out of the car. They found him lying in a field beside the road, dazed but miraculously unscathed. Still, the drive haunted him for the remainder of the trip. In a letter to Joseph Conrad that fall, he recounted the recurring nightmares he had about “stone houses, fences, trees, hay stacks, stone walls, stone piles, dirt walls, chasms and precipices advancing towards us out of the fog.” For all his interest in the new art, the landscapes that had inspired several generations of modern painters had instead been reduced to instruments of terror.[6]
At this point, Quinn might have been justified in giving up on French modernism altogether. Picasso’s drawings had left him nonplussed. Paris had been illusory. They had nearly been held at gunpoint by a possessed Austrian woman; then he had nearly broken his neck trying to experience the great landscapes of the south in the company of a Welsh reprobate. He had gotten no closer to Picasso and Matisse than hearing rumors about the Steins, and he had so little time at the Paris galleries that he returned to New York with nothing more than a few Manet drawings.
—
If France had largely refused to give up its secrets, however, the misadventure with John made Quinn all the more intent on unlocking them. Disoriented and unnerved, he withdrew to his hectic law work, and for several months thought little about modern art at all. But even the Impressionists he had seen at Vollard’s had sharpened his senses and he was now naggingly aware of the insistent provincialism of much of the American art world. “Some of these American artists paint as though Constable and Turner and Monet and Manet and Renoir had never exhibited a picture,” he told John Sloan. Going back to the Metropolitan, he was struck by the almost total absence of good nineteenth-century paintings, let alone more recent work. “Aside from its old things,” he wrote Augustus John, the museum “would be negligible among the galleries of the world.”[7] Meanwhile, the Metropolitan was the richest museum in the world, yet apart from its Old Masters, he thought there were probably not more than twenty paintings out of its hundreds that were “worth wall space.”[8]
The spring after his French excursion, Quinn fell in with a group of young New York artists who were intent on shaking things up. Led by Walt Kuhn and Arthur B. Davies, they had founded a new society, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, with the aim of promoting the work of American artists who defied the academic teachings of the conservative National Academy of Design. But Davies and Kuhn also shared Quinn’s impatience to, as he had put it, “bring the post-Impressionists over here.” At first, Davies wanted to exhibit some European work alongside the new American art that would be their primary focus. But with Quinn’s encouragement, they soon began to conceive of a far more daring project.[9] It was the unlikely beginning of what would become one of the most legendary, if poorly understood, art events of the twentieth century.
In July 1912, Quinn incorporated Davies and Kuhn’s association, which now had the aim of staging a single large-scale show in New York the following winter. That same month, Quinn received a letter from Cologne, Germany, from an art dealer friend who had just seen an extraordinary exhibition. Staged by a group of German enthusiasts called the Sonderbund, the show aimed to be a comprehensive survey of international modern art and was filled with post-Impressionist, Cubist, and Futurist paintings, including eighteen Picassos and more than one hundred Van Goghs. If the art in it could somehow be brought to the United States, the dealer told Quinn, it would “give America the exhibition of its life.” Quinn, fascinated, must have informed Davies, who soon after obtained the Sonderbund catalog from Birnbaum. “I wish we could have a show like this,” Davies told Kuhn. There would still be American art, but now their primary objective was to provide a sweeping view of the new art movements that were conquering Europe. Importantly, they were also determined to sell the works in the show directly to the public, to demonstrate that there was a market for modern art in New York.[10]
From the start, it was a quixotic venture: The association had no building and no budget. It also didn’t have any art. They would have to raise the funds they needed, acquire the paintings from Europe somehow, and rent an exhibition space large enough for the huge presentation they envisioned. A still greater obstacle was that Davies and Kuhn knew almost nothing about the new art they wanted to show. Until now, Davies had primarily been known for his pastel landscapes, some of which were strewn with unicorns; Kuhn was so unfamiliar with the “freak cubists,” as he called them, that by his own admission, he was starting from zero. But they were determined to pull it off, and Quinn encouraged them to aim as high as possible.
Then, just as these plans were getting under way, Ryan dispatched Quinn back to Paris on an urgent business matter. The circumstances were hardly more favorable than during his earlier trip. Pinned down with work, he had almost no time for art; he later told Conrad that he found the city “hateful to me and everything in it.”[11] As soon as he could steal a few hours, however, he headed straight for Vollard’s. Though the secretive dealer liked to hold back from clients, Quinn, on this second visit, won his respect. By the time he left, Vollard had agreed to relinquish what would soon become three of the most important post-Impressionist paintings to cross the Atlantic: a dramatic Cézanne painting of his wife, Hortense; one of Gauguin’s final Tahiti scenes, painted a year before the artist’s death; and a searing Van Gogh self-portrait, also from his final years. For Davies and Kuhn, these paintings would serve as crucial anchors for their show.
Shortly after Quinn returned from Paris, Kuhn set out on his own last-minute art-gathering trip to Europe, where he was later joined by Davies. With crucial help from friends in Paris, they were improbably successful, managing to borrow more than three hundred works from many leading artists and dealers. Even Kahnweiler, who did not have any major American clients at the time, agreed to contribute a few Braques and Picassos. “All of the big names of the last twenty years and of today are going to be represented,” Quinn reported to Jack Yeats, the artist brother of W. B. Yeats. “They will have a room for the Futurists. Also a room for the Cubists.”[12] Meanwhile, they gathered hundreds of works by American artists to show alongside the European art. As one of the few Americans with a large contemporary art collection of any kind, Quinn himself became the show’s biggest lender, furnishing dozens of his English and American paintings, along with the Cézanne, the Van Gogh, and the Gauguin that he had just acquired from Vollard.
But lining up the art was not the only challenge Davies and Kuhn faced. The association had planned the show to open in February 1913, which gave them only weeks after their return from Europe to stir up public interest. Drawing on his experience bringing Yeats and other literary figures to the United States, Quinn knew they would need to prepare the ground as much as possible. “Our show must be talked about all over the U.S. before the doors open,” he told Kuhn. While Kuhn began writing artists and newspapers around the country, Quinn himself began to court members of the political and cultural elite. “I am going to have the mayor of the town, the governor of the state, and United States Senator Root at the opening,” he told friends.[13]
In fact, Quinn remained skeptical of some of the newest work that Kuhn and Davies were planning to introduce. It was less than eighteen months since his first, flailing excursion to Paris—a trip during which he had met no artists, seen little art, and acquired almost nothing—and even his second trip had failed to expose him to the contemporary art scene. “Personally I don’t understand or sympathize with cubism,” he confided to one British friend during the final preparations for the show. But he also recognized that challenging prevailing tastes, including his own, was precisely the point. “American art needs the shock that the work of some of these men will give,” he argued, in an interview for one art magazine. “Our art has been too long vegetating.”[14]
Not least for Quinn was the opportunity to take the battle to the conservative forces that he believed were holding back American culture. By bringing the new and strange art directly to the public, he felt, they could outflank the Old Master dealers and the men of the Metropolitan, who seemed to resist modern art of any kind. And as he discussed the show’s publicity campaign with Kuhn and Davies, he told them they “should not apologize or explain but should attack.”[15]