6
If the Armory Show did not lead to the broader cultural shift he had hoped for, Quinn quickly brushed aside the setback. His ambitions were bigger than any one show. In his alliance with Kuhn and Davies and their supporters, he had acquired a lively circle of like-minded enthusiasts, and he was at last laying the ground for the “collection of modern pictures” he had been talking about since 1911. Though he didn’t yet own any of their work, he had discovered the magic of Picasso and Brancusi and he planned to pursue them in the years to come. Above all, in the larger battle for modern art, he had already set his sights on a different and potentially more important constituency: the political class in Washington.
It was hardly an obvious target. In 1913, even more than today, getting senators and representatives to take an interest in art of any kind was something of a fool’s errand. Improving American taste had never been a high priority for the government, and the nation’s capital was a cultural desert, with the National Gallery of Art still nearly a quarter century away. Quinn himself viewed the mediocre statues in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol as an indication of how little esteem the country’s leaders had for aesthetic beauty. (“Anyone, after looking at these horrors, could see what Rodin was after,” he complained to one European friend.) That Congress might be persuaded to promote the cause of advanced modern art in the United States—including works like the Matisses that were causing art students in Chicago to riot—was almost unthinkable.[1]
Yet throughout the winter and spring, even as the Armory Show was startling visitors with Duchamp’s visual puzzles and Picabia’s strange geometries, Quinn had been shuttling back and forth to Washington, trying to persuade Congress of the strategic value of international modern art. Specifically, he wanted Congress to rewrite the tax code to encourage the import of contemporary art from Europe. To Quinn, there were powerful grounds for his appeal: According to existing U.S. law, works that were less than twenty years old were subject to a punitive import tariff that didn’t apply to any other category of art. Not only did the tax discourage dealers from selling modern art; it also served to reinforce the assumption that living art was not a legitimate part of American culture. As Quinn saw it, as long as the tariff was in place, the country would never be able to measure up to the advanced nations of the world.
Now he had launched a quixotic one-man campaign to change the law. At the time, few in Congress knew anything about, or had any interest in, the post-Impressionists and their radical followers. And since the modern art market itself was virtually nonexistent, few people other than Quinn and his artist friends had reason to care. Among the $900 million worth of European goods that entered the United States every year, modern art occupied such a tiny fraction that it was easy to imagine him being dismissed as an eccentric crank. But Quinn had never been lacking in self-assurance, and he was utterly convinced that sheer force of argument would get him very far. “No man in the United States could have presented the merits of free contemporary art to that Committee with half the lucidity I did,” he boasted to the critic James Huneker, after his first appearance before Congress that spring, “and I have no doubt of the result.”[2] As he soon discovered, however, actually changing the law would require taking on powerful interests in both New York and Washington.
Though he had only recently begun to collect advanced modern art, Quinn’s frustration with the tax code was not new. A few years earlier, upon returning from a trip to Dublin laden with contemporary Irish paintings, he had been chagrined to discover that he faced more than $500 in customs duties—a significant sum at the time—despite the minor value of the paintings themselves. Meanwhile, some of the country’s richest collectors were bringing in Old Master paintings that were a hundred or a thousand times more valuable duty-free. This anomalous situation was owed to a 1909 tariff law that had eliminated import tariffs on historic art. As Quinn knew well, the law had been largely created for J. P. Morgan, the financier and rapacious art collector who had powerful contacts in the government. Faced with an estimated $6 million tax bill, Morgan had threatened to leave the vast collection of Old Master paintings, sculptures, and other treasures he had amassed in Europe—the greatest private art hoard in the world at the time—to British rather than American museums. Soon after the law passed, he brought in some $60 million worth of art to the United States, much of it destined for the Metropolitan, where he was chairman.[3]
What rankled Quinn was what this extraordinary tax break left out. Since Morgan and his wealthy friends disdained modern art, and members of Congress were intent on retaining an art tax of some kind, the 1909 law imposed a tariff barrier exclusively on contemporary paintings and sculptures. In theory, this provision was designed to protect contemporary American painters from foreign competition: Sheltered by the import tax, so the argument went, American artists—like American industries—would have a better chance of competing with their more advanced European counterparts. But to Quinn, these rationales were just a fig leaf: If the government wanted to raise money, it was the lucrative Old Master trade it should be taxing. “If they taxed old art it would bring in twenty or fifty or a hundred times more revenue than modern art,” Quinn observed.[4] Clearly the law was catering to powerful dealers like Joseph Duveen, who were making a fortune selling sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings to the country’s elite.
In effect, Washington was helping rich men buy Rembrandts and Velázquezes, while actively discouraging adventurous collectors like Quinn from pursuing Cézannes and Van Goghs. (One reason Stieglitz had limited many of his 291 shows to inexpensive drawings was the exorbitant cost of bringing in paintings.[5]) Worse, by separating the historic paintings collected by museums from the daring art of the current era, the tax reinforced the perception that the work of living artists was not a legitimate form of high culture. But it also seemed unlikely that Quinn could do much to change the situation. “I think that a tariff on works of art is monstrous,” he had written one British dealer in 1911, “but while it is the law I shall have to conform to it.”[6]
A few weeks before the Armory Show, however, Quinn had found an opening. Woodrow Wilson was coming to office promising a sweeping overhaul of protectionist trade policies. For years, steep tariffs had been justified as a way to protect American industry from foreign competition in everything from steel to sugar. To Wilson and other Progressive Era politicians, however, the trade barriers were mainly serving to enrich big corporations while raising the cost of consumer goods. So intent was Wilson on reform that he asked Congress to begin working on a new tariff law before his inauguration, and appointed Oscar Underwood, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to lead the effort. Quinn happened to be friends with Underwood, and soon after Congress convened in January, the congressman agreed to allow him to appear before the committee, in his capacity as legal representative of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, the artists’ group behind the Armory Show.
Enthralled by the prospect of shaping policy, Quinn was initially tempted to propose that the government tax old art instead of modern art: a sort of sweet revenge on the tycoon class. But he quickly saw that it would backfire. For one thing, he was facing a group of legislators who in all probability had very little sympathy for contemporary work of any kind, let alone the Cubist and Futurist works he and his friends were at that moment unleashing on New York. Moreover, such a move risked turning the entire established art world against him. “I was warned by a dealer that there would be hell to pay,” Quinn recounted to a friend shortly before his departure to Washington. “All the rich men would be down on me and the Duveens, the Seligmans [sic], the Knoedlers and the rest of them would be hot at me.”[7]
In the end, Quinn took a different tack altogether. He did not mention the Armory Show and the controversial new art it was bringing to the country. Instead, he approached the tax question as a matter of lofty principle. Like other forms of civilizational advancement, art was a matter of education not commerce, he told Underwood’s committee, and therefore all art should be “free”—exempt from duty. Appealing to the national interest, he argued that the tax was hindering progress. “New art movements are in the air in many countries of Europe,” he argued. “We alone seem to be behind the times.” He also said that the existing law discriminated against ordinary people, who could not afford Old Masters but might otherwise buy contemporary art—an argument that Underwood found compelling. “In other words,” the congressman summarized, “we gave rich men their class of art free and to the poor man or the man of moderate means we declined to give it free.” Quinn had found his mark. For a committee already disposed to eliminating gratuitous tariffs, Quinn’s appeal to the edification of the common man hit home. When the House presented its draft bill later that spring, the modern art tax was gone.[8]
The Senate, though, was another story. Many senators were less sympathetic to tariff reform in the first place and saw no compelling economic reason to change the art tax. Moreover, western senators tended to regard fine art as an East Coast luxury good, and since powerful interests were blocking a tax on historic art, modern art was a natural target. In its own version of the reform bill, the Senate not only upheld the modern art tax but extended it back to art fifty years old or less. Then, in late June, a group of Democratic senators, adhering to the party’s traditional position on taxing luxuries, decided also to raise the duty itself to 25 percent. For Quinn, it was a devastating setback: If the Senate prevailed, there would be a punishing tax on every foreign painting and sculpture from Manet forward. More or less the entire modern movement, including the Impressionists, the post-Impressionists, and their followers, would be rendered so expensive that dealers might stop selling them altogether.[9]
Up to this point, Quinn had kept his Washington campaign quiet, fearful of setting off a countereffort by the big dealers. But now it was war. To prevail in the Senate, he knew he would need as broad a coalition as possible. Setting aside his law work, he began an intense publicity campaign against the Senate bill, drawing on the skills he had perfected when he brought Yeats and other foreign writers to the United States. Turning his office into a makeshift lobbying operation, he contacted dozens of university presidents—including Princeton’s, Harvard’s, and Yale’s—who he knew would support the free circulation of knowledge. He reached out to museums, even the conservative Metropolitan, which was glad to endorse the concept of “free art” for all. He recruited prominent authors, scholars, collectors, and artists to write statements of support. And he sent copies of his briefs to Congress to dozens of newspaper editors across the country, most of whom knew nothing about the art trade but were glad to write editorials against an apparently elitist Senate bill. “On Monday the World, independent, and the Tribune, republican and protectionist, had strong editorials against it,” Quinn recounted to New York senator James O’Gorman at the end of June. “On Tuesday the Morning Sun and on Tuesday evening the Evening Sun and the Herald had a column of interviews with artists and [modern] art dealers against it. On Wednesday, the Times and the Herald had editorial protests against it. The Globe and other evening papers have protested against it. The Philadelphia Ledger and other leading papers are against it.” If nothing else, it was a formidable display of Quinn’s ability to rally public opinion around an issue about which few Americans had reason to care. “The whole press of the country is up in arms against the Senate amendment,” Quinn wrote O’Gorman. “One might as well tax religion, or science, or medicine.”[10]
Finally, in mid-September, Quinn went to the White House to make a direct appeal to Woodrow Wilson. After meeting with Wilson’s secretary, he delivered a huge binder to the president containing what he called “disinterested evidence” against the art tax, the accumulation of a summer of nonstop advocacy. Included were statements Quinn and his friends had obtained from several hundred American artists; a petition he had helped organize, signed by some two hundred officials of public museums; statements by dozens of college presidents and education experts; editorials and articles from more than three hundred newspapers and magazines; and formal endorsements from the American Federation of Arts, the Free Art League, and Quinn’s own Association of American Painters and Sculptors. In an accompanying letter, Quinn told the president, “in urging Congress to make art free,” these organizations were supported by “the enlightened public opinion of the entire country.”[11]
A few weeks after his meeting at the White House, the House and Senate committees jointly convened to draft the final version of the Underwood tariff reform. Though he was not permitted to attend the meeting, Quinn traveled to Washington to follow the outcome. Despite his efforts, he knew the Senate remained dug in on the art tax, and he feared that in the end, the “damned Senate amendment,” as he called it, would be enacted. It was an enormous bill, covering many sectors of the economy, but when the joint committees came to the matter of art, debate over the provision dragged on for nearly two hours. Underwood held firm, however, and the letters, documents, and briefs that Quinn had furnished made for a powerful, and seemingly unanswerable, show of force. In the end, the Senate gave in: There would be no more tax on foreign art.
For Quinn, it was an improbable triumph. As he later admitted to friends, almost from start to finish, it had been his “fight” and his alone, financed and run entirely out of his own office. In reality, few if any of the museums and institutions—let alone the press—had paid any attention to the modern art tax until he asked for their endorsement. Only a tiny number of Americans had any interest in contemporary art from abroad, and Congressman Underwood came from a state—Alabama—that was as far from the art trade as any in the union. Yet he had managed to convince Congress that there was overwhelming public support for his view. In a final coup de grâce, Underwood, sensing Quinn’s mastery of the issue, told the joint committees that he was asking the New York lawyer to draw up the art paragraphs in the final bill. Since Quinn was already in Washington, he and Underwood met that evening and they hammered it out. Thus, it was Quinn who wrote the new tax law on art. If J. P. Morgan had shaped the previous tariff, this one would be all Quinn’s.[12]
Still, as Quinn saw it, the larger “art fight” was just beginning. As a matter of legal principle, the tariff reform was a breakthrough. No longer could the federal government treat a Picasso or Matisse any differently than the most prized Rembrandt or Holbein; modern artworks would at last enjoy the same status in law as their historic predecessors. More important, though, were the possibilities the reform created for the market itself. For the first time, new art could be brought over from Europe and shown to the American public, without penalty. Dealers could sell it, collectors could buy it, and museums could acquire it. In theory, the ground had been laid for a new art scene.
In his closing remarks to the Senate committee, Quinn laid out what he saw as the larger importance of the law. For the first time, the United States would be able to compete culturally with its European peers; by opening the spigot to new art from across the ocean, the tariff reform would “do more than anything else to spread culture and the love of true art throughout the country.” In the long run, he added, it would “make New York City the art centre of the world.”[13]
—
The question was how. In the months after Quinn’s victory in Washington, there were few signs that much had changed in the American art world. The Art Institute of Chicago, fresh from the Armory scandal, was hardly charging forward into the modern era; in New York, the Metropolitan was as set in its ways as before. During the Armory Show, there had been a glimmer of promise, when a curator from the Metropolitan had boldly acquired a Cézanne landscape, the museum’s lone purchase. But the purchase proved highly controversial on the board, and as little mention of it was made as possible. It seemed unlikely to be repeated for the foreseeable future. “The Met ought to have a dozen good Manets, ten or a dozen good Daumiers, it ought to have half a dozen at least or a dozen of good examples by Degas,” Quinn complained to his friend Judge Learned Hand. “It ought to have a dozen Cézannes. It ought to have examples by Van Gogh and it has none. It ought to have some good Gauguins and it has none.”[14]
As Quinn reflected on the situation, he realized that it would take much more than the tax code to change people’s minds about modern art. What the country needed was a new kind of museum altogether, one that approached the art world as a dynamic, evolving thing. Instead of devoting itself to the past, his imagined institution would be firmly anchored in the present, taking the cause of living art as its primary mission. And it would have the task of sorting out the very best of the new work of the present age. It would be a place to show the new art, but also to acquire the best examples of it and build a collection, just as conventional museums, like the Metropolitan, did for historic art.
That winter, Quinn began to outline his ideas to friends and contacts in the art world. “I have long had in view a modern museum,” he wrote to John Cotton Dana, the prominent librarian and museum leader who was a leading innovator of public education. As he explained, alongside a continual exhibition program devoted to new art and new artists, such a museum would “purchase and receive bequests of examples of the work of living artists.” Looking to European models, he also imagined that such a museum could act in a complementary way to the historic collections of the Metropolitan. As he put it, it could “act as a feeder to the Metropolitan in much the same way as the Luxembourg does to the Louvre.”[15]
It was a seductive idea, but it was also absurdly impractical. For a country whose museum leaders still saw themselves almost exclusively as custodians of the treasures of past centuries, a “modern museum” of any kind would be a difficult sell. To model it on the Luxembourg Museum in Paris, Europe’s first state museum of modern and contemporary art, seemed almost a fantasy. Who would pay for such a museum when it was far from clear whether the art that was supposed to go in it would have any lasting value in the first place? Once again, Quinn was finding his ideas far ahead of what could actually be done. And yet, on a small scale, he was determined to try.
In the early years of the century, a number of progressive social movements had been spearheaded by a rising generation of prominent New York women, and in many ways, modern art, in its associations with cultural change, was a natural extension of their interests. Several of these women had taken an active interest in the Armory Show and Quinn wondered if they might be persuaded to support modern art on a more sustained basis. One of the most prominent was the socialite and progressive activist Mary Harriman Rumsey, the eldest daughter of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman and the founder of the Junior League, the national women’s organization to promote social welfare in American cities. She was also married to a prominent sculptor, Charles Cary Rumsey, and was anxious to learn more about the new art movements in Paris. Another was Alice Brisbane Thursby, a vivacious and cultivated supporter of the arts with whom Quinn had had an earlier romance. The daughter of a prominent social philosopher and the sister of one of the country’s leading newspaper editors, Thursby was so enthralled by the Armory Show that she told Quinn she was going to Paris to see “all the exhibitions and look up talent.”[16] Even more taken with the Armory Show was Lillie Bliss, the heiress and collector who would one day transform the American art world in ways that Quinn could scarcely imagine. Though she remained cautious in her own collecting, she also shared Quinn’s impatience with the conservative trustees of the Metropolitan and the city’s woeful neglect of modern art.
In the months after the tariff reform went through, Quinn and his artist friends began talking to several of these women about setting up a permanent exhibition space, or “Art Room,” to show modern art. Quinn drew up a prospective budget and they began looking for a suitable top-lit gallery on Fifth Avenue to house the venture. Quinn also recruited Walter Pach, a loyal associate who had spent years in Paris and had helped organize the Armory Show, to serve as its director. As usual, Quinn was moving with headlong speed. By December—just two months after the passage of the tariff act—he and Pach were envisioning a continual series of shows of avant-garde European and American art. Meanwhile, there was talk of Rumsey enlisting the support of several of her society friends and perhaps even her mother, who had inherited the bulk of the Harriman fortune.[17]
As was so often the case with Quinn, though, he had gotten ahead of himself. He quickly discovered that the venture would be difficult and expensive and would require constant management. Mary Rumsey, for all her glamour and energy, was not prepared to be directly involved in the project; nor was her mother, in the end, willing to spend any of her own vast fortune on it. None of them had the time or expertise to run such an institution, which seemed unlikely, in any case, to make any money.
Even apart from these limitations, the plan faced formidable obstacles. For nearly a year, Quinn had pursued his “art fight” with reckless abandon, from his nightly visits to the Armory to his full-throttle campaign in Washington, and he was dangerously behind on his law work. Even now, alongside his primary work in finance, he had taken on an important obscenity case, involving a new novel that had fallen afoul of Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice. To his friends, Quinn’s reserves of energy had an almost terrifying quality. “I envy you your power,” Conrad had written him, after hearing about the tariff victory.[18] According to the novelist, it was Quinn’s “mental mastery” that had seemingly allowed him to expand his activities without limit. But the truth was, Quinn was exhausted, and after several months of struggle, he was forced to concede that the Art Room—and his larger ambition for a permanent modern art space in New York—was too much for him to handle. “I had absolutely no time for it,” he told Thursby.[19]
Quinn’s ideas made sense. He had detected, correctly, a gap in the city’s—and the country’s—art culture that urgently needed addressing. He had also intuited, presciently, that many of New York’s leading progressives were women, and that their support would hold the key to bringing a new kind of institution into being. But the country simply wasn’t ready. There was still scant knowledge of the new art in New York, even among his forward-minded friends. Quinn himself had yet to buy his first Picasso. For the foreseeable future, the center of gravity of the new art seemed destined to remain firmly in Munich and Moscow.