8
Jeanne Foster was not thinking about war when she arrived in Britain at the end of July 1914. She was on assignment for the Review of Reviews, which had sent her to investigate poor housing in London, Manchester, Birmingham, and other cities, as well as to pursue several literary projects in Dublin and in the Scottish Isle of Arran. On one of her first evenings in London, however, the startling news was broadcast all over the country: George V had instructed his ministers to go to war. Though it was close to midnight, she rushed to Piccadilly to gauge the public reaction; to her surprise, the streets were filled with young Londoners in straw boaters, singing and waving flags. “One might have thought a holiday had been declared instead of war,” she wrote in her diary. Swept into the crowd, she followed the mass of people slowly making its way to Buckingham Palace. A few minutes after she reached the front gates, the king and queen came out on a balcony and bowed to wild cheers. By the following morning, when Foster left her hotel, she saw soldiers in the streets and young men lining up to enlist. All over the city, there were posters declaring, “To Hell with Serbia!”[1]
Sensing the enormity of the moment, Foster abandoned her housing investigation. There was a war to report on. Equipped with her American press credentials and her insistent charm, she talked her way into British military installations, embedding with army battalions as they prepared for deployment and touring the new “white winged airships” that were being tested at a grass airstrip on Salisbury Plain, the military training ground near Stonehenge. In Hyde Park, she interviewed and photographed the fresh-faced members of the London Rifles, a regiment that was on its way to the front lines in France; later, she would learn that, down to the man, none of them had survived the Battle of the Marne. She also witnessed the first zeppelin attack on London, which resulted in the deaths of a number of schoolchildren. With trains all over the country commandeered for the war effort, it was often difficult to travel, and at one point, chasing down an important story in Cambridge but unable to get a seat, she took a harrowing ride on the roof of a train car, ducking under overpasses as she went. In between dispatches, she found time to look at paintings at the National Gallery of British Art (now the Tate Gallery) and study the sculptures of Salisbury Cathedral, but she discovered that her whole relation to art and monuments had changed. “One seemed before to live outside history,” she wrote in her diary. “Suddenly, history is in the making everywhere.”[2]
—
In Avignon, in the south of France, a group of painters were having their own reckoning with world events. Earlier that summer, Picasso, Braque, and Derain had decamped to Provence, in what had, for several years, become an almost annual ritual. Often working in proximity, they had grown used to pursuing their work on their own terms. Spurring one another on, they shared ideas, opinions, and humor; frequently, their paintings ended up in one another’s hands. Matisse later claimed that his own first real encounter with Cubism was Braque’s 1908 landscape Houses at l’Estaque—which he saw in Picasso’s studio. That summer, Picasso and Derain were collaborating on a fourfold panel of still lifes, which they painted on a group of tiles that had come loose in Derain’s kitchen.[3]
Along the way, their personal lives had become deeply entwined as well. Derain and Braque boxed together; Braque and Picasso traded recipes. (“Picasso and I do a lot of cooking,” Braque told Kahnweiler during an earlier sojourn in Provence.) It was Picasso, in fact, who had introduced Braque and Derain to their future wives: Marcelle Braque, known as Blond Tobacco for her chain-smoking habits; and the dark-haired and sharp-witted Alice Derain, who would later attract the admiration of John Quinn.[4]
More than most artists, they were able to pursue their art largely oblivious to the outside world. With Kahnweiler’s all-encompassing contracts, none of them had to think about sales or shows: He would take care of that. And although he paid very low fixed prices and was stockpiling much of what he bought, his purchases were guaranteed, providing a level of economic stability that was almost unheard of among their peers. He also trained them to think—like he did—of the long term and not worry about critics. “I advanced them money so that they could live. They brought pictures,” Kahnweiler said. “And the people who were interested in them came to see them.” The arrangement was a remarkably pure way to make art.[5]
For Picasso, the summer of 1914 also began in a moment of rare tranquility. Two years earlier, amid a stormy breakup with Fernande, he had fallen deeply in love with a waifish, dark-haired woman named Eva Gouel, and their relationship had—almost for the first time—brought a remarkable equilibrium to his emotional life. Petite, demure, and quietly radiant, Eva was a striking counterpoint to the tall, blustery Fernande, and her calm, self-effacing presence had inspired some of his most intricate work, including the analytical Cubist masterpiece Ma Jolie, whose title was a coded dedication to her. “I love her very much and I will write this in my paintings,” he had told Kahnweiler.[6] Though Eva had a complicated past and there were resentments among Fernande loyalists, she ingratiated herself with Picasso’s circle; even Fernande herself, before she was replaced, had found her appealing.[7] “Pablo is very happy,” Gertrude Stein observed after seeing the new couple together.[8] Such was Eva’s capacity for empathy that when she and Picasso hired a housekeeper in Avignon, she ended up doing the work herself. (“My cleaning lady is so chummy with me that I can’t ask her to do anything,” she confided to Stein.[9])
Certain that Eva was the one, Picasso had taken her to Barcelona to meet his conservative family in early 1913. They had decided to marry that spring, but the death of Picasso’s father, and Eva’s fragile health, put the plans on hold. Still, she called herself Madame Picasso and he referred to her as ma femme—my wife—and it was clear to his friends that she was unlike any of his other women. In Avignon, Eva talked of settling down in a more permanent way. “It’s high time we felt a bit more at home somewhere,” she wrote Stein, recounting how they had found a “quite Spanish-looking” house to rent for the season. Picasso sent Stein their new address, with a drawing of an imaginary dog, Saucisson, on the day they moved in.[10]
As Picasso reunited with Derain and then Braque, who was staying in nearby Sorgues, none of them was particularly concerned with international events. “I saw Derain. He is very happy to be here and is looking forward to having a good season,” Braque reported to Kahnweiler in the middle of July, two weeks after the assassination of the Austrian archduke in Sarajevo had pitched Europe into crisis.[11] A week later, as the French prime minister visited St. Petersburg to reaffirm France’s alliance with Russia, and Austria-Hungary, with German support, prepared to issue an ultimatum to Serbia, Picasso wrote the dealer, “I’m only doing big canvases; at least that’s all I think about.”[12] By the end of the month, the whole of the Continent was teetering on the edge, and yet on the morning that France announced a general mobilization, Braque, unaware, wrote Kahnweiler to tell him that his painting was going well and that he was “quite content to be finally settled in my own place.”[13]
—
Hours later, as the news of the war finally reached them, the Avignon idyll crashed into reality. As Frenchmen, Braque and Derain would have to report for duty; as a foreigner, Picasso needed to secure his residency papers—and his livelihood. Racing back to Paris with Eva, he stayed just long enough to put his affairs in order and empty his bank account. Then they returned to Avignon, arriving in time to accompany Braque and Derain to the train station.[14] Derain left Picasso his dog, Sentinelle, to look after while he was at the front. For the three friends, it was a decisive parting. Though the friendships would remain, the free-spirited days of banding together and painting what they wanted were over; history had caught up with them. Later, Picasso would say of Braque and Derain that he “never found them again.”[15]
Hoping that the war would be over quickly, Picasso and Eva decided to remain in Avignon. But they were now cut off from nearly all of their friends, with not only Derain and Braque but also Vlaminck, Léger, and most of the others in his circle on their way to the front. “Really it drives one to despair,” Eva wrote.[16] Over the next few weeks, as the Germans rapidly advanced on the French capital, Picasso also began to fear that the art he had left behind—in his studio and at Kahnweiler’s gallery—might be in danger. “I am always worried thinking about Paris about my house and all my things,” he wrote Gertrude Stein in September.[17] Meanwhile, he heard nothing from Kahnweiler, who seemed to have vanished even as the war started. In fact, the dealer’s predicament was far worse than anything Picasso could imagine.
—
In late July, just as he did every year, Kahnweiler had locked up his gallery and departed with his family for the summer break, leaving Paris and his enormous stockpile of paintings behind. Having finished his most successful season yet, he was in a triumphant mood, and couldn’t imagine anything getting in the way of a holiday in the Bavarian Alps. It was true that some of his artists and friends in Paris had expressed vague concerns about the European situation. Derain was apprehensive about the consequences of Sarajevo. Vlaminck, who remained in Paris, had speculated that a German invasion might be imminent. Even Picasso had urged Kahnweiler, at the very least, to apply for a French passport. “In case there is a war it will get you out of hot water,” he told him.[18] To Kahnweiler, though, all that was extravagant alarmism. “Up to the last minute, I didn’t want to believe it,” he said.[19]
While the Kahnweilers were basking in the mountains above Munich, the magical European peace that had held since the late nineteenth century was abruptly ended. On July 30, Russian troops went to war against Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary, making it almost inevitable that Germany would join in. For Kahnweiler, it was a particularly dangerous situation: As a German citizen, he knew he would be drafted if they stayed a moment longer in Bavaria. That night, just hours ahead of the German declaration of war, he raced Lucie and their daughter, Zette, across the border to Switzerland.[20] From there, they decided to board a train to Italy, which for the moment was not involved in the war.
Only as they began the long southward journey through the Swiss Alps did Kahnweiler begin to see the danger he was in. If Germany went to war with France and Russia, his entire world would collapse. He thought about all that he had built over the past seven years—his improbable breakthroughs selling Picassos to Moscow and staging exhibitions in Munich and Berlin. Everything he had staked on these artists had depended on a common European market. Now, from one day to the next, it was gone. For a moment, as they rumbled across the vertiginous mountain passes of the St. Gotthard railway, he imagined the train pitching into a precipice. “It really seemed like European civilization had stopped,” he said.[21]
When they reached Rome, Kahnweiler tried to carry on as if nothing had changed. They checked in to a hotel on the Pincio where they’d stayed on a previous trip and talked about the art they were going to see. Even now, he was trying to will the war out of existence. But events were overtaking them by the hour. Trying to keep up, newspapers were printing special supplements throughout the day and selling them in the streets. Kahnweiler took to dashing out of their room at ten-minute intervals to check for the latest edition. Finally, in late afternoon, the dreaded announcement came: Germany and France were officially at war.
Paralyzed with indecision, Kahnweiler anguished over what to do. In theory, sitting out the war somewhere abroad should have been his best option. After all, he was a committed pacifist, and as long as Europe’s armies were fighting each other and his artists were at the front, there would be little he could do in Paris. But there was a more urgent problem with his absence from France: He was cut off from his gallery and all of its precious contents. When the Kahnweilers had gone on vacation, he left behind an almost unimaginable cache of artworks. Not only were there more than seven hundred paintings in total, including well over one hundred pictures by each of his leading painters: Braque, Derain, Vlaminck, Gris, and Picasso; the works also spanned the five or six years during which these artists had utterly transformed Western art. It was the Cubist story and much of the Fauvist story, told by the movements’ leading figures. As Vlaminck put it, “a young German of twenty-five” had somehow come “to possess the work of the greatest French painters of the day.”[22] Today, such a trove could easily stock the collections of several world-class museums. If ever a single basement could contain an entire epoch of art history, the cellar of Kahnweiler’s little tailor’s shop on rue Vignon was it.
The dealer needed his paintings, but how would he get them? Over the next few days, he wrote to as many of his friends in France as he could. As a German national, he knew it would likely be impossible for him to return to Paris. Juan Gris, who was a Spaniard, reported that the French authorities had been summoning foreigners to the town hall in the place where he was staying in the south of the country; he also thought the situation was worse in the capital. “Some have even been threatened with expulsion,” he wrote Kahnweiler.[23] One alternative for the dealer was to enlist in the French Foreign Legion: If he agreed to fight for France, he would be allowed to return to Paris. But taking up arms against his own country seemed as unthinkable as fighting for Germany itself. Finally, Kahnweiler considered enlisting as a medic in the French army, but even this seemed to go against his pacifist principles. Slowly, he confronted the reality that he was going to remain exiled until the war was over.
As long as Kahnweiler was separated from his gallery and his bank accounts in Paris, though, there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t sell his paintings; he couldn’t even pay his artists, including Picasso, to whom he owed a large sum for his latest batch of paintings. At the same time, Kahnweiler was cut off from his clients in Russia and Germany, where he was now officially a draft dodger. The far-flung European network that had brought him such success was coming back to haunt him. Yet he still had one more card to play—in a country that was not involved in the war and which potentially had a large new market for his artists.
In the years when Kahnweiler was aggressively expanding in Central Europe, he had paid little attention to the United States. The country was far away, and he had few connections there; and the reaction to the paintings he had sent to the Armory Show had hardly given him confidence that Americans were ready for his artists.[24] A few months before the war started, however, two young Americans had turned up at Kahnweiler’s gallery with a bold proposal. Robert J. Coady was an Irish American painter with an idealist streak; his business partner, Michael Brenner, was a Lithuanian American sculptor who was based in Paris and had met Picasso and other members of his circle. With money provided by Coady’s mother, they were planning to open a modern art gallery in New York called the Washington Square Gallery. According to their plan, Coady would run the gallery in New York, while Brenner would serve as its Paris agent. They were deeply interested in Kahnweiler’s artists and were prepared to purchase a substantial number of his paintings. They also hoped to serve as his agents in the United States.
Kahnweiler was agnostic, but Coady and Brenner agreed to buy a minimum of 2,500 francs’ worth of art and cover all related costs up front, and in the spring of 1914, he signed a contract with them giving the Washington Square Gallery exclusive American rights to the artists in his stable. At the time the war started, Kahnweiler had sent them an initial consignment of artworks, and they were planning shows of Juan Gris and Picasso for the coming winter. Could the Washington Square Gallery provide a refuge for Kahnweiler’s operations?
As the German invasion of France loomed, Kahnweiler got in touch with Brenner, who was still in Paris and about to return to the United States. As Brenner took in Kahnweiler’s difficult situation, he sensed an extraordinary opportunity. The dealer was now cut off from his gallery, and amid the onset of war, the European art market was virtually frozen. Hundreds of paintings by Braque, Picasso, Gris, and Derain were simply sitting there in Paris. “Let me take them to New York,” he told Kahnweiler.[25] Going further, Brenner suggested that Kahnweiler could come to New York himself and run his business out of their gallery.[26] It should have been a tantalizing prospect. The United States was a wealthy neutral power, and the paintings would be out of harm’s way, where Kahnweiler could access them. And they would be arriving at a moment when Quinn and his friends were trying to give advanced modern art a permanent foothold in New York. Moreover, from what Kahnweiler had heard from his own sources in Paris, it would not be too difficult for Brenner to get the paintings out of France. “I could easily, if I had wanted, have had my things moved out of rue Vignon by friends,” he recalled.
But Kahnweiler would have none of it. For all his readiness to take huge risks on new art, he was oddly inflexible in his own affairs. Just as he had refused to let the talk of war interfere with his annual vacation, he could not quite imagine, even now, with the German army rapidly advancing toward Paris, abandoning the city where he had built his trade. Somehow, he still believed that the war would be over by Christmas and that he would soon be back on rue Vignon, selling to his old clients in Moscow, Prague, and Berlin.
In the end, he balked at sending even some of his paintings to New York. “No, no, we mustn’t do that,” he told Brenner. “We must leave them where they are. Anyway, nothing will happen to them!”[27]