Picasso! How Europe's avant-garde won over Americans

First they call you Bolshevik

The Book:

Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America
By Hugh Eakin
Crown Publishing
2022

The Talk:

Kanye West is not Picasso
I am Picasso

~ Leonard Coen, “Kayne West is Not Picasso”

In America today the name Picasso is synonymous with artistic genius. But that wasn’t always so obvious. In fact, it took a remarkably long time for Americans to appreciate Picasso, despite decades of obsessive effort from a handful of American collectors and curators.

This is the story Hugh Eakin tells in his new book Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America, an entertaining, myth-busting account of the many battles of early 20^th Century art reception across the Atlantic.

Picasso is a bit like modern art’s Plato. Everything that comes after him is a footnote. Eakin writes:

Years later, Jackson Pollock’s partner, Lee Krasner, recalled how Pollock once picked up his dog-eared copy of Picasso: Forty Years of His Art and threw it across the floor of his studio in frustration. “God damn it! That guy missed nothing!” he shouted.

But at the turn of the 20th Century, America’s banking and railroad elite were far more interested in shoring up the “genteel tradition,” preferring to collect Renaissance works, Old Masters, and academic paintings. Buying a painting of Cézanne, who had been painting over fifty years by then, was considered just a bit too edgy for most collectors.

In other words, America was furthest thing you could imagine from a hotbed of avant-garde creativity. So what ultimately led to the American embrace of modern art?

The modern art museum as market creator

Art, if it is alive, is a market. And for most of the early 20^th Century there was very little market for modern art in America. This led to a curious institution: The modern art museum.

Historically, museums collect and showcase very old things for the good of the public. They define and honor those works that have stood the test of time and that are widely considered important, excellent, or noteworthy.

In contrast, the modern art museum at its inception was a progressive institution, a contradiction in terms on some level. Their purpose was to educate the public in order to create a market, to educate the public on what’s happening in the present, and to collect works in anticipation of future acclaim.

It’s a bit like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, “Guess you guys aren't ready for that yet. But your kids are gonna love it.”

And for decades these kinds of institutions—centrally, the Museum of Modern Art in New York—barely survived. They found few financial backers, and those that did support them were more comfortable with late 19^th Century artists. Often their exhibitions had few attendees; but even that was perhaps preferable to raising the moral outrage of community leaders who saw some of the work as “degenerate”—a sign of moral decadence or cultural insanity.

My sense from the book is that American cultural reception was about 40 years behind Europe, based on Eakin’s narrative. For example, Van Gogh’s art was not popular with the American public until a major retrospective show toured 45 years after the artist’s death. Picasso was considered “Bolshevik” and degenerate up until the 1939 retrospective show Picasso: Forty Years of His Art toured the country.

The European art apocalypse

Ironically, America embraced modern art at the very moment that era was ending in Europe. In 1939 Nazi Germany was eliminating all modern art and modern design within its own country and every country it was invading. Not only did they consider modern art deviant and perverse, but 4/5^th of art dealers in Paris during that time were Jewish; many of their art works were seized and their galleries were shut down when Germany invaded. Within a matter of months, the entire European art market, particularly in Paris, but also in Germany and Russia, that had sustained artists like Matisse and Picasso was simply erased.

If that sounds extreme, it was—but only an extreme version of something that was pretty typical in the U.S. Only a couple decades before then, American morality squads in nearly every city and community, in alignment with Comstock laws, were shutting down plays, art shows, and book publishing that was considered lewd by the moral tastes of the time.

(Comstock laws, which were never entirely repealed, have returned to legal and public consciousness post-Roe because they prohibit the delivery of abortifacients by mail.)

But in 1939, in a sudden reversal, Picasso and European modern art were embraced by the American public as an embodiment of American ideals—rugged individualism, freedom of expression, in opposition to totalitarianism. From that point on, America (and New York) would be the epicenter of modern art.

Seeking “radium”

So was it opposition to Nazism that ultimately changed American taste in 1939? Eakin’s thinks that’s unlikely, since the European war seemed far away for most Americans at that time.

Eakin makes the case that it was tireless champions like John Quinn and Alfred Barr who were critical to changing the cultural tide. And no doubt that’s an important part of the story.

The early champions of modern art saw their mission as confrontational, as a conflict between two different approaches to art. To embrace modern art was to be converted to a new way of seeing; once you had seen the light, it was impossible to go back to the old ways.

Obsessive modern art collector Quinn was searching for art that had what he called “radium,” that ineffable glowing energy of the present modern moment. “All the radium has gone out of many old paintings,” he wrote.

Once converted, enthusiasts like Quinn ultimately wanted to convert the American public to their way of seeing. But, according to Eakin’s own telling, many of these conversion strategies didn’t work. Shock and awe exhibitions—like the 1913 Armory show—were unsuccessful. Trying to educate the public on modern art’s continuity with tradition didn’t seem to go anywhere either.

At best, one could say that a small group of passionate believers kept the ember of interest glowing, backed by a few elite donors, until history swerved and an unforeseen opportunity presented itself. Such is the story of many fringe movements and subcultures that lay quiet for decades, only to explode into mainstream popularity, seemingly out of nowhere.

George Santayana wrote in his essay “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” about generational change in culture: “Nothing will have been disproved, but everything will have been abandoned.”

The tides of generations churn, and in time—sometimes within months—what a culture admires and pursues irreversibly changes, not by argument or reason, not because the old was bad, but simply by the collective search for something excellent but different, whatever that might mean.