In late November 1932, a few weeks after Stein completed her two autobiographies, Virgil Thomson arrived in New York. He sailed third-class on the Ile de France, as he had done three years earlier. His fortunes had not improved in the intervening years; he was relying on a two-hundred-dollar loan from Philip Johnson to make the trip, and on the hospitality of Johnson and other friends for his lodging. But Thomson considered the trip essential in light of his growing determination to get Four Saints in Three Acts staged. Since his last trip the Depression had deepened, the Metropolitan Opera had nearly gone under, and commercial art galleries were closing as quickly as they had opened during the boom years of the 1920s. And—perhaps most ominous of all—Gertrude Stein had stopped speaking to him.
Thanks to the ingenuity of Maurice Grosser, Thomson had cleared one difficult hurdle; he now had a series of playable scenes that transformed Four Saints from an oratorio into an opera. Grosser’s scenario could not impose a plot or a narrative on the material, but he drew from the text enough suggestions for a series of vignettes. He called them “a train of images … a train of action.”1 They contained neither message nor story but were evocative enough to ground the music and words on stage. As Alice Toklas later commented, “It not only sounds like an opera but it looks like an opera.”2
Grosser imagined the first act as a series of Sunday school entertainments. The second act became a lawn party, the third act a multiwalled version of Barcelona, and the final act presented the saints congregated in heaven.
Grosser had begun writing the scenario after Thomson’s return from New York in 1929. He was an ideal scenarist. As Thomson’s domestic companion, he had repeatedly heard him perform the piece, and because he was not a writer he was less likely to encroach on Stein’s jealously guarded turf. A proficient painter of still lifes, portraits, and landscapes, his canvases were concrete but not literal; they reflected many of the allusive connotations of Stein’s text. “Saint Teresa could be photographed having been dressed like a lady,” for example, justified a scene in which a minor saint carried a large camera on a tripod and Saint Settlement delicately focused the lens on Saint Teresa on her throne. For other tableaux, Grosser took his inspiration from the rapture of Thomson’s music, envisioning a dancing angel or sailors tangoing with their Spanish ladies.3
A close look at Thomson’s date book during his five-month visit to New York in 1932–33 shows how and where he found the resources to stage the opera—in two overlapping groups that could be called the Harvard modernists and high-bohemian society. Their members made modernism chic; their cachet and cash made the opera’s production possible. Together with the Museum of Modern Art and the School of American Ballet, Four Saints brought modernism into the settings of the old guard: the opera, the museum, and the ballet. “It shows how strong a need there was,” Philip Johnson said, “and how strong a wave … coming along and breaking at the same point on the beach.”4
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Jere Abbott met Virgil Thomson at the French Line Pier. After cabbing across town, they ascended five flights to Philip Johnson’s duplex apartment. He had torn out walls and replaced them with translucent glass and floor-to-ceiling curtains on slender steel rails. Johnson described it to House & Garden as “designing in planes.” The “living room” consisted of an austere white-walled chamber whose only ornament was a rubber plant. Tan raw silk covered windows overlooking the East River and pale ecru linoleum the floor. Mies van der Rohe’s and Lilly Reich’s designs dominated the room: chromium-and-pigskin chairs, a bookcase that was more beautiful than functional, and a rosewood table set with porcelain dinnerware by Porzellan of Berlin. A narrow Werkstätte der Stadt lamp with a partially sheathed bulb illuminated the ensemble. This apartment, the first of Thomson’s several residences during his stay, offered the most programmatically Bauhaus interior in America at that time. When Johnson told a reporter that it was “a show apartment to counteract the terrible wave of modernistic apartments we now have,”5 he meant to distance his design from the Art Deco style that was more often associated with modernity in America.
After a month, Johnson asked Thomson to leave. The apartment was not the sort of space that could easily accommodate an extra, and his manservant had threatened to quit if Thomson did not depart soon. “He could charm the birds off the trees,” Johnson recalled. “Unless he didn’t like you, and then the viper’s tongue came out. It was like living with Oscar Wilde.” Thomson moved on to guest rooms at Kirk and Constance Askew’s on East Sixty-first Street, Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s in Middletown, Connecticut, and Chick and Helen Austin’s in Hartford. Everywhere he saw the signs of his Harvard friends’ success. Thomson ascribed his friends’ rapid success to the newly advanced collecting habits of the rich, which connected them with curators and dealers in what Thomson called “the racket of art.” The economics were basic, he explained; it took “a combine of collectors, dealers, and curators to establish a theory that historical values, artistic values, and commercial values are identical.” (On hearing this summary, Lincoln Kirstein observed, “That is the Marxist view, and it was also accurate.”) The Crash tightened the umbilical cord between wealthy collectors and the Harvard modernists and led to one of Thomson’s pet theories: “You must remember the Depression scared hell out of the powerful rich. The shake-up of the rich in 1929 destroyed their confidence in their ability to run the art and literature world. We could do all sorts of things in places they thought they were running. They let their curators take over for a minute. For five to ten years the intellectuals were allowed to run things.” What did they do?
Conger Goodyear, the Museum of Modern Art’s president, described Alfred Barr in 1932 as “wearing out at the edges under the strain of three years of high-pressure work.”6 The physical reality was even more disturbing. When Paul Sachs lunched with him in early 1932, he observed that Barr’s lips seemed thinner and his cheeks more sunken than usual and that his pallor suggested insomnia. Sachs expressed his concern and then cautioned, “Please do not think that these are the vaporings of an old fool. I say these things as an older and devoted friend, and because I have great faith in you.” Barr had not slept soundly for a year and a half without medication, his digestion was poor, his eyes stung, he ground his teeth. When Sachs lunched with him again a few months later, he thought Barr was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and sent him to a “nerve specialist.” The doctor prescribed a year’s rest far away from the Museum of Modern Art.
Barr’s deterioration dated back to the museum’s opening on November 7, 1929. A smartly dressed crowd congregated in the lobby of the Heckscher Building at Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue, then went up twelve floors to the exhibition of Post-Impressionist classics, “Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and van Gogh.” It was the first show in the world’s first museum devoted exclusively to modern art. The Beaux Arts urge to decorate had given way to the modernist credo of spare white walls and perfectly proportioned volumes. For $12,000, the new museum had freshly plastered its ceilings and installed a bright and sophisticated lighting system and a few taupe velour couches. One historian described the rooms—with their thick walls, patterned ceilings, chamfered corners, thin marbleite base, naked picture rail, and neutral friar’s cloth—as only “half-modern.”7
The crowd of several thousand included a few artists and more collectors. Some of them had been severely hurt by the stock market crash just nine days before, but no one looked like it. Many leafed through the museum’s first catalog, which Frank Crowninshield had rushed through priority printing at Condé Nast, bound with striking yellow boards and printed in sans-serif type. Jere Abbott conducted a personal gallery tour for Sir Joseph Duveen and was astonished to find Duveen’s eye so habituated to art of the past that he could not distinguish a van Gogh from a Gauguin. A reporter from The New Yorker overheard one guest exclaiming that van Gogh’s Lady from Aries was the spitting image of Mary Baker Eddy and another proclaiming his confusion that Gauguin’s paintings depicted “all colored people.”8
Exhibiting four Post-Impressionist masters was hardly a daring step in 1929; already by the mid-1920s, their paintings had become investments promoted by such blue-chip galleries as Knoedler and Wildenstein. (The ultramoderns of the moment, as identified by Barr in 1929, were Joan Miró, Pierre Roy, Otto Dix, and Jean Lurçat.) The Post-Impressionist canvases that had proved so shocking sixteen years earlier at the Armory Show now looked reassuringly traditional. “It truly makes us rub our eyes now that we have gone such a journey to see that we have arrived at the destination,” wrote Henry McBride. “What was the insidious danger of it twenty years ago, or even ten years ago? Nothing more than that, that it was alive.”9
Another journalist directed his attention to the dynamics of the assembled crowd: “For the first time in the history of the town society and art met and kissed each other without a single false move or gasp of surprise. It was all done so charmingly, so naturally and with such distinction that for once the people seemed on a par with the ornaments on the walls.”10
Of course, the charm depended on a finely balanced combination of taste, social chic, and money. Three wealthy art collectors—Abigail Rockefeller, Lizzie Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan—had come up with the idea for a modern art museum in early 1929, and over the next nine months they gathered a team of art advisers (Paul Sachs, Alfred Barr, Jere Abbott, Conger Goodyear) and members of stylish society (Frank Crowninshield, Mrs. W. Murray Crane). Such a combination provided a multitude of resources, and it allowed the fledgling institution to weather the Depression and gradually change New York’s taste for modern art.
Barr and his paid staff of three ran the enterprise from a single, poorly ventilated office, fifteen feet square and equipped with two typewriters and five telephones. Before the museum opened, Barr had prophesied, “At the end of two years, we should be able to discover whether New York really wants a Modern Museum, which may easily become the greatest of its kind in the world.”11 During those initial years, the museum went a long way toward fulfilling its promise. One of America’s most controversial museums, it was also its sixth best attended. With Lizzie Bliss’s death and the conditional bequest of her art collection in 1931, a substantial foundation was established for the institution’s collecting future. Bliss’s bequest included paintings by Cézanne, Matisse, Gauguin, Degas, Picasso, and Seurat. The institution had managed to successfully balance the solid financial base of the old guard (the trustees) with the adventurous ideas of young turks (embodied in the Junior Advisory Committee, which included Lincoln Kirstein, Philip Johnson, and Edward Warburg).
In December 1931, the museum’s president told the press that “the experimental period of the Museum will come to an end with the present season.” With this remark he announced the museum’s move into new and larger quarters at 11 West Fifty-third Street, the site of the refurbished Rockefeller town house. The final two shows of the season—“Murals by American Painters and Photographers” and “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition”—revived the spirit of Barr’s 1929 manifesto: to extend the museum’s purview to all media of modern art.
The extraordinary achievement of those first years owed a great deal to the energies of what one called “a really evangelical team.”12 Barr’s wife, Margaret, recalled the tone of the early days’ informal meetings: “You felt an unbelievable vibration. It sort of centered around Alfred but, nevertheless, everybody was adding their contributions, reminding one another of things and saying ‘we could do this,’ ‘we could do that.’ It was absolutely electric.”13
Alfred Barr encouraged a climate of rigor and adventure, and, by example, inspired his colleagues. At the time of Barr’s death, Philip Johnson recalled his friend’s most important characteristic: “his narrowly channeled torrential passion; at times a divine rage, at times a quiet concentration on his goal that was as inspiring and, yes, as frightening as his rages. Calvin had a true son.”14 Barr’s zealotry was reflected everywhere in the museum, from the signs on the bathrooms and the catalog typography to the lapidary wall labels and modern furniture in the galleries. Barr simultaneously curated exhibitions, wrote catalogs, delivered lectures, traveled to Europe to secure loans, conferred with trustees, and inspired a young cadre of curators. Yet in his quest to create the world’s greatest modern museum, he slowly fell apart.
A graphologist’s report on his handwriting told the story in a nutshell: “The new always beckons, he will always follow the same pattern: seduced by yearning toward an unreachable, always receding fata morgana.” Barr’s high school yearbook described him at sixteen as “a sincere nut of the silent but deadly type.”15 At thirty, Barr had funneled that sincere nuttiness into the creation of a seminally important modern institution.
The museum’s final exhibition in the Heckscher Building, “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition,” opened on February 9, 1932. Philip Johnson, its chief organizer, was undergoing an operation, but his cocurator, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, led guests through a miniature city of white mechanomorphic buildings that stretched through five galleries. Proceeding from the smaller galleries just off the elevator, visitors passed a series of maquettes—an aluminum apartment building, a glass-and-plywood school, a papier-mâché housing development—on low platforms. The meticulously crafted models accompanied architectural elevations comprehensible only to experts (although Hitchcock never lacked explanatory words) and a frieze of black-and-white photographs, uniformly enlarged to three feet high. In the main gallery were models for houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and J. J. P. Oud, and featured at the center were projects designed by Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, the masters most revered by Hitchcock and Johnson respectively. “Mies was too cold and simple for Hitchcock,” recalled Johnson, “and Corbusier was too much of a painter for me.”
The exhibition encompassed the work of forty-six architects from fifteen countries, ranging from a gas station and a drugstore to factories and department stores. On this polyglot display of industrial-style metal spandrels and horizontal ribbon windows, pipe-rail parapets and glass screen walls, the two curators had imposed a modernist vision for building in the twentieth century. As Alfred Barr asserted in his introduction to the exhibition catalog, “The confusion of the past 40 years, or rather of the past century, may shortly come to an end.”16
Supplanting a century of architectural disarray with a unified modernist polemic required both scholarship and propaganda. The process had begun in the summer of 1930, when the exhibition’s two curators had motored through Europe.
In the months following his European tour with Johnson, Hitchcock wrote the text for The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 and the catalog for “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition.” These two books not only placed modern architecture within a historical context but made it seem the inevitable outcome of history. (Their proportions—two parts words to one part pictures—characterized modern architectural discourse, which from the outset consisted largely of theoretical discussion.) Hitchcock brought to the study of architecture an integrated approach and comprehensive sweep; his embrace of architectural idiosyncrasy and variety made the text all the more persuasive. The ideas were all Hitchcock’s, Johnson recalled, but transforming the scholar’s architectural logorrhea into readable prose depended on Johnson’s discipline. “He didn’t mind working, and I put him down at the table with some pencils. Two hours later there was some stuff,” Johnson said. Without appearing to raise his voice or descend to polemical bravado, Hitchcock fashioned the intellectual backbone of a modern architectural canon.
Alfred Barr was an omniscient background figure. Separated by only a few floors in the same apartment building, he and Johnson constantly talked about modern art and architecture. “We were monomaniacs,” Johnson recalled. “He was a Calvinist and I was too, so between us we were all for converting the world. A very dangerous American characteristic.” Johnson wrote manifestolike articles that attacked those architects—such as Joseph Urban and Norman Bel Geddes—whose popularizing brand of modern architecture did not fit within the narrow confines of his Bauhaus-derived doctrine. He considered them moderne rather than modern.
Describing himself as “the drummer and screamer-arounder,”17 Johnson executed a splashy propagandistic stunt in the spring of 1931 that was perfectly in keeping with the tone and spirit of the avant-garde. When the projects of eight young modern architects were rejected by the Architectural League of New York’s fusty but powerful show, Johnson organized the splinter group into a “secessionist” American Union for New Architecture. The attempt did not survive beyond its first meeting, but out of it grew an alternative show of “Rejected Architects.” Their maquettes and plans were displayed in a West Side storefront lent by Julien Levy’s father, and at Barr’s suggestion Johnson hired a man to parade up Lexington Avenue in front of the league’s exhibition at the Grand Central Palace wearing sandwich boards. “SEE REALLY MODERN ARCHITECTURE REJECTED BY THE LEAGUE AT 907 SEVENTH AVENUE,” read the signs, prompting the league to have the sandwich man arrested. At this point reporters and critics jumped to the defense of embattled freedom of expression, and Johnson recalled, “We had a high old time, being mean to the establishment.”18
“Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” and the simultaneous publication in 1932 of the catalog and The International Style provided the climax of the campaign. Hitchcock and Johnson’s achievement was curatorial, scholarly, and above all polemical.19
Despite these feats and stunts, there was no groundswell of enthusiasm for the International Style. The exhibition attracted a relatively disappointing 33,000 visitors to the Museum of Modern Art before it began a two-year-long tour whose fourteen venues included the Wadsworth Atheneum as well as such department stores as Bullocks-Wilshire and Sears, Roebuck. But the exhibition and the publication of the books eventually became watershed events in the history of modern architecture in America. The transformation of the term—from “modern movement” to “modern architecture” to “modern style” to “international style”—also suggests how the leftist ideological roots of modern architecture were undercut and replaced by three formalist principles: (1) emphasis on volume enclosed by thin planes as opposed to static, heavy masses; (2) regularity of design as opposed to axial symmetry; (3) attention to elegance of materials and proportion as opposed to extrinsic ornament. This delicate balancing act—denuding aesthetics of their political foundations—allowed the upper class that supported the Museum of Modern Art to sanction modernist architecture without allying themselves to leftist politics.
Treating The International Style as a recipe book for building may have been a debasement of its elegant argument, but the authors certainly presented enticements to the docile, the doctrinaire, and the dutiful. They offered a manifesto reduced to three principles; proffered a specific list of dos (flat roofs, thin noncorroding metal window frames, sans-serif lettering) and don’ts (excess color, steel gargoyles, contrasting mortar, heavy mullions). They established a hierarchy of materials (moving up from stucco to glass brick to marble) and extended the absurdly formalistic promise that “Anyone who follows the rules … can produce buildings which are at least aesthetically sound.”20
Shortly before Virgil Thomson’s arrival in New York, the Julien Levy Gallery celebrated its first birthday. Its twenty-six-year-old, nattily dressed director bore the early marks of success. No matter that he had barely scraped by—launching a modern gallery during the Depression was itself a feat. The slight curve of his gallery’s white plaster wall looked thoroughly modern, the friends at his openings embodied high-bohemian style, and—most important—the artworks that he exhibited were more advanced and eclectic than anything that could be seen in other galleries in New York. He not only showed photography (his first love) but also showcased the recent trends in modern painting after Cubism. “I did it,” he said to himself on the opening of his first show, with a mixture of self-congratulation and awed surprise. After his abrupt departure from Harvard in 1927 and his impromptu trip to Paris, no one—least of all Julien Levy—had expected him to focus long enough to run a gallery.
When Levy had returned to America in the fall of 1927, he had established connections with the Paris art and literary world through Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Mina Loy. His own country and especially his own family seemed backward and lackluster by comparison as he settled into the all-too-real life of marriage and soon fathered two sons. What niche would allow him to be stylish, carefree, and creative—and sufficiently stable to support his family?
Julien worked in his father’s booming construction business for a year, and in 1930 he started working at Weyhe’s Upper East Side bookstore-gallery, where he sold books on the fine arts, along with a few prints and drawings. The position paid little, but it provided Levy an apprenticeship in running a gallery. Spurred by Erhard Weyhe’s remark that, for a rich man’s son, Julien was remarkably useful, the lowly assistant initiated an ambitious exhibition of Eugène Atget’s photographs. At the same time he began to dream of owning his own gallery, which he saw as an extension of his “ingrained exhibitionism, for I am an exhibitionist, if only of other people’s work.”
Invoking Alfred Stieglitz’s An American Place, Levy planned to call it “The Place of Levy.” Stieglitz was both Levy’s adopted mentor and the pioneering gallerist of American photography, and the eager young man spent hours listening to the loquacious figure in a black cape. “Stieglitz would wander around his gallery like a Western prophet or an Eastern guru,” Levy recalled. On his twenty-fifth birthday, in 1931, Levy inherited the twenty-five thousand dollars his mother had left him in trust, and he dreamed of the pictures and objects he would buy to stock his planned “Art Shoppe.” That summer he lived in Paris and made the arrangements for the first season of his gallery. He returned that fall with “almost an excess of material.”21
Edgar Levy provided his son with a space in a building at 602 Park Avenue, just off Fifty-seventh Street. Julien devised an ingenious gallery design with one smoothly curving wall to set each work apart, encouraging the flow of traffic and, in Levy’s mind, looking modern without slavishly evoking Bauhaus austerity. He thought that covering the walls with monk’s cloth was distasteful, rejected the red velvet walls of blue-chip galleries such as Knoedler, and regarded as impractical Stieglitz’s practice of replastering and repainting after each exhibition. Instead he ran two strips of molding two feet apart across the plaster walls, grooved so that photographs could float, sandwiched between two layers of glass.
The gallery’s opening show of American photography was a success, or so he claimed. It was widely admired for its stylish installation, but nothing was sold. “Art has become here such a matter of fad,” Levy wrote at the end of 1931, “that there soon must be a complete revulsion and the public will loathe the sight of any picture.”22 Julien quickly became adept at judging the evolving fashions of modern art, and his gallery became not just a place for art commerce but a site for screenings and parties.
Rotating his exhibitions every three weeks, Levy spotlit artistic trends faster than any of his few competitors.23 After his death, Virgil Thomson observed that he had achieved his distinction early “by being early, which is the only way it can be achieved.”24 From the outset Levy possessed the best ear, the fleetest transatlantic organization, and the most eclectic sensibility of New York’s modern galleries. Assessing the gallery’s first three years, Joella Levy observed, “I have always insisted that Julien’s great success came from his having all the artists across the pond. Because we could hang as we wanted, print what we wanted, all at top speed.”
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (COMPLETE EXHIBITION SCHEDULE, 1929-1932)
Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and van Gogh (1929, opening exhibition)
Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans (1929)
Painting in Paris from American Collections (1930)
Weber, Klee, Lehmbruck, Maillol (1930)
Forty-six Painters and Sculptors Under Thirty-Five Years of Age (1930)
Charles Burchfield: Early Watercolors, 1916–1918 (1930)
Homer, Ryder, and Eakins (1930)
Corot, Daumier (1930)
Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans (1930)
Toulouse-Lautrec, Redon (1931)
Memorial Exhibition: The Collection of Miss Lizzie P. Bliss (1931)
German Painting and Sculpture (1931)
Henri Matisse (1931)
Diego Rivera (1931)
Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (1932)
Murals by American Painters and Photographers (1932)
Persian Fresco Painting—Facsimiles of Seventh Century Frescoes in Isfahan (1932)
A Brief Survey of Modern Painting (1932)
American Painting and Sculpture, 1862–1932 (1932)
INTERNATIONAL STYLE ARCHITECTURE: THE BIG NINE ACCORDING TO JOHNSON AND HITCHCOCK
Walter Gropius
Mies van der Rohe
Le Corbusier
Frank Lloyd Wright
Richard Neutra
Bowman Brothers
J. J. P. Oud
Raymond Hood
Howe and Lescaze
THE JULIEN LEVY GALLERY
* = American solo premiere
Surrealist Exhibition (1932)
Walker Evans (1932)*
George Platt Lynes (1932)*
Man Ray (1932)
Alexander Calder (1932)
Berenice Abbott (1932)
Max Ernst (1932)
Eugene Berman (1932)*
Joseph Cornell (1932)*
Lee Miller (1933)*
Mina Loy (1933)*
Pavel Tchelitchew (1933)*
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1933)*
Serge Lifar Russian Ballet collection (1933)
Salvador Dalí (1933)*
Levy showed young, now-classic photographers including Berenice Abbott, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Lee Miller, George Platt Lynes, and Man Ray, as well as such older classic photographers as Nadar and Eugène Atget. (One of the only buyers was Kirk Askew, who bought a Nadar portrait of George Sand.) But he by no means stuck to photography alone. The Julien Levy Gallery is most famously linked to Surrealism—and the cover of his autobiography billed him as “The Man Who Organized the First Surrealist Exhibition in America.” After that 1931 inauguration, he showcased such Surrealists as Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí.
Levy’s gallery provided America’s headquarters for a now-forgotten group of artists known as the neo-Romantics: Pavel Tchelitchew, Eugene and Leonid Berman, Christian Bérard, Kristians Tonny. Representing a figurative alternative to abstraction, the neo-Romantics are frequently characterized as modernist kitsch art, and Tchelitchew and Bérard may be best remembered for their stage design. Their paintings were avidly collected by the Harvard modernists in the early 1930s.25 Julien Levy also showcased work that fit no school, such as wire sculptures and mobiles by Alexander Calder, figurative paintings by Mina Loy, photographic portraits by novelist Max Ewing, and collages and objects by Joseph Cornell. One might assume that Levy’s stable of now-classic modern artists led to commercial success. In fact, his finances were precarious. Nor was it the famous artists who kept the gallery afloat. Sales of work by Eugene Berman and Massimo Campigli provided the gallery’s bread and butter. Levy sustained heavy losses on his first two exhibitions of Dalí, lost money on Alberto Giacometti, broke even on Tchelitchew.
Levy began to show avant-garde films at the beginning of 1932, including Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique, accompanied by George Antheil’s player piano roll, and Man Ray’s L’Étoile de Mer, accompanied by John McAndrew at the piano. The following year, the gallery inaugurated an ongoing Film Society, which in 1935 melded into the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent department of film. “Julien was always ahead of his time,” observed Maurice Grosser, “and he had a movie camera before anyone else did.”26
His mother-in-law, the poet and painter Mina Loy, provided access to that other side of the “pond,” Paris, and served as the gallery’s Parisian eyes and ears. Julien decided which artists he would show, but Loy often selected the individual works and negotiated the deals.
Julien’s Harvard friends—primarily Chick Austin, Alfred Barr, and Lincoln Kirstein—provided essential connections to the museum world.27 On Saturday mornings in the early 1930s, Edward Warburg recalled, they often toured the galleries along Fifty-seventh Street, embarking from Alfred Barr’s apartment and ending the day at Levy’s gallery. Joella’s beauty, her industrious efficiency, and her Continental manner made her an alluring presence at the gallery, and more than one visitor fell for her charms.28
Like so many successful art dealers, Levy became a jack-of-all-trades. He designed graphically striking invitations and sometimes even wrote his own reviews, each tailored to the style of the art critic receiving it. He claimed to have pioneered the cocktail opening, democratizing Knoedler’s practice of champagne in the back room for special customers and providing a magnet for conviviality. Most important, he created a milieu in which anything could happen. Of one opening, Henry McBride wrote, “The atmosphere was precisely that of the Boeuf sur le Toit back in the days when Paris used to be good.”29
Of all the Harvard modernists, Lincoln Kirstein in 1932 most resembled the protagonist of a picaresque novel. His orbit ranged from Harlem speakeasies to Oyster Bay estates, and from painter Robert Chanler’s raucous bohemian parties on Nineteenth Street to the Brooklyn sailor bars along Sand Street. While each of the other Harvard modernists had found his niche, Kirstein zigzagged. As the title of a novel he wrote but never published suggests, he saw his vocational struggle as “A Choice of Weapons.” Which would he choose?
Kirstein regarded Harvard as his launching pad and passport, his “luxurious playpen or laboratory,” and his graduation in 1930 carried with it the weight of expectation. He remained in Cambridge until 1931 to run the twin enterprises of his undergraduate years: The Hound & Horn and the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. By the spring of 1931, he had curtailed his involvement with the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. As he plunged into the new, he struggled to rub out the patrician features of his past. “I killed all that,” he said of his Boston and Cambridge upbringing. “I had to kill all that.”
Kirstein moved to New York in 1931, where he continued editing The Hound & Horn from a pair of closet-sized offices at 10 East Forty-third Street, next door to Muriel Draper’s home. But the leadership of the magazine was, he noted, increasingly “taken over by Southern Agrarians under the captaincy of [Allen] Tate, and finally by a mixture of Anglican Marxists(!), Trotskyites, and ‘humanists.’ ” The mechanics of getting each issue out were turned over to a secretary.
Louis Kirstein continued to tolerate his son’s mercurial shifts, expensive and odd tastes, and ambitious ideas about starting something new. All he demanded of his son in return was that he address the inevitable paternal question, “What leads you to suppose that you can really do it?” Following the obligatory and not entirely pleasant discussion, the elder Kirstein agreed to provide hands-off support for his son’s invariably costly activities. The Hound & Horn’s production expenses alone set him back about eight thousand dollars per year.30 He lectured his son “that there were two kinds of energy: the energy to establish something and the energy to maintain it.” He was all too aware that his son possessed primarily the former.
In New York, Kirstein shared a Greenwich Village apartment with an ex-cowboy. He dressed in Navy surplus sailor uniforms, took up boxing at the West Side YMCA (then, as now, a homoerotic milieu), and fraternized with firemen and sailors. These activities made up the strenuous program he called his “postgraduate education.” His new friends embodied the grittily plebeian life that Kirstein regarded as more “real” than that of Harvard Yard and were certainly more physically attractive. “I was the worst physical snob in the world,” he recalled.
In addition to flirting with burly men and New York lowlife, Kirstein was drawn into socialist politics through his infatuation with a sharecropper organizer. The dominant member on the Junior Advisory Council of the Museum of Modern Art, he initiated an exhibition, “Murals by American Painters and Photographers,” that resulted in the museum’s first major political controversy. One of the painted murals, by Hugo Gellert, depicted John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, and Al Capone behind a wall of money bags, the gangster wielding a machine gun. The trustees regarded it as “Commie stuff” but did not stop it from being exhibited.
Kirstein also served for a few weeks as Walker Evans’s assistant, photographing New England architecture. Despite the chaos of his zigzagging, Kirstein’s ultimate direction soon came into focus. “Whatever it was that lurked as an imaginative need,” he wrote at the end of his life, “ ‘ballet’ stuck in my elementary judgment as a luminous magnet.”
In the spring of 1932, Kirstein found himself looking into a mirror that stretched the length of former Ballets Russes choreographer Michel Fokine’s drawing room. His hand on the barre, struggling to learn ballet’s five classic positions, he saw in his reflection an awkward and unlikely dancer. His physical presence was gawky and stiff, his head large, his ears protruding. As his friend Eddie Warburg observed, “Lincoln was like a great dane with a tea table in the room.”31 But none of this really mattered. “He had no hopes of being a dancer,” recalled Paul Draper Jr., Kirstein’s fellow class member. “He did it long enough to figure out how tough a dancer must be, how mad you have to be to be a dancer.”32
In Fokine’s drawing room, he hoped to absorb dance by means that were corporal, historical, and mystical. He stayed on after class to interview Fokine, scribbling notes about his early years with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. The reason for the interview and his presence on the barre was that he was writing a biography of Fokine, which was published in London two years later. “By birth, training, or merit I could never belong,” Kirstein wrote of the ballet world, “but by association with Fokine, something might rub off on me.”33
The two women most instrumental in guiding Kirstein toward ballet were Muriel Draper and Romola Nijinsky. Pointing young homosexual men toward their arena of greatest possibility was Muriel’s métier, while Romola’s strength was extracting money from balletomanes in the name of her schizophrenic dancer husband, Vaslav.
“I owed her much of whatever solid intellectual or moral development I may have made,” Kirstein wrote of Muriel Draper, “and through her met the twin strata of society about which I was most inquisitive.” She encouraged him to take risks, but she was also blunt. When he told her that he wanted to be a dancer, the pale, gold-turbaned woman with electric blue eyes responded that he was too tall, too old, and too rich. His talents, she pronounced, should be directed toward organization and management. Perhaps Draper saw in Kirstein someone who could fill the vacuum left by Diaghilev’s death.
In the midst of Kirstein’s chaotic sallies into high life and low life, love life and politics, Draper provided consistency. They communicated nearly every day. Although she was twenty-one years older and regarded as a menace by Kirstein’s parents, Lincoln even became romantically interested in her. The romance never flourished, but her role in his development proved seminal: “She became the judge and oracle of most of my activity from the time I left Boston and Cambridge until I began to work with the ballet.”
Romola Nijinsky entered Kirstein’s life in 1931 in the resplendent drawing room of Mrs. William Vanderbilt, a patron of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Speaking four languages, immaculately and expensively dressed, Madame Nijinsky was both charming and steel-willed. Quickly sizing up Kirstein’s promising financial position and his fascination with her husband, she soon swept him along in her schemes. “She was one of the sanest people I have ever known,” Kirstein observed near the end of his life. “She lived off nothing and could manipulate anyone.”
Romola Nijinsky was literally stateless (her passport had been issued by the League of Nations), she slid from euphoria to suicidal feelings, and her desperate schemes for survival constantly shifted as she was evicted from one luxurious hotel after another. She proposed to write a biography of her husband. No matter that Nijinsky’s profound schizophrenia rendered him uninterviewable, no matter that Romola could not write—she pushed on. To fill in the lacunae in Nijinsky’s life, she engaged in seances with an elderly seer called “Ma” Garrett, and to ghostwrite the book she enlisted Kirstein.
Although she sometimes terrified and infuriated him, Kirstein freely suffered her hysterical ups and downs over the next year. His new connection to Nijinsky, combined with his coincidental presence at Diaghilev’s funeral three years earlier, seemed a providential link. He later wrote, “I felt endowed or, well, chosen.” Romola introduced Kirstein to the manipulative ploys one needed to run a ballet company, and she introduced him to potential patrons. But her contribution to Kirstein’s development had little to do with concrete guidance and everything to do with a mystical feeling of connection to a grand tradition: “She unlocked for me the closets, corridors, and subcellars of an edifice in which I would spend the rest of my life.”
At eight-fifteen on a Thursday evening in mid-April 1932, Chick Austin stepped before a black velvet curtain, his abbreviated white jacket framed by a bright yellow proscenium arch, his figure illuminated by soft footlights. “I am the Great Osram,” he majestically announced. Most of the audience seated in the barrel-vaulted tapestry gallery of the Wadsworth Atheneum were under ten years old. Accompanied by an upright piano, “Osram” snatched dozens of bright chiffon handkerchiefs and billiard balls from the air and pulled rabbits from hats and canaries from saucepans. Against a flamboyant backdrop, “Osram, The Man of Multiple Mysteries” was an ideal persona for Austin. “An important key to him is sleight of hand and concealment of mechanism,” observed Austin’s son. “You can only understand him in terms of theater.” He had by then mastered many magic tricks, but his most implausible trick was the transformation of Hartford from the “Insurance City” into the “New Athens.”34
By the time Virgil Thomson came to Hartford in December 1932, Austin’s transformation of the Wadsworth Atheneum was nearly complete; under his guidance the museum had metamorphosed into an internationally renowned oasis of modernism. Only Alfred Barr’s achievement at the Museum of Modern Art could compare. Yet their style could not have been more different.
The methodical, scholarly Barr was Paul Sachs’s ideal. Chick Austin, by contrast, followed his instincts and tacked to the prevailing winds. But, as Barr later wrote Austin, “You did everything sooner and more brilliantly than any of us.”35 One of Austin’s rare pieces of expressive writing, a description of the impresario of the Ballets Russes, reflects his own aspirations:
With erudition and an unparalleled taste, he knit together the arts of painting, music, literature, acting, and choreography into a brilliant pattern, a triumphal procession, and set against it the eternal beauty of youth. Forever fortunate are those who were privileged to see the creations of Diaghilev. To them the joyful pangs of memory will be a constant proof that the twentieth century has known splendor devoid of vulgarity and taste kept inviolate from commercial degradation.36
In many respects Austin flouted the Harvard model of the museum professional. His only identifiable professional ability was his extraordinary connoisseurship. (“Chick’s eye” became a legend among the museum world when he recognized Bernardo Strozzi’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria, before it had been fully uncrated, as a replica rather than the original he had seen once eight years earlier.) His exhibition catalog essays are short and few, and he often used slangy vernacular language to describe his profession (e.g., he worked in “the art racket,” beautiful paintings were “swell numbers”). “He was anti-intellectual by policy,” Kirstein wrote, and Austin claimed, with slight exaggeration, that he read only The Saturday Evening Post. He could barely manage his own finances, much less those of an institution, and he showed little interest in becoming the custodian of other people’s taste. The purpose of a museum, Austin joked, was “to entertain its director.” (Virgil Thomson added: “And come to think of it, if it does not do that, God help us all!”)
His formidable strengths as a museum director were the flip side of his professional shortcomings. Kirk Askew observed, “Psychologically Austin was a creative man manqué.” He ran his museum like an artist or a poet, making decisions intuitively, ruling his small empire by enthusiasm and odd forays into new territories. Blurring the line between work and play, he incited his colleagues to follow suit—as Julien Levy put it, he “seduced them into unexpected achievement.” Friends described him as “always at the ready,” leaning slightly forward, talking rapidly, taking a drag on the Pall Mall cigarette that perpetually hung from his lower lip, his hand grazing the speaker’s elbow. Austin’s mannerisms provided the visible barometer of his enthusiasm. “Ecstasy did not embarrass him as it does so many Americans,” Kirk Askew observed. His quivering receptivity was not mindless cheerleading; he grounded his judgments in the thousands of artworks he had witnessed since childhood. His friends asserted that Austin “got it” faster than anybody else in his generation.37 Henry-Russell Hitchcock observed that Austin possessed “the happy talent of realization—sometimes almost impromptu realization—of ideas which others could cope with only more ploddingly and at a further remove from actuality.”
Austin was not only a magician and a museum director but a hands-on creative practitioner. He ran a summer theater, designing its sets and acting lead roles; he danced (ballet) in the privacy of his office; he designed his own home and the interior of his museum; New York’s Brummer Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art exhibited his paintings. His proficiency in these art forms ranged from inventiveness to doggedness, but the seriousness of his amateurism and the intensity of his participatory play earned him Virgil Thomson’s praise as “a whole cultural movement in one man.”
Fostering the latest waves of modernism offered one challenge and convincing his trustees to support him another. He assessed just how much the trustees could take, and then, as Lincoln Kirstein observed, “he administered discreet overdoses of piquant surprise.” His most important potential ally was Charles Goodwin, who for twenty-eight years served not only as the museum’s president but also as its treasurer. Through Chick’s marriage to Helen Goodwin, he became “Uncle Charlie.” Tall, handsome, and powerful, Goodwin had once run for governor of Connecticut on the Republican ticket, and his conservative New England style and complete absence of interest in art gave him and Austin little in common. The Goodwin family had once owned Hartford’s fashionable Scarborough Street, where Chick and Helen Austin lived.
The Austins’ house on Scarborough Street exemplified its owner: wacky in everything from the spontaneity of its conception to the extravagant objects that filled it. Impressed by the Villa Ferretti, a Palladian-style villa he photographed on his honeymoon in 1929, Austin asked Leigh H. French Jr. to copy the 1596 structure in wood on the site of a garden. Eighty feet long but only eighteen feet deep, the house resembled a stage set. Other Goodwins on the block skeptically called it “the pasteboard palace.” With its theatrical interior, opulent first floor, and Bauhaus-inspired second floor, it embodied Austin’s passion for the grand past and the austere present. As he joked to a friend, “The house is just like me—all façade.”38
Carefully balancing a program of traditional and modern art at the museum, Chick managed to satisfy Uncle Charlie and the trustees while freeing himself to engage his modernist passions. “These pictures are chic,” he said. “It is much more satisfying esthetically to be amused, to be frightened even, than to be bored.”39 When Thomson came to Hartford on December 19, Austin was facing the specter of boredom. The day before he had celebrated his thirty-second birthday; the anniversary had elicited an annual stocktaking: Now that he had transformed the museum, what battles remained to be fought?
Virgil Thomson performed sections of Four Saints in Three Acts for as many Friends and Enemies of Modern Music as could be squeezed into Chick and Helen Austin’s shallow living room. Austin announced the opera with characteristic enthusiasm, claiming that it had brought Virgil Thomson fame in Europe. In fact, Chick had never heard a note of it and even botched its name on the invitation for the evening, which referred to the opera as “Two or Three Saints’ with lyrics by Gertrude Stein.”40 Ever since Henry-Russell Hitchcock had first spoken to him about Four Saints, Austin had wanted to produce it on a small scale, using a small orchestra from the Hartford School of Music, local choral groups, and his own sets.
During Thomson’s visit to Hartford, Austin excitedly laid out a new and grander plan: he would stage the opera at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and the Friends and Enemies of Modern Music would sponsor it. This grand plan was, like Austin himself, “all façade.” As John Houseman bluntly put it, “Certainly any contract Chick made was worthless, he never had any money.” Nor did the Friends and Enemies have any experience producing on a grander scale than living-room musicales.
Formed in 1928, the society “has believed that contemporary music deserved a hearing and it has frankly recognized the valuable stimulating effect of controversy,” according to its own literature. To these ends it presented performances of works by Stravinsky, Satie, Milhaud, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Antheil, and Ives. The Friends and Enemies met sporadically—a couple of times in 1929 and 1930, not at all in 1931, only once in 1932. But, as it later announced in the opera program, the society wanted to “offer to friends and enemies a new field of controversy.”41 By 1932, Chick Austin was the driving force of the Friends and Enemies, assisted by his wife as the organization’s treasurer. Its sponsorship allowed Austin to move forward without being so directly under the thumb of the trustees. “Chick went ahead with the opera plan in the same way that he accomplished other things, by finding out whether anyone would try to stop him,” Thomson wrote. “Then once inside a project he would rely entirely on instinct and improvisation.”
Austin’s enthusiasm reflected not only his appreciation for the opera but its strategic utility in enhancing his grand scheme for the new wing at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Chick even planned to make his opera debut in the third act, causing pigeons to appear and disappear and transforming a small tree into a bouquet of red feathers.
Constructing the new wing offered Austin the biggest challenge of his Hartford career. Money posed no problem; museum benefactor Samuel P. Avery Jr. had donated $225,000 for a new wing in 1918, and the combination of accumulating interest and the declining costs of Depression-era labor now made construction economically feasible. The problem was aesthetic. The trustees selected a Beaux-Arts-trained architect, Benjamin Wistar Morris, and his son-in-law partner, Robert B. O’Connor, to design a wing that would harmonize with the Morgan Memorial that Morris had designed in 1907. But Austin wanted to build the first International Style museum building in the world. While Morris and O’Connor were not entirely deaf to Austin’s ideas, they provided a conservative—and cautionary—voice: “It can never be forgotten that a Museum sets a definite standard of taste in its community.… For the purely transitory, however alluring it may be at the moment, can only hinder in the long run that essential element among the Museum’s functions, the development of good taste.”42
Austin persisted with his campaign. Although Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock played no direct role in designing the Avery Wing, they influenced him from the sidelines. Hitchcock spoke with Austin constantly throughout the period of design, and Johnson’s Miesian New York apartment offered inspiration. Equally important, their “Modern Architecture” exhibition moved from the Museum of Modern Art to the Wadsworth Atheneum at just the moment when the trustees approved the building plans. Since the Avery Wing’s exterior was designed to complement the original museum buildings, the architects used Tennessee marble and bronze. Austin fought to make the interior more up-to-date.
Around the time Virgil Thomson performed his opera at the Austins’ house, Chick delivered an impassioned speech to the trustees about the necessity for a modern design. Art history demanded that “a museum of living things” should reflect the present age. To interrupt pure planes and straight lines with columns and machine-made garlands was architecturally meaningless, even spiritually frivolous. Among his demands he included modern lighting, rectilinear balustrades, doors without transoms, and radiator grills. Should the trustees not agree, Austin offered to resign. “If, after five years, the trustees have no faith in me,” he said, “then there is no point to my continuing as director.” Austin knew that his design concerns would seem out of scale with his threat. (Would he really resign over skinny railings and some radiator grills?) But he knew he was right: “Perhaps I can be forgiven on the ground of my anxiety that the Avery building be as fine as I have tried to imagine it and excused for my insistence on details which may seem unimportant and irrelevant at the moment, but which I am certain are vital to the ultimate success of the building.”43
When the trustees caved in, Austin was jubilant. He imagined not only the new wing but the events that would inaugurate it. Upstairs: the first Pablo Picasso retrospective in America.44 Downstairs: Four Saints in Three Acts.