One of the reasons Mrs. Rockefeller, Miss Bliss, and Mrs. Sullivan had asked Conger Goodyear to head their new institution was that as chairman of the board of the Albright Gallery in Buffalo he had been so vociferous in his support of modern art that his fellow trustees had thrown him off its board. He had committed two major crimes. One was that he had taken a loan show from Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme. The other was that he had purchased for five thousand dollars Picasso’s La Toilette, a Rose Period painting not unlike the one Eddie Warburg would buy later that summer. Chatting on the dock, Goodyear and Felix Warburg looked like rule-abiding upper-crust gentlemen, but their lives were beginning to be touched by bohemianism and new approaches to vision and thinking more than most of their fellow businessmen could ever have imagined.
In addition to Mrs. Rockefeller, Miss Bliss, Mrs. Sullivan, Mr. Goodyear, Professor Sachs, and Mrs. W. Murray Crane, the founding committee for the Modern included Frank Crowninshield. Moreover, when the initial Museum of Modern Art board was formed that October, not only did Sam Lewisohn become one of the first trustees, but so did Chester Dale of Washington—a regular lender to the Harvard Society—and Frederick Clay Bartlett of Chicago—who had lent de Chirico’s Twin Steeds, as well as a Dufy and a Vlaminck, to the pivotal second exhibition. Bartlett was a sustaining member of the Harvard Society.
In its early years the Museum of Modern Art would echo the Harvard Society in many ways. There was no comparison of scale, of course; the museum’s first annual budget was $100,000, about fourteen times that of the Harvard Society, and the monthly visitor tally during its second exhibition was as high as forty-seven thousand. But in program it often mimicked the Harvard Society. For example, the second Museum of Modern Art show, “Nineteen Americans,” was based on a similar premise to the exhibition with which the Harvard Society had opened its doors ten months earlier. It showed work by many of the same artists, among them Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Sloan, Eugene Speicher, and Maurice Sterne. The “Painting in Paris” show held at the Modern at the beginning of 1930 echoed the Harvard Society’s second exhibition, and depended largely on loans from the same people who had already sent works to Cambridge, such as Chester Dale and Sam Lewisohn. The patterns would be repeated. Within the next few years the Modern would follow the Harvard Society in showing Diego Rivera, German Expressionism, Bauhaus design, recent photography, and American folk art. The subject matter may have been totally new to the broad public that walked through the doors of the Heckscher Building and into the Modern’s subsequent locations, but to people who had climbed the stairs of the Harvard Cooperative Building a lot of it was already familiar. In the case of the Bauhaus, for example, the Modern’s exhibition—which has historically been treated as having been the first in America—came eight years after that of the Harvard Society.
The Museum of Modern Art mirrored the Harvard Society not only in what it showed, but in the nature of the critiques some of those choices inspired. The “Can you believe this idiocy?” running commentary that A. J. Philpott and A. F. Cochrane had repeatedly spewed to the broader readership of Boston was now put forth by many of their prominent counterparts in New York. Above all, Royal Cortissoz—in the New York Herald Tribune—went at the Modern constantly, so much so that A. Conger Goodyear, in his official history of the museum, while not actually deigning to name him referred to “our pessimistic castigator … of the Royal memory.”65 Reviewing the “Painting in Paris” show on January 26, 1930, Cortissoz described Picasso’s Seated Woman as “merely grotesque and repulsive,” and when the Modern showed some Paul Klees several months later he characterized them as “queer unintentionally amusing scrawls of childish effort.” His comment on the 1931 show of contemporary German art was more acid than anything the Harvard Society’s similar show had evoked a year earlier: “The collection of paintings here is the crudest, most raucous and least interesting of modernistic groupings we have seen in a long time.”66 But in general the Museum of Modern Art was tamer than the Harvard Society and had been formed in a more sympathetic city. Public support was its lifeblood, and in general it won high praise. Audience tastes had to be accommodated; the museum had its charter from the Regents of New York State, and it had consequent obligations.
By focusing on nineteenth-century paintings in its inaugural exhibition, the museum had opened on a modern but noncontroversial tack. There was Cézanne’s Still-life with Apples, Van Gogh’s L’Arlésienne, Seurat’s Parade, and Gauguin’s The Spirit of the Dead Watches—fine paintings to be sure, but also relatively safe ones. It was little wonder that The New York Times referred to “the rewards so lavishly spread before a visitor’s eye.” The values being promulgated were more established than the Harvard Society’s in Boston; hence the congratulations were more readily forthcoming. Not that Royal Cortissoz was the only voice of dissent. The Modern’s “Painting in Paris” show prompted W. B. McCormick in the New York American of January 26, 1930, to say that Matisse and Picasso “show to the full how thin is their art, how empty they are of ideas savoring of anything like originality of art.” But Picasso was sufficiently mainstream in some circles that the New York Sun the day before had referred to one of his paintings as “an acknowledged miracle of art.” The local and national press generally endorsed the new museum, which is why by the end of its first season the Modern had drawn in 170,000 visitors.
This isn’t what the Harvard boys wanted. The Modern had opened with Seurat and Van Gogh; they had charged forward with the likes of Bucky Fuller, Calder, and Brancusi. Nothing could get them to compromise. They were ardent about what they showed, and didn’t give a hoot about pleasing the crowd. Extreme reactions were just fine. In time, of course, Kirstein and Warburg would do their best to engender a bit of controversy at the Museum of Modern Art, but at least at the start “the young Turks”—as the most loudmouthed of the Advisory Committee members were called—let the New York institution emerge peacefully, and confined their ranting and raving to greater Cambridge.
A month after they had been appointed to the Advisory Committee at the six-month-old Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Kirstein, Edward Warburg, John Walker, and Philip Johnson were graduated from Harvard. Even more so than the others, Warburg went out in rare style.
In September of 1926, shortly after Warburg had started freshman year, his father had written him a letter addressed to “Dear Teddy, Most learned of gentlemen!” It began:
Perhaps by this time you have imbibed so much wisdom that I am taking you away from your serious labors for the purpose of reading this letter, but you may take my apologies for that.
I was awfully glad to learn that Paul Sachs has been so cordial to you and I know that if you show any sign of reaction this will mean a friendship and an inspiration and a guidance for life to you.
By Warburg’s senior year, however, things were no longer going precisely as his father had intended. The young modernist had indeed shown a “sign of reaction” to Paul Sachs, but it was not the type to guarantee friendship for life. Warburg had begun regularly to voice his view that art history courses focused too much on facts and identification. He attacked their indifference to judgments of quality in art. To ridicule the methods by which monuments were memorized he pointed out that Cefalu Cathedral could always be spotted because all the university photographs of it had a dog defecating in front. He and Lincoln Kirstein made up a painter called “Bebi di Papa Daddy” and convinced several fledgling art historians that Bebi was for real.
Then Warburg ignited the situation further. He made it public that he and a friend, Thomas Howe—the future director of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor who, in the Crimson, had shown rare sympathy for the Harvard Society’s “School of Paris” show—had skipped classes for an entire month of winter term, during which they had sailed to and from London to see the exhibition of Italian Renaissance painting at Burlington House. Not a single faculty member had detected their absence. Moreover, the journey had in no way harmed their grades. Simply by reading their professors’ books, they were able to prepare themselves for exams as thoroughly as if they had attended the lectures.
The final stroke was the speech Eddie Warburg gave as class orator at commencement in June of 1930. To speak one’s mind was a Warburg family tradition. When Eddie’s great-grandmother Sara Warburg, a close friend of both Heinrich Heine and Prince Otto von Bismarck, was annoyed because Bismarck’s court chaplain had made an anti-Semitic pronouncement, she ceased her regular practice of sending Bismarck his annual Passover cookies, forcing the prince to deploy an emissary to her to try to make amends. Eddie could hardly be expected to bite his tongue when he felt strongly about something. His oration was an attack on the Harvard tutorial system. Speaking in Memorial Hall to his classmates, their parents, and much of the Harvard faculty, he depicted the great professors as remote and lazy. He pointed out that the only faculty with whom students had any direct connection were the tutors and section leaders who were more interested in their own graduate work than in teaching.
Who are these section men and tutors upon whom the main responsibility of stimulating the interest of the students rests? Too often they are simply young men whose main aim is working for their doctor’s degrees, or doing research for a future book. This is not so peculiar, since after all they depend on their books or their Ph.D.’s for recognition and promotion, and not on their ability to teach.
Eddie Warburg said that the professors and assistant professors—those unapproachable eminences who gave the actual lectures—very often merely repeated what they had already said year after year and had previously published in their books. More than teachers they were status-seekers—a category of sinner for which he and Kirstein had particular contempt. Before the assembled group of people who had so much invested in the experience of the past four years, Warburg amplified: “In an attempt to keep up its prestige as far as other colleges and the outside world is concerned, Harvard finds itself lamentably lacking in teachers and rather overloaded with authorities.”
The oration was discussed a few weeks later in an unsigned editorial in The Nation,67 where the names on the masthead included Oswald Garrison Villard, Heywood Broun, Lewis S. Gannett, H. L. Mencken, Norman Thomas, and Carl Van Doren. Under the title “Fair Harvard,” the piece began: “Only fair, according to Edward M. Warburg, senior orator at the Class Day exercises … That great institution, it seems, has grown too fast. The teachers, alas, are gone.” It quoted Warburg as saying, “ ‘The time of stimulating discussion between student and professor in the classroom is a thing of the past,’ ” and went on to analyze that development in some detail, reflecting that it was symptomatic of an overall degeneration in college education throughout America. The Nation cited a student at another prominent university who claimed that “the old-time contact between professor and student was entirely gone … but after all it didn’t matter, because there were no teachers left among the professors—none of them cared for anything but research.” The editorial concluded by quoting Warburg’s assertion that Harvard was
… lamentably lacking in teachers and rather overloaded with authorities. Mr. Warburg is right, and Harvard is in the same boat with most of the good colleges in the country … We congratulate Mr. Warburg, then, on making a frank and outspoken criticism of his Alma Mater, and we congratulate Harvard on training sons ready to criticize as well as praise.
The editors at The Nation may have been impressed, but Paul Sachs was livid. Sitting next to Felix Warburg, he could hardly control himself. When Eddie called on Sachs a few days later, Sachs exploded. His rage drove him to tears. Felix Warburg’s youngest son, however, was incorrigible. Eddie told Sachs that he would demonstrate the proper role of a conscientious tutor by taking the post himself, gratis. Sachs’s response was anything but a thank you. He considered this the most presumptuous suggestion he had ever heard.68 Before young Warburg could dream of showing his face at Harvard again, he would have to begin his teaching experience elsewhere.
As usual when he was at loggerheads with Sachs, Warburg turned to Agnes Mongan. She had not only her familiar easy laugh and soothing voice, but a specific solution. “Hark the herald angels sing, Here’s to Georgiana Goddard King,” she intoned. She completed the verse: “Who is this who knows each thing, Yet she has no wedding ring. Peace on earth and mercy mild, Has she ever had a child?” King had told her Bryn Mawr students that she had had every experience known to women; the only one they could not imagine was her having given birth. But surely there was nothing about Eddie Warburg—oration, joking ways, modern art shows, and all—that King could not handle. Mongan arranged for Warburg to interview for a position. With a bit of Fizzie-style charm, he got a job. When King asked him why he had come to see her, Eddie “fell back defensively, and using one of Father’s gallantries, responded, ‘To meet one of America’s few intelligent women.’ ”69 She said that he should study in Europe for a year and then return to Bryn Mawr to teach a course in nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting and a second course in a still undetermined subject.
There was a hitch, however. Bryn Mawr lacked the funds for another art instructor. When Warburg volunteered to teach for nothing, King said that was out of the question. To teach without a salary would violate the school’s standards and jeopardize the entire profession. But she did suggest that if she were to receive a check for one thousand dollars from an anonymous donor, that salary would be taken care of. Eddie Warburg’s reply was to ask if she wanted him to sign it right away, and they shook hands on the deal.
By early fall Eddie Warburg had agreed that the second course should be a history of sculpture from the Renaissance to modern times. He headed for Paris to begin to prepare himself by looking at art and collecting slides. John Walker also went to Europe that fall following college graduation, to work with Bernard Berenson in Florence. Of the three members of the Executive Committee of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, only Lincoln Kirstein remained in Cambridge.
Kirstein had plenty to do there. The Hound & Horn was still going full force. So was the Harvard Society. He continued to mount exhibitions that launched trends that have had a lasting impact on American public taste. From October 15 to 31, the Harvard Society held an exhibition of American folk art that made it the first modern art organization to recognize the aesthetic relevance of these older objects. The show presented late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraits, landscapes, mourning pictures, still lifes, and ship pictures in oil and watercolor on materials ranging from canvas and paper to wood, glass, cardboard, and velvet. This unacademic native art was more spontaneous than tutored. Generally unsigned, and of little interest to most art historians, it had many of the values prized in the more adventurous contemporary art.
The unsigned catalog essay—presumably Kirstein’s—dealt as before with the issues of truthfulness and authenticity of feeling.
The great charm of provincial and folk painting is its freshness, its surprising closeness to all that is directly necessary to the initial development of a culture.… A growing nation without the benefits of absolute despotism or state patronage has little chance for a broad artistic development, but on these walls, considering the artist’s limited range, we have several qualities displayed without which the most sophisticated work is useless—a purity of linear handling, a deep psychological insight in portraiture, a freshness of color combined with the use of original media and an honesty that is as gracious as it is disarming.
Whether in Eddie Warburg’s oration or in the stovepipe bases for Noguchi’s sculpture, that high regard for candor was at the crux of things.
From November 7 to 29 the society put on a photography show. Again the concept, not unusual by today’s standards, was pioneering for the time and place:
The present exhibition attempts to prove that the mechanism of the photograph is worthy and capable of producing creative work entirely outside the limitations of reproduction or imitation, equal in importance to original effort in painting and sculpture.
The participants, most of them quite young, included Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget, Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans (he was then twenty-seven), Charles Sheeler, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston. There were unsigned aerial and astronomical views—the latter lent by the Harvard College Observatory—and press photographs, among them two shots of motor accidents lent by the Boston Herald. The show also included X rays, with titles ranging from “dislocation of the ulna” and “a bony tumor within the frontal sinus” to “skull fractured by baseball.” In this way the Harvard Society further elevated the notion of truth—this time medical and biological—as an essential component of art.
• • •
In December 1930 and January 1931, the first Bauhaus show ever held in America was installed at 1400 Massachusetts Avenue. It was the only such exhibition outside Germany that took place while the experimental German school linking arts and crafts was still in operation. The Cambridge show—and its subsequent venue at the John Becker Gallery at 520 Madison Avenue in New York—was pivotal in introducing the American public to art and ideas that have since penetrated our society.
There were paintings, drawings, and prints by Erich Borchert, Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gerhardt Marcks, Oskar Schlemmer, and Lothar Schreyer—lent primarily by John Becker and Weyhe. There was typography by Herbert Bayer, and an array of objects—plates, a lamp, an ashtray, a scarf of rayon and silk—all lent by Philip Johnson. And there were lots of photographs and Bauhaus books lent by Jere Abbott and Alfred Barr. Barr and Johnson had both visited the Bauhaus in Dessau, which is how Kirstein had come to know enough about the school to mount an exhibition.
The society issued a handsome catalog that credited Mr. Alfred V. Churchill, Mr. Philip Johnson, and Helmuth von Erfa as sources of its information. Von Erfa had been a pupil of the Bauhaus at Weimar. Churchill, head of the art department at Smith College, had become something of an authority on the school thanks in part to his close friendship with Feininger, the one American-born artist who taught at the Bauhaus. The authorship of the catalog was not cited, however; nor was there any indication of the name of the designer of the cover. This was a brilliant Bauhaus-style abstraction along the lines of the sand-blasted stained-glass constructions that Josef Albers was making in Dessau at the time. Later when the cover design and entire layout were reprinted for the John Becker Gallery, Lincoln Kirstein’s name was given as both the writer and the designer.
Kirstein’s task was to present the Bauhaus to an audience that had never before heard of it. With precisely the sort of clarity that the school was striving for, he wrote, “The exterior should directly echo the interior in lack of ornamentation and use of rigid economy in material and labor.” He elaborated on that idea with a statement about the Bauhaus’s third and final director, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—a name then scarcely known in the United States:
Mies wishes to make the best school in the world for those who are interested in architectural development, based not on aesthetic, historical, or Beaux Arts points of view, but founded on the principles of functionalism, of materials that are necessary and indigenous to the present, regardless of tradition, with an eye always open to social implementation.
Cover of the exhibition brochure from “Bauhaus, January, 1931,” The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, 1930. (Photo Credit 1.34)
The anonymous Kirstein cited objects that exemplified these principles. He mentioned Albers’s glass work, Breuer’s chairs, Gropius’s architecture for a theater in Jena, and Moholy’s photography. In time all four of these people would end up in America, teaching a generation of disciples and redesigning the look of the country; Gropius would eventually teach architecture within a stone’s throw of the Fogg. This exhibition and Kirstein’s essay put these names before a new public for the first time.
Kirstein, of course, did not simply fall at Gropius’s feet. As with the American, French, and Mexican shows, he latched on to new ideas with considerable enthusiasm and prescience about future American cultural trends, but he also had his own point of view. He expressed this with the unabashed certitude that he revered in others. Kirstein admired the honesty of the man who had founded the Bauhaus in 1919, but made no bones about his views of Gropius’s short-comings:
Gropius had an extraordinary effect on everyone who came in contact with him. A brilliant publicist and theorist, he had the astounding faculty of making men of small parts outdo themselves when working for him. His influence was everywhere, in everything, in the painting, in the typography, and of course in the architecture. Gropius had the fundamental fault of being obsessed by the problems of technic. Primarily an artist he has the romantic fallacy of feeling that he must talk like an engineer, not like a designer—that if a wall is made of brick, a plaster facing is a dishonest facing.
Here was an instance in which Kirstein had put on an exhibition that did not necessarily follow his own taste. He preferred bravura to austerity; he liked evocative figurative art more than purist abstraction. But he valued integrity above all, and this is what he found in the Bauhaus. Moreover, he had developed a special regard for Philip Johnson, who had introduced him to this material.
Above all, the Harvard Society’s Bauhaus show emphasized paintings. As in the modern German art show, they assembled an exemplary collection of Paul Klee’s work. The catalog praised Klee for being “conscious of the extraordinary power of the poetry of simple intentions, the lyric of the pure primitive.” As in so much else that the Harvard Society backed, what mattered was the idea of getting to the core. To attain knowledge and beauty one must peel away the coverings. The ideal was to know one’s true instincts and to have the courage to be spontaneous. It was the concept that Sigmund Freud was at the same time doing so much to perpetrate in other ways.
At the start of 1931 Kirstein organized a Picasso exhibition, primarily with loans from the John Becker Gallery, Paul Sachs, and John Nicholas Brown. He then put on shows of work by Harvard graduates and of recent American art. Walker and Warburg had become “ex officio” on the Executive Committee, but Kirstein still had a strong board of trustees, to which he had added A. Conger Goodyear. But funding was getting to be more and more of a problem, especially without Eddie Warburg there to be the most sustaining of the sustaining members. Kirstein sent out a letter saying that it would be necessary to increase membership and contributions, or else to close.
Operating with limited funds, he slowed down the pace of exhibitions. At the end of March he presented modern art from the British Isles, but after that there was nothing on view in the two rooms at 1400 Massachusetts Avenue until November. Then came “Modern Painting in Review,” which included major work by Monet, Seurat, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Degas, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Kandinsky, Marin, and Léger. More along the lines of what was being shown at the Museum of Modern Art, a bit less risky, it was meant to attract new blood to the society. The following exhibition was simply called “Abstraction.” It was announced by a startling flyer the cover of which is dominated by a bold solid black square. In the white space on top of the square, “ABSTRACTION” is written vertically in black upper-case sans-serif type, bisected horizontally by “The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art” in red. Kirstein gave the rationale for the content of the show. What the works had in common was that independence from subject matter was their pervasive quality. Their underlying qualities were “simplification and stylization,” “distortion,” or “pure pattern.” With those criteria, the selection included a fifth-century B.C. Greek white lekythos, an Egyptian limestone relief, a late fourteenth-century Sienese Madonna, an El Greco painting, Russian icons, a notebook by Hokusai, Negro masks, Mexican santos, and work by Archipenko, Chagall, Léger, O’Keeffe, Lachaise, Gris, Masson, Picasso, de Chirico, Braque, Moholy-Nagy, Mondrian, Brancusi, and Gauguin. This exhibition was conceived as a swan song. On the back of the flyer it was announced that the gallery would close at the end of the exhibition because of lack of financial support.
News of the society’s closing also appeared in the Harvard Crimson and the Boston Transcript. So did a significant letter of protest. Alfred Barr, as director of the Museum of Modern Art, wrote to the Crimson to voice “his astonishment and utmost regret … I have admired the courage and alertness of its directors both in their choice and presentation of exhibitions. Very frequently they have been in advance of any other organization in the country in presentation of new phases of modern art.… If the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art should die in the wealthiest academic community in the world it would be little short of disgrace.”70 Barr’s and Kirstein’s efforts paid off. Students came up with $900.33. In addition, $400.17 was pledged, $500.16 was contributed by people outside the college, and $700.00 was given by an anonymous donor.
So 1932 got off to a running start. There was another Picasso exhibition, this time of original drawings, copper plates, and etchings for Ovid’s Metamorphoses. When the same exhibition had been at the Marie Harriman Gallery in New York the previous month, Henry McBride had said it was “exceedingly difficult, and for that reason will greatly please those already in the cult, and violently repel those who are not.”71 That was exactly the sort of material the Harvard Society longed for. And the cult appeared to be growing. A new student executive board was formed with three members of the Harvard class of 1933 and a Radcliffe sophomore. The first show at the society after their induction demanded even more of a personal taste than the Picasso had. This was an exhibition of Surrealism that included three major works each by de Chirico, Dali, and Picasso, four Max Ernsts, and a range of drawings, books, and periodicals. It was the third venue of the exhibition, which had been organized by another former Paul Sachs student—Julien Levy—who had a gallery in New York. But the Harvard Society put its own special slant on it. They issued another striking flyer; its cover brandished the word “Surrealisme” with each individual letter backward—which made it far more puzzling than a perfect mirror image, with the entire word in reverse, would have been. Then there was Kirstein’s succinct explanation of what the show was all about. What could have been intimidating material became palatable:
The Surrealiste artist is interested in externalizing the experience that takes place in the remote spaces of consciousness. He attempts to reclaim for painting the regions that lie beyond logic. He is experimenting at the very edge of the expressible and the communicable.
Surrealisme … uses a vocabulary of recognizable images and it links them in a purely subjective sequence.… It has the triple lure of the unexpected, the censorable, and the remote; and at its best it is embarrassingly comprehensible.
The society was back in full swing. From March 21 to April 2 there was a show of architecture and interiors with models and photographs of work by, among others, Gropius, Howe and Lescaze, and Frank Lloyd Wright. On its heels came another exhibition of recent American painting. Then, following the summer break, Kirstein presented twenty-three gouaches by Ben Shahn for The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti and ten of his depictions of the Dreyfus case. This was risky stuff. One of the people depicted as a henchman of Sacco and Vanzetti was President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, with whose nephew—Francis Cabot Lowell—Kirstein had roomed during his freshman year. At the order of the Harvard Yard police, the posters for the show were torn down from bulletin boards of dormitories and other college buildings—the official claim being that there had been no application for permission to hang them. It took courage to challenge the larger establishment in this sort of way, but here again Kirstein’s ways were consistent with his father’s; out of sympathy for what had happened to the two Italian immigrants, Lou Kirstein employed Sacco’s son as his chauffeur.
Next came another photography show and an exhibition of designs for the theater. But even if Kirstein had managed to keep his art society alive and well, his own focus was shifting. He handed the reins of power over to J. P. Coolidge and R. P. Heller. The Harvard Society lasted awhile longer—even expanding its ranks to include sustaining members like Bernard Berenson—but in little time it faded. Kirstein moved to New York to be closer to his old friends and to be where he could see more art and ballet. He left Cambridge the legacy of a great literary review and a pioneering public art gallery.
Eddie Warburg’s Bryn Mawr preparation program was no hardship. If he saw an artwork that would be instructive to his students, he often simply bought it. Curt Valentin helped guide his purchases. When Valentin visited Paris from Berlin, they would lunch together with the new young art dealers whose wares Valentin felt Warburg should consider. They owned galleries off the beaten track, as opposed to places like Durlacher or Wildenstein where Warburg might have run into his relatives or his parents’ New York friends. After a sufficiency of sweet Anjou wine to wash down the special green and white oysters known as “marennes moyennes,” Warburg invariably picked up another experimental drawing or piece of German Expressionist sculpture.
Equipped with addresses from Valentin, Warburg also traveled through Germany to see and in some cases acquire sculpture and drawings by Georg Kolbe and Gerhard Marcks. In Lübeck he looked up Professor Carl Georg Heise, a former student of Aby’s whom he had met in Hamburg several years earlier. Heise was a great patron of the sculptor Ernst Barlach. Warburg bought several major Barlach bronzes, including a very dramatic and boldly formed Head and a poignant beggar leaning on crutches. He visited the Folkwang Museum in Essen, where he was even more excited by a loan exhibition of Gauguin than by the German collection. A wooden figure, barely ten inches high, moved him to distraction. Roughly whittled, stained red and black, and resembling a piece of folk art, this graceful statue—called Woman on a Stroll or The Little Parisienne—was made in 1880, at the very beginning of the artist’s career. It is to Gauguin’s work as Blue Boy is to Picasso’s: a rare moment of innocent charm and loveliness. Again Warburg turned to Curt Valentin for intervention. The piece was on loan from Gauguin’s widow, who lived in Copenhagen. Dollars were magic in those years, and Warburg became the owner.
At almost the exact time that the Bauhaus exhibition was filling the rooms at 1400 Massachusetts Avenue, Warburg called on Paul Klee at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Having admired Klee’s work at Flechtheim’s, he bore a letter of introduction from Curt Valentin. He arrived eagerly at Klee’s doorstep, but stopped at the sound of the artist playing Bach on the violin. He waited to knock until the sonata was over. Once inside, he was even more riveted by what he saw than by what he had heard. First there was the sight of the intense, dark-eyed artist in the sort of white coat worn by surgeons. Then there was the art as fresh and spontaneous as any statement Warburg had previously encountered in any form.
Paul Klee, Romantic Park, 1930. Oil and watercolor, 33 × 50 cm. (Photo Credit 1.35)
The young Harvard graduate began to look at works on paper. When he attempted to detour one of Klee’s many cats from walking across a watercolor he was holding, the artist urged him to let the animal do as he liked. Warburg said he was afraid the cat would leave a pawprint; the watercolor was still wet. Klee laughed and replied that many years henceforth such a footprint would be a great insoluble mystery for art historians trying to figure out the technique with which it had been achieved.
It was all a revelation. The art with which Warburg had grown up left no room for happenstance. Here was someone who believed in flowing with life rather than imposing artificial strictures. In little time, Warburg became enchanted with an oil called Departure of the Ships. In his experience boats were either Felix’s hundred-foot yacht or ocean liners where one’s valet laid out one’s evening clothes; Klee’s canvas of ships presented the idea of seagoing vessels in its greater, more generalized form. The painting reveals motion itself. It illustrates wind. Its sails could be any type, anywhere, in the moonlight. Like Blue Boy, Departure of the Ships presents its subject as universal rather than specific, in all its humble grandeur. The young collector was equally fascinated by Klee’s Romantic Park, a complex, dreamlike painting full of banners, lamps, jagged staircases, upside-down heads, and half-ornamental, half-real forms charged with inexplicable motion. It took the idea of staircases out of their 1109 Fifth Avenue mode and into their more Freudian aspect. In its complexity and the readings that it invited, it reminded Warburg of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. This imaginative way of seeing things was irresistible, and at about eight hundred dollars a picture, he acquired the pair.
While Warburg was traveling around Europe buying Barlachs and Klees, most of his college classmates had gone the route of what Fizzie called “the money-mad crowd.” Those who hadn’t headed to graduate school had generally gone to work for banks and brokerage firms. Eddie’s brothers Fred and Piggy fit into the mold by entering the financial world. Recognized by every headwaiter in New York, they adapted easily to the life of the rich. His brother Gerald, however, had also taken an alternate course. He became a professional cellist. If Eddie fulfilled one of Felix’s missions by linking up with Sachs and the Fogg and making full-time work of his father’s hobby of art, Gerry performed the same role in music. Fizzie didn’t only collect Renaissance art; he also collected Stradivariuses. He owned four, which Gerry put to good use by founding the Stradivarius Quartet. On one occasion the Music Room at 1109 Fifth had the unique distinction of housing an all-Stradivarius octet when the Warburgs’ four were joined by Herbert Strauss’s.
Gerry annually bowed Kol Nidre during Yom Kippur services at the Temple Emanu-El, New York’s bastion of German Jewry. On the other hand, his family’s connections and fortune sometimes worked to his detriment. Determined to make the most of his musical career, he got his father to arrange an audition with Fritz Kneisel, the brilliant violinist who was head of the Kneisel quartet. When Felix asked Kneisel (in German), “Has the boy got talent?” the reply was, “Talent he’s got, so long as he’s ready to starve for it.” “That,” Felix replied, “is the only thing I can’t provide.” To many musical aficionados, what made the difference between Gerry’s being merely a good cellist and a great one was that he never had to push himself enough. Not only did he not have to find the income to make ends meet, but he often couldn’t get jobs performing because everyone knew that he didn’t need the money; besides having his own income, he was married to Condé Nast’s daughter. Especially in the 1930s, when so many people were struggling, it seemed unfair to deprive others of work.
Eddie Warburg may have also seemed like a rich young dilettante in the eyes of the world, but when he began to teach at Bryn Mawr in the fall of 1931, the students hung on his every word. He felt that his main job was to teach people how to see. By never proselytizing and by sprinkling his comments with humor, he managed to explain alien concepts to educated but unadventurous people. Warburg’s students had traditional notions of the function of art; he knocked down their preconceptions and opened them to new possibilities. They considered verisimilitude a prerequisite of art; he showed them that abstraction was equally viable.
Having attacked the dependence on slides at Harvard, Warburg did his best to teach with actual objects. He had most of his art collection in his two-room apartment at the Bryn Mawr Gables on the Montgomery Turnpike. He often brought examples into the classroom. He also regularly squeezed as many students as possible into his Packard roadster to ferry them to the Philadelphia Museum. Georgiana King called Warburg into her office to heap praise on him. He responded by telling her that in that case he would give himself a raise.
King decided, however, that the young lecturer needed a real salary. Since she could earmark no more than five hundred dollars, adequate for only half a course, she proposed that Warburg return the following year for spring term. During the 1932 fall term he accompanied Professor Arthur Upham Pope, an authority on Near Eastern art, to Persia. Pope had asked Warburg to join him as a general assistant and adjunct photographer.
To get to Persia they went by train from London to Warsaw and then to the Soviet Union. They spent several weeks in Moscow. When Jacob Schiff’s grandson looked out of his shabby Red Square hotel room at Lenin’s tomb, he had to ask Pope who Lenin was. But ignorance of the history of Communism did not keep him from being sympathetic to its possible value. In a letter he wrote to his family from Leningrad on October 18, a description of miserable accommodations, greasy food, and his “second dose of fleas,” was followed by the conclusion:
All this sounds pretty terrible, but despite it all, I am all in favor of the life and all that goes with it. I have never felt better and I have never understood what went into pioneering before. It is a real thrill!! … The propaganda against Russia, that even I had become a victim of, is so fallacious as to seem humorous.… The figures on literacy, health, employment, and harnessed natural resources are all in favor of the Soviets.
The critic of Harvard’s tutorial system and teacher of privileged young women at Bryn Mawr at last saw an education program that impressed him.
I wish I could have had some of my students, world-weary friends, and depressed family, along with me on my trips to the schools and clubs. The cheerful, eager attitude exuding from those audiences was not only a tonic but a lesson. Everybody is on their toes and in sharp competition with his neighbor.… For the first time I witnessed education administered to fulfill a genuine demand from the students. Here they got what they wanted, and they not only knew what they wanted, but wanted lots.…
Imagine groups of sailors and soldiers asking the museum to supply them with a guide who will tell them about the works of Art exhibited. Imagine the Hermitage having eight times the attendance it had before the revolution and its directors busy lecturing in the lunch hour in the steel mills. Imagine a nation educated to believe,—AND BELIEVING—, that culture is a necessity in this race.
Warburg may have been charged by the fervor for art in Russia, but he hadn’t forgotten who the readers of his letter were any more than who his lecture audiences were.
I could go on for many more pages but I can just see and hear the skeptical snickers these lines will arouse and the pitying tolerance you will all feel for me—“for having been pulled in like a sucker”. I am no parlor-bolshy but I certainly am glad I got bitten by fleas in this country and thereby got the chance to see Life from the side of a worth while, exciting adventure.
Don’t worry. I won’t bother you with all this when I get home.
Fondly,
Edward
He never minced words about his faith or tastes, but he always knew how far he could go.
Warburg and Pope encountered long delays in the Caucasus Mountains while they waited for equipment to arrive and paperwork to clear. When they reached Azerbaijan, Pope suffered from acute food poisoning. Warburg stuffed his shirts into a samovar to make hot compresses to apply to his mentor’s stomach for two days until he could get him to a doctor. Both men were periodically ill, the plumbing primitive at best. But they continued happily past Teheran, to the site of an excavation on the Caspian, and then to Isfahan. There, urinating on a minor mud-covered tomb, Warburg inadvertently uncovered some key inscriptions. This unstandard technique revealed such fascinating ornament that he and Pope cleaned off the rest of the tomb—with more traditional methods—to reveal what was later considered a major monument of Persian art, fragments of which ended up in the Teheran Museum.
Next they went to Baghdad by way of a region where the American minister had recently been captured by brigands. Officials advised them to have a military escort. Warburg and Pope drove it alone, however, continuing on to Jerusalem. There Frieda Warburg and one of Eddie’s cousins awaited them. Eddie had escaped his realities for long enough. He wanted to discuss Persia; his mother wanted to talk about family. Family won. There was also a letter from Georgiana King. She had only been able to raise fifty dollars toward his salary. In her attempt to come up with more she had written to people ranging from his father’s fellow philanthropists to his own friends with the appeal, “Won’t you please help save Mr. Warburg for Bryn Mawr?” Warburg was embarrassed; it was no one’s priority to feed a Warburg at the peak of the Depression.
Despite the lack of funding, Warburg returned to Bryn Mawr for one more term. But after that he decided he had had enough. In his teaching he was too often quoting what he had said the previous year—the very shortcoming of which he had accused the Harvard faculty. But what was most discouraging were the passive students eager only to score well on exams. Warburg found them pretentious, interested only in appearing cultured. He missed the broader populace that had moved him so in the museums of Moscow. Looking for the American equivalent of that general audience, as well as for more social life than he could find on the Montgomery Turnpike, he returned to New York.
For Eddie Warburg, the new Museum of Modern Art was the center of New York life. He had traveled there often from Bryn Mawr, including one occasion when he gave the first public lecture at the museum, on Matisse. What drew him primarily was the magnetism of Alfred Barr and of Philip Johnson. After Harvard, Johnson had traveled around Europe looking at modern art with Henry Russell Hitchcock, and in the fall of 1930 he had started a Department of Architecture at the museum. His terms of employment were like those of Warburg at Bryn Mawr, except that in addition to his own salary, he also paid his assistant’s and, in time, that of the museum’s first librarian. He too was caught up in the fervor for modernism, willing to do what it took to abet the new cause.
Warburg, Johnson, and Kirstein saw one another all the time. Among other things, they met at meetings of the Modern’s Advisory Committee. Here again, Kirstein was full of ideas. It was time for the Modern to stop getting its customary pats on the back and to make a few waves as the Harvard Society had. He proposed a show called “Murals by American Painters and Photographers.” Not only had he long admired the murals at the Boston Public Library, but in 1928 he had painted some murals of his own—in a geometric/representational style akin to that of Stuart Davis and Gerald Murphy—for the Harvard Student Liberal Club. Organized by the Advisory Committee under Kirstein’s direction, Kirstein’s show was scheduled for the spring of 1932, to launch the museum’s new headquarters in the former Rockefeller town house at 11 West Fifty-third Street.
Kirstein asked each of sixty-five painters and photographers to take “The Post-War World” as their subject and to do designs on different scales. One of the works, by a little-known painter named Hugo Gellert, was called Us Fellas Gotta Stick Together. It showed Al Capone entrenched behind money bags and operating a machine gun, with President Herbert Hoover, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford at his side. It was fine with Kirstein, but most of the powers at the Modern were enraged. The Advisory Committee members who were the liaisons to the Modern’s board begged Kirstein to do something. Kirstein’s reply was that if the museum refused to show this work, he would organize the same exhibition elsewhere and focus maximum publicity on what had happened.
Hugo Gellert, Us Fellas Gotta Stick Together, chalk on celotex sized with plaster, 7′ × 4′. (Photo Credit 1.36)
It took another contemporary of Lincoln Kirstein’s and Eddie Warburg’s to save the day. The same year they finished Harvard, Nelson Rockefeller was graduated from Dartmouth. Having become closely caught up with activities at the museum his mother had helped start, he was chairman of the Advisory Committee. As a grandson of the tyrant portrayed at Al Capone’s side, he discussed the matter with both his father and J. P. Morgan. Although some of the trustees wanted Kirstein fired, Rockefeller and Morgan agreed that the show should go on as planned. The public flocked to see it.
The murals were more than the critics could fathom, however. Generally a staunch supporter of the avant-garde, the New York Sun’s Henry McBride called the exhibition “simply terrible. It is the saddest event of a none too cheerful winter.”72 Edward Alden Jewell in The New York Times wrote, “The exhibition is so bad as to give America something to think about for a long time”; it was “easel painting glorified into an ignominious failure.”73
Nelson Rockefeller did not waver, however. And Kirstein did not go down quietly. In an essay called “Contemporary Mural Painting in the United States” in the July-September 1932 Hound & Horn, he applauded the new works at the Modern as the best of their kind. First Kirstein evaluated two well-known murals at The New School for Social Research; the Orozco, he opined, “has the advantage of his medium’s earthy palette, but suffers from the awkward proportions of the place and an iconography which has not been wholly resolved.” Thomas Hart Benton’s New School mural was “more a documentation than a decoration,” its colors unduly harsh. Then he defended the dining room murals by José Maria Sert at the Waldorf-Astoria, works that most critics had attacked. “Architecturally speaking, the building is a monument of mediocrity and false chic, but that is no reason for the fashionable condemnation of the murals along with it, for they are another thing.” The Sert Room, Kirstein felt, reflected tradition and competence, and the reason they had been slandered was that these values were out of favor, much to Kirstein’s dismay. He then addressed the issue of the recent Museum of Modern Art show without naming its curator. “The Museum of Modern Art, with a gesture of courage which has not yet been fully appraised, attempted to do what it could for mural painting.” The show was “an excitement and a stimulus” for artists; since for most of the painters this was a first attempt, they warranted further opportunity to work on a large scale. Ben Shahn’s The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti was a model of straightforward eloquence. Even more successful was Philip Reisman’s The Post War World. It illustrated farmers setting fire to wheat they could not market and pouring full milk cans into a brook, and members of the Ku Klux Klan hanging a victim. As for the critics who objected to this or Hugo Gellert’s revelations of the class struggle in America, Kirstein’s conclusion was that “The panels were very efficient. They provoked violent anger.” Addressing McBride’s remark that “The murals lack ideas, they lack beauty, they lack interest” and Jewell’s assertion that they were “violations of even the most catholic conceptions of good taste,” Kirstein belittled the notion of “good taste.” What mattered was that statements had been made.
