Picasso's War summary

If you’ve ever been a collector of anything, you probably know how it goes. What starts as a fun hobby can soon turn into an all-consuming passion. Collecting modern art quickly became just that for John Quinn, as every penny he made through his law practice got funneled into this new pursuit.

There was a practical reason behind Quinn’s collection. Simply put, someone had to do it. In his opinion, the Metropolitan Museum had hardly anything good from the nineteenth century at all. Quinn felt like he had to take the initiative. Maybe, one day, his collection could serve as the foundation for a real modern museum of art.

It was July 1907, when Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler knocked on the door of a dilapidated building in the Montmartre district of Paris. When the door finally opened, Kahnweiler was greeted by a short, bedraggled young man standing in his underwear. He welcomed Kahnweiler in, and while the strange man put on some pants, Kahnweiler took in the scene. The place was a mess. Wallpaper was peeling off the walls. Junk was strewn everywhere. What little furniture there was had a layer of cigarette ash covering it. The place reeked of dog and paint. This was Pablo Picasso’s studio.

Kahnweiler was an ambitious and inexperienced art dealer in his early twenties. He was a German-Jewish man who’d recently borrowed some money from his uncle to start his own gallery in Paris. He had no connections, knew very few artists, but he loved modern art and had good taste.

Back in New York, John Quinn wasn’t feeling so well. For years, Quinn had known something was wrong, but in 1919, he received a grim diagnosis that he had cancer, and likely had only six years left to live. By this time, Quinn had already amassed what was likely the biggest collection of modern art in America. His Upper-West Side apartment had rows of paintings stacked against the wall in every possible location. The only thing holding him back was space and money. He’d developed strong relationships with European dealers like Rosenberg. He’d even visited Picasso at his home.

The American press, however, continued to refer to modern art as dangerous and degenerate “bolshevik” art, the work of “madmen'' whose visions could only serve to corrupt wholesome American minds. And when Quinn finally passed away in 1924, the Metropolitan Museum still failed to own a single Van Gogh, Gauguin, or Toulouse-Lautrec – never mind a Picasso or a Matisse.

In the 1930s other cultural and political changes were happening too, which, in the long run, would make modern art look like a bold signifier of democracy and freedom.

When the Nazi party took over in Germany, modern art exhibitions began to get shut down, galleries were closed, and works were being taken off the walls in museums. A similar thing was happening in Stalin’s Russia, but in Germany, the term “degenerate art” was being used exactly the same way the term had been used in America. Only now, the works were being forcibly taken away by Gestapo agents.