Michael: Most people think of modern art museums like MoMA as these timeless, inevitable institutions. But what if I told you the most powerful art museum in the world was basically founded out of a spectacular failure, a massive estate sale gone wrong, and a deep-seated fear of 'degenerate' art? Kevin: That sounds completely counterintuitive. You walk into MoMA today and it feels so permanent, so authoritative. The idea that it was born from chaos and failure is pretty shocking. It’s like finding out the Roman Colosseum was originally a failed attempt at a water park. Michael: It's the incredible story at the heart of Hugh Eakin's book, Picasso's War: How Modern Art Came to America. Kevin: And Eakin isn't just an art historian; he's a senior editor at The New York Review of Books. He spent years in archives across Europe and the US, and it shows. The book is widely acclaimed and reads less like a textbook and more like a high-stakes thriller about art, money, and politics. Michael: Exactly. And it all starts with one of the most unlikely champions you could imagine, a man who was instrumental in this whole affair.

Michael: The story really kicks off with John Quinn, a powerhouse Wall Street lawyer in the early 1900s. He's brilliant, connected, and a patron of the arts, but his taste is fairly traditional. In 1911, he goes to Alfred Stieglitz's tiny gallery in New York to see the very first US exhibition of some drawings by a young Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso. Kevin: And I'm guessing he was blown away, saw the future, and bought everything on the spot? Michael: Not even close. He was horrified. He wrote to a friend that the drawings were "blood-curdling... like some awful dream partly forgotten but haunting still." Kevin: Wait, so the hero of our story starts out hating the art? How do you go from that to becoming its biggest champion? That’s a wild character arc. Michael: Because Quinn had this core philosophy that drove him. He once said, "I like to be a man of my own day and time." He came to believe that even if modern art was difficult or unsettling, it was the only art that was truly alive. He said it had "radium" in it, while the Old Masters were beautiful but dead. For him, collecting modern art wasn't just about decoration; it was about engaging with the vital, chaotic energy of the 20th century. Kevin: So he was like a cultural venture capitalist. He wasn't investing in what was safe and proven, but in what felt risky and full of future potential. He was betting on the "radium." Michael: A perfect analogy. And he had a knack for it. Before he got deep into visual art, he almost single-handedly launched the Irish literary revival in America. He brought over the poet W.B. Yeats, who was completely unknown in the States, and through a masterful publicity campaign, turned him into a national celebrity. He knew how to sell the difficult and the foreign to a skeptical American audience. Kevin: That context is key. He wasn't just a rich guy buying paintings; he was a master promoter, a strategist. But even with his skills, America in the 1910s seems like a tough market for Cubism. Michael: Incredibly tough. The cultural establishment was openly hostile. And here’s a story that perfectly captures it. After that first Picasso show was a commercial disaster, the gallery owner, Stieglitz, was desperate. He went to the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and offered to sell him the entire collection of Picasso drawings—the whole show—for two thousand dollars. Kevin: Hold on. The entire set of early Picassos for two grand? That's less than a used car today. What did the Met say? Michael: The curator, a man named Bryson Burroughs, laughed him out of the room. He said, and this is a direct quote, "Such mad pictures would never mean anything to America." Kevin: Wow. That single decision has to be one of the biggest blunders in art history. It just shows how completely unprepared and hostile the American cultural landscape was. They literally couldn't see the value. Michael: And that’s the world John Quinn decided to fight. He realized it wasn't enough to just buy the art. He had to change the entire system. He went to Washington and launched a one-man lobbying campaign to get rid of a punitive import tax on contemporary art. The law at the time made it free to import hundred-year-old paintings, but taxed new art. Kevin: So the system was rigged in favor of dead artists. It was a tax on the new. Michael: Precisely. Quinn argued it was undemocratic. He said the law "gave rich men their class of art free and to the poor man or the man of moderate means we declined to give it free." He successfully framed modern art as a matter of public education and cultural progress, and he won. He got the tax eliminated. This man wasn't just a collector; he was a warrior for modernism.

Michael: And for all of Quinn's victories, his greatest legacy was born from his biggest failure: his death. He was diagnosed with liver cancer and died in 1924, at the peak of his collecting. Kevin: Oh man. So after all that fighting, what happened to his incredible collection? He must have had a detailed plan, right? A will to create a museum or something? Michael: You would think so, but it was a complete mess. His will was ambiguous, and the people he left in charge of his estate were his lawyer and the National Bank of Commerce. They knew nothing about modern art and, frankly, they were embarrassed by it. Kevin: Let me guess, they didn't see the "radium." Michael: They saw a financial liability and a potential PR problem. One of the bank officers told a friend of Quinn's, "We don’t want Wall Street laughing at us as the Cubist bank." Their primary goal was to liquidate the collection as quickly and quietly as possible. Kevin: That's heartbreaking. It's like a visionary builds this incredible library of priceless first editions, and the heirs just see a pile of old paper to be recycled. So what happened at the auction? Michael: It was a bloodbath. Quinn himself had predicted it, telling his confidante Jeanne Foster, "If anything happened to me and there was a sale of my paintings, there would be a slaughter." And he was right. Masterpieces by Seurat, Brancusi, and Picasso were sold for a fraction of their worth. One critic called the sale a "massacre." America's first and greatest collection of modern art was scattered to the winds. Kevin: That’s a tragedy. But you said this failure led to a great success. How does that work? Michael: Because a few key people were watching this disaster unfold in horror. Three incredibly influential women: Lillie P. Bliss, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Mary Quinn Sullivan. They saw the Quinn collection vanish and realized there was no institution in the entire country that could have, or would have, saved it. The Met didn't want it, and there was nowhere else for it to go. Kevin: So MoMA was essentially founded as a 'never again' movement. It was a direct response to the Quinn catastrophe. That completely reframes its origin story. It wasn’t just a nice idea; it was an emergency rescue mission. Michael: That's the perfect way to put it. And to lead this mission, they hired a brilliant, intense, and very young art historian from Harvard named Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Barr had seen the memorial exhibition of Quinn's collection in 1926, and it had been a life-changing experience for him. He called Quinn the country's "most emancipated" art collector. Kevin: So the torch was passed, in a way. From the passionate, chaotic warrior to the systematic, strategic institution-builder. Michael: Exactly. Barr consciously set out to build the institution that Quinn had dreamed of but never realized. He even developed a famous plan for the museum's collection that he called the "torpedo report." He envisioned the collection as a torpedo moving through time, with the nose being the ever-advancing present and the tail being the receding past. Works would be acquired, and as they became "classics," they would be passed on to more traditional museums like the Met. Kevin: Wow, so the museum itself was designed to be a living, breathing thing, just like the art Quinn championed. It wasn't meant to be a static warehouse of old masterpieces. Michael: That was the revolutionary idea. And it was an idea born directly from the ashes of John Quinn's lost collection. The failure to save one man's vision gave birth to an institution that would define modern art for the rest of the century.

Michael: So when you look at the whole story, you see this incredible through-line. It starts with one man's personal, almost irrational, crusade to force a new and difficult art form on a resistant country. Kevin: A country that literally thought modern art was 'degenerate' and linked it to Bolshevism! Quinn even called the critics out, comparing their attacks to the Ku Klux Klan. He called it "Ku Klux criticism." Michael: He did. And when his very personal, very chaotic crusade ended with his death, the destruction of his collection became the very reason an institution had to be born. MoMA isn't just a museum; it's the institutionalized version of John Quinn's fighting spirit, systemized and scaled by Alfred Barr. Kevin: It makes you realize that our cultural landscape isn't inevitable. It's not shaped by committees or consensus. It's forged by a few obsessive, brilliant, and often difficult people who refuse to take 'no' for an answer. Michael: And it also shows how the threat of destruction can be a powerful catalyst for preservation. The rise of Nazism and their war on "degenerate art" in the 1930s added a new urgency to Barr's mission. MoMA became not just a gallery, but a sanctuary. Kevin: That’s a powerful thought. It makes me wonder, what is the 'difficult' art or what are the challenging ideas of our time that are being dismissed or attacked? What are we currently letting slip through our fingers that future generations will see as a 'massacre'? Michael: A fantastic question for our listeners to ponder. What do you think is the 'modern art' of our time that's being misunderstood? Let us know your thoughts on our social channels. We'd love to hear what you think. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.