Rachel: What if the most famous artist of the 20th century was a total flop in America? For decades, Picasso wasn't a genius; he was a joke. His art was called 'degenerate,' a 'fire escape,' and was rejected by every major museum. This is the story of that failure. Justine: A flop? Picasso? That sounds impossible. We think of him as this untouchable giant, the definition of modern art. To imagine him being laughed out of the room is just… wild. Rachel: And it's all laid out in this incredible book we’re talking about today, Picasso's War: How Modern Art Came to America by Hugh Eakin. Justine: Right, and Eakin isn't just an art historian; he's a senior editor at The New York Review of Books. He spent years digging through archives in Europe and the U.S. to piece this together. It's less an art book and more a cultural detective story. Rachel: Exactly. And it was widely acclaimed for that novelistic style. It shows how the battle for Picasso wasn't just about art—it was about saving masterpieces from the Nazis and shifting the entire center of the art world from Paris to New York. Justine: It’s a story with huge stakes. And it really begins with one person, right? One man who decided to take on the taste of an entire country. Rachel: It does. A fascinating, contradictory man who was a Wall Street lawyer by day, and a cultural renegade by night.

Rachel: His name was John Quinn. And in 1911, he walked into a tiny New York gallery called 291, run by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, to see the very first American exhibition of Picasso's work. His reaction? He said the drawings were "blood-curdling." Justine: Blood-curdling? What did he even see? Can you describe it? I think for a lot of us who aren't art history majors, 'Cubism' is just a vague word. What were people actually seeing that made them so angry? Rachel: Imagine seeing a portrait, but the face is shattered into geometric pieces, like looking at a reflection in a broken mirror. You see a nose from the side and an eye from the front, all at the same time. It was disorienting, aggressive. One critic looked at a drawing of a standing woman and famously dismissed it as a "fire escape, and not a good fire escape at that." Justine: A fire escape! That’s brutal. So the establishment just completely shut it down. Rachel: Completely. Stieglitz, the gallery owner, only sold one single drawing. He got so desperate he offered the entire remaining collection—dozens of works—to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for just $2,000. Justine: Wait, are you telling me the most important art museum in America rejected a whole set of Picassos for just two grand? That has to be one of the worst deals in history. Rachel: The curator at the Met, a man named Bryson Burroughs, dismissed them as "mad pictures" that would "never mean anything to America." He sent them back to Paris. Justine: Wow. But Quinn, even though he found them 'blood-curdling,' didn't give up. What was his next move? Rachel: He realized that to change America's mind, you couldn't be subtle. You needed a cultural bomb. And that bomb was the 1913 Armory Show. Quinn was a key organizer, and they brought over not just Picasso, but Matisse, Duchamp, Brancusi—all the European radicals. And America… lost its mind. Justine: So what was the reaction? Were people throwing things? Rachel: Almost! The press called the artists "inmates of a madhouse." Former President Teddy Roosevelt came and wrote a scathing review, mocking the "lunatic fringe." And when the show traveled to Chicago, it got even worse. Art students held a mock trial for Henri Matisse, found him guilty of artistic crimes, and burned his paintings in effigy on the steps of the Art Institute. Justine: They burned effigies of him? That's not just dislike, that's violent opposition. It’s like a culture war fought with paint. Rachel: It was. And Quinn understood that this war had to be fought on multiple fronts. It wasn't just about galleries. He realized the system itself was rigged against modern art. At the time, there was a punitive tariff on any imported art less than twenty years old. So, a billionaire could import a Rembrandt for free, but an ordinary person trying to buy a painting from a young, living artist got hit with a tax. Justine: That’s so backward. It’s a system designed to keep art in the past. Rachel: Precisely. So Quinn, the lawyer, went to Washington. He launched this brilliant lobbying campaign, arguing that free art wasn't about commerce, it was about education. He framed it as a matter of cultural equity—why should rich men get their Old Masters tax-free while the common man was penalized for wanting to see the art of his own time? And he won. He got the tariff abolished. Justine: That’s incredible. He won the legal battle. But as you said, the cultural war was far from over. Rachel: Far from it. While America was still arguing about whether a painting was a masterpiece or a fire escape, the real machine for making Picasso a global star was just getting started, back in Paris. And it was being run by two men who couldn't have been more different.

Justine: The dealers! This is the part of the art world nobody sees. It’s not just about the lone genius in a studio. There’s a business behind the brand. Who were these guys? Rachel: On one side, you have Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. I think of him as "The Chess Player." He was a quiet, intellectual German dealer. His strategy was revolutionary for its time. He’d find an artist he believed in, like Picasso or Braque, and sign an exclusive contract to buy everything they produced. Justine: Everything? So he's cornering the market. Rachel: Exactly. But here’s the genius part: he almost never held exhibitions. He kept the work hidden away in the back of his small, unpretentious gallery. He created scarcity, mystique. He didn't sell to the Parisian public. He cultivated a small, elite group of international clients—industrialists from Germany, textile barons from Russia—who he knew had the vision, and the cash, to invest long-term. Justine: That's a fascinating strategy. It's like a tech startup operating in stealth mode, only showing the product to a handful of venture capitalists. So who was his rival, the 'Showman'? Rachel: That would be Paul Rosenberg. If Kahnweiler’s gallery was a laboratory, Rosenberg’s was a palace. It was on the chic rue La Boétie, right next to the Elysée Palace. He was all about presentation. He wanted to make modern art a luxury good, something that belonged in the elegant homes of Parisian high society. He would even tell Picasso what to paint—more Harlequins, more classical figures—because he knew what his bourgeois clients wanted to buy. Justine: So it's the ultimate business case study: Kahnweiler the product-focused, long-game strategist versus Rosenberg the slick, market-driven showman. It’s like comparing Apple's early days with, I don't know, a luxury fashion brand. Which one of them 'won'? Rachel: Well, history intervened. When World War One broke out, Kahnweiler, being a German citizen in France, was declared an enemy alien. He was forced into exile in Switzerland, and the French government seized his entire gallery—hundreds of paintings, including over 130 Picassos. It was a catastrophic loss. Justine: Oh, man. So his whole long-game strategy was wiped out by geopolitics. Rachel: Completely. And that left the field wide open for Paul Rosenberg. He swooped in, signed Picasso, and began to completely reshape his career. He moved Picasso into a fancy apartment, got him a chauffeur, and turned the bohemian artist into a respectable, high-society figure. Picasso was now a brand, and Rosenberg was his global brand manager. Justine: Okay, so Rosenberg makes Picasso a star in Paris. But how does this finally connect back to America, which, as we've established, still thinks his art is a joke? Rachel: It connects through a void, and a vision. The void was left by John Quinn. When he died in 1924, his will was a mess. He had wanted to preserve his collection, but it ended up being sold off and scattered to the winds. His friend called the auction a "massacre." Many of the great works he’d fought for were sold for a pittance. Justine: That’s heartbreaking. All that work, just gone. Rachel: It was a tragedy for American culture. But it was that tragedy that spurred a group of wealthy, determined women—chief among them Lillie Bliss, Mary Sullivan, and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller—to say, "Never again." They realized America needed a permanent fortress for modern art. A place to protect it, champion it, and teach people how to see it. Justine: And that fortress became the Museum of Modern Art. Enter Alfred Barr.

Rachel: Exactly. Alfred Barr was MoMA’s first director, a young, brilliant, and incredibly driven curator from Harvard. And from day one, he had a singular obsession: a massive, career-spanning Picasso retrospective. He wanted to show America, once and for all, why Picasso mattered. Justine: A huge undertaking. But he's still facing a country that's deeply skeptical, right? Rachel: Deeply. But now, the stakes were even higher. As Barr was planning his show in the 1930s, a new, far more sinister enemy of modern art was rising in Europe: the Nazi party. Justine: This is where the 'war' in the title gets literal. Rachel: It really does. The Nazis launched a systematic campaign against what they called "degenerate art." They purged modern works from German museums. Artists like Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky were fired from their teaching posts and forced to flee. For Barr, his Picasso exhibition was no longer just an art show. It was a rescue mission. It was a political statement. Justine: So he’s racing against time, trying to get these masterpieces out of Europe before the continent collapses into war. Rachel: He is. And the stories are incredible. He's trying to secure loans for monumental paintings like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon—the painting that basically started Cubism—and Guernica, Picasso’s furious anti-war masterpiece. He's dealing with Picasso's own indecisiveness, the scheming of dealers, and the logistics of shipping priceless art across an ocean shadowed by U-boats. There's this one nail-biting story where a final, crucial crate of Picassos is set to sail from France, but when the ship arrives in New York, the crate is missing. Justine: Oh, no. Don't tell me it's at the bottom of the Atlantic. Rachel: For weeks, they thought it might be. Barr was in a panic. It turns out, in the chaos of people fleeing Europe, the crate was simply left behind on the dock in Le Havre. It was safe, but it showed just how precarious the whole enterprise was. Justine: The stakes are suddenly so much higher. It's not about taste anymore; it's about saving culture from being erased. So the show does happen? Rachel: It opens in November 1939, just two months after Hitler invades Poland. And it becomes a phenomenon. The exhibition, titled Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, is a blockbuster. It tours the country for years, from New York to Chicago to San Francisco. Hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom had never set foot in a museum, lined up for blocks to see it.

Justine: It's just an incredible arc. The same art that was called 'degenerate' and burned in effigy twenty-five years earlier is now the hottest ticket in the country. What changed? Rachel: The context changed everything. In the 1910s, Picasso’s art felt like a foreign threat to American values. By 1940, with Europe under the boot of fascism, that same art became a powerful symbol of American values: freedom, individualism, and defiance in the face of tyranny. Alfred Barr and MoMA didn't just show the paintings; they gave America a new story about what they meant. Justine: So the book is really arguing that the art we see in museums isn't just there because it's 'good.' It's there because of these intense, messy, human battles—Quinn's legal fights, the dealers' business rivalries, and Barr's cultural crusade against the backdrop of a literal war. The journey of a single painting can be an epic. Rachel: Exactly. And that's the profound insight here. Art doesn't exist in a vacuum. Its meaning is forged in the fires of history, business, and politics. The story of how Picasso came to America is the story of how America came to see itself as the new guardian of Western culture. Justine: It makes you wonder, what art is being fought for right now? What cultural battles are happening that we won't see the results of for another 50 years? Rachel: That is a fantastic question. And it’s a great one for our listeners to think about. What do you think is the 'modern art' of our time—the art that challenges us, that some people hate, but that future generations might see as defining our era? Justine: We'd love to hear your thoughts. Find us on our socials and join the conversation. This story shows that these debates truly matter. Rachel: This is Aibrary, signing off.