Confessions of an Art Addict (10 page)

Soon after Pearl Harbor we were married, as I did not want to live in sin with an enemy alien.

When we arrived in America we had expected a warm reception from Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, but he was in Vermont and we did not see him until the fall. His books had been my bibles for years and I was longing to meet him. When I did so, I was surprised how much he resembled Abraham Lincoln. I
liked him at once. He was shy but charming, and his conversation was serious and learned and stimulating. He was impressed by my passion for art. He wanted to buy a painting of Max's for the Museum of Modern Art, but as my Aunt Olga, his guardian angel, only gave him money to buy the most expensive paintings, he could never raise the funds he needed. So in the end he gave me a Malevich (of which he had thirteen) which had been smuggled out of Russia in an umbrella, and I gave Max five hundred dollars and Barr got Max's painting.

When we moved into Beekman Place we gave a huge house-warming. Unfortunately there was a terrible fight between giant Nicco Callas, the art critic, and little Charles Henri Ford, the poet. Jimmy Ernst, who was my secretary, rushed to take down my Kandinsky, fearing it would be spattered with blood. Barr thought it was real devotion on Jimmy's part to rescue my painting before Max's.

Max took me to many museums. He called the Modern Museum the Barr house, and the Guggenheim museum. (my uncle's collection), the Bauer House, and the Gallatin collection, now in Philadelphia, the Bore house. He liked the Museum of Natural History, where he decided the mathematical objects were much better than Pevsner's constructions, but what he really preferred was the Museum of the American Indian, the Hay Foundation, where Breton took us. It has undoubtedly the best collection in the world of British Columbian, Alaskan,
pre-Columbian, Indian and Mayan art. Max was in constant communication with a little man called Carlebach, who produced wonderful things for him from all these places, so our house soon became full of them, and as we had practically no furniture, it looked very beautiful. Carlebach was perpetually scurrying round and finding things with which to tempt Max and phoning him.

When Carlebach discovered that I collected ear-rings, he immediately got together a large quantity and began to work on me. But I did not succumb. Of course, Max did. He bought me a beautiful pair with Spanish baroque pearls. But I resisted any further efforts on the part of Carlebach, as I considered him sufficiently dangerous with his masks and totem poles. The last one Max bought was twenty feet high. He also bought an old Victorian chair with a ten-foot back. It was a stage piece and he would not let anyone else sit in it, except my daughter. He looked regal in it, or more like a matinée idol. At one period, he filled the house with American wooden horses. He was selling more and more pictures in New York, with my aid and Putzel's, and could well afford luxuries of this sort, especially as he refused to contribute to our household expenses and never put a cent aside for his income tax.

The paintings Max had done in France between periods of concentration camps, or while he was actually in them, started a completely new phase of his work. The backgrounds of these paintings resembled the desert land
of Arizona and the swamps of Louisiana, which we were soon to visit together. It seems to have been his special gift to forepaint the future. As his painting was completely unconscious, and came from some deep hidden source, nothing he ever did surprised me. At one time when he was alone in France, after Leonora had left, he painted her portrait over and over again in all the landscapes that he was so soon to discover in America. I was jealous that he never painted me and it was a cause of great unhappiness.

One day when I went into his studio I had a great shock. There on his easel was a little painting I had never seen before. In it was portrayed a strange figure with the head of a horse. It was Max's own head with the body of a man dressed in shining armour. Facing this strange creature, with her hands between his legs, was a portrait of me, but not of me as Max had ever seen me. It was my face at the age of eight. I have photographs of myself at this age and the likeness is unquestionable. I burst into tears and told Max he had at last painted my portrait. He was rather surprised, as he had never seen the photos. Because my hand was placed where it was, and because it was between two spears, I named the painting ‘Mystic Marriage'. At my request Max gave me this painting. Later he painted an enormous canvas of this same subject, slightly changing it, and my lovely little innocent child's head turned into that of a terrible monster. He called the big painting ‘Anti-Pope'. I own both of them and they
now bear the same title.

In New York I kept on buying paintings and sculpture in order to complete Herbert Read's list. Many of the artists had left Paris and were living in New York, so the atmosphere was very exciting and stimulating. Breton and Max went about with me to galleries and helped me to choose. Putzel showed up too and continued his exertions. I was also very busy completing the catalogue I had started in Grenoble. Max did a beautiful cover for it and helped me a lot with the layout. I was rather worried about this catalogue, however, and decided it was very dull. I asked Breton to save it. He was always telling me it was ‘catastrophique', which it probably would have been, had it not been for him. He spent hours of research and found statements made by each artist represented in the collection. We included all these statements in the catalogue, as well as photographs of their eyes. Breton's introduction, translated by Laurence Vail, was excellent, containing a whole history of Surrealism. I got Mondrian to do another introduction for me as well and also used the one Arp had written for me in Europe. Breton made me add the manifestos of the different movements in art in the last thirty years. We also included statements made by Picasso, Max, de Chirico, and others.

The catalogue, which I named
Art of This Century,
was produced by the Art Aid Corporation and sold in all the bookshops in New York, and eventually all over the world. It sold very well, but unfortunately there were only
two thousand copies. The bookshops made lovely windows for me, and I was terribly excited. Jimmy, my stepson and secretary, helped me a great deal in all this and was excellent about advance publicity.

I introduced Max to my aunt, Mrs Solomon Guggenheim. All my uncle's best paintings were in their suite in the Plaza Hotel, while their museum was full of awful enormous Bauers in heavy silver frames. When I told my aunt to burn them all she said, ‘Don't let your uncle hear that, he has invested a fortune in them.' She said with much perspicacity that she considered Dali was to Max what Bauer was to Kandinsky.

Finally I found a top story in West 57th Street for my museum. I didn't know how to decorate it, and Putzel, as usual on hand said, ‘Why don't you get Kiesler to give you a few little ideas?' Frederik Kiesler was one of the most advanced architects of this century. So I accepted Putzel's suggestion, never dreaming that the few little ideas would end up in my spending seven thousand dollars.

Kiesler was a little man about five feet tall, with a Napoleonic complex. He was an unrecognized genius,
and I gave him a chance, after he had been in America for fifteen years, to do something really sensational. He told me that I would not be known to posterity for my collection, but for the way he presented it in his revolutionary setting.

Kiesler really created a wonderful gallery—very theatrical and extremely original. If the pictures suffered from the fact that their setting was too spectacular and took away people's attention from them, it was at least a marvellous décor and created a terrific stir.

The only condition I had made was that the pictures should be unframed. Otherwise Kiesler had
carte blanche.
I had expected that he would insert the pictures into the walls. I was quite wrong: his ideas were much more original. In the Surrealist gallery he put curved walls made of South American gum wood. The unframed paintings, mounted on baseball bats, which could be tilted at any angle, protruded about a foot from the walls. Each one had its own spotlight. Because of Kiesler's theatrical ideas, the lights, to everybody's dismay, went off every three seconds. That is, they lit only half the pictures at a time. People complained, and said that if they were looking at a painting on one side of the room, the lights suddenly went off and they were forced to look at some other painting that was lit instead of the one they wanted to see. Putzel finally put an end to this and the lighting system became normal. In the abstract and Cubist gallery where I had my desk, near the entrance, I was perpetually
flooded in a strong fluorescent light. Two walls, consisting of an ultramarine canvas curtain like a circus tent, attached to the ceiling and floor by strings, curved around the room in various sweeps. The floor was painted turquoise.

The paintings, which were also hung on strings from the ceiling, and at right angles to the walls, looked as though they were floating in space. Little triangular shelves of wood supported the sculptures, which also seemed to float in the air. Kiesler had designed a chair out of plywood and various coloured linoleums, which could be used for seven different purposes. It could serve as a rocking chair, or it could be turned over and used as a stand for paintings or sculpture, or as a bench, or table, and it could also be combined in different ways with planks of wood to increase the seating capacity. The gallery was supposed to seat ninety people for lectures, so there were also little folding chairs covered in ultramarine blue canvas, like the curtain. Kiesler also produced an ingenious stand which, at the same time, served as storage space for the drawings and a place to exhibit them. This saved much space, which I needed.

There was a beautiful daylight gallery that skirted the front of 57th Street, which was used for monthly shows. Here pictures could be shown in frames on plain white walls. In order to temper the light, Kiesler put a flat ninon screen a few inches in front of the window. In one corridor he placed a revolving wheel on which to show
seven works of Klee. This wheel automatically went into motion when the public stepped across a beam of light. In order to view the entire works of Marcel Duchamp in reproduction, you looked through a hole in the wall and turned by hand a very spidery looking wheel. The press named this part of the gallery ‘Coney Island'. Behind the blue canvas, I had an office, which I never used, as I wanted to be in the gallery all the time to see what was going on.

The opening night, October 20, 1942, was dedicated to the Red Cross, and tickets were sold for a dollar each. Many of the invitations were lost in the mail, but hundreds of people came. It was a real gala opening. I had a white evening dress made for the occasion, and wore one of my Tanguy ear-rings and one made by Calder, in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and abstract art. The last days we worked day and night to get the gallery ready in time, but workmen were still on the premises when the press arrived in the afternoon before the opening.

We had great money difficulties. More and more bills kept coming in. Finally, when I realized how much Kiesler's total cost exceeded his estimate, I practically broke with him and refused to let him come to my house, but I maintained a formal museum façade.

I was so excited about my life in the museum that I neglected Max and my home, which did a great deal of harm to our marriage. But we had a lot of parties in the
evening and entertained all Breton's and Max's followers, besides the abstract painters, and a great many young American ones.

My first secretary in the gallery, which I named Art of This Century, after my catalogue, was Jimmy Ernst. Later, when he left me, Putzel came to work with me. The first show was dedicated to my collection. Fourteen of Max's paintings and
collages
were on exhibition, more than those of any other painter; naturally, as I owned so many. Kiesler and I had not permitted anyone to see the gallery before it was finished—even Max was not admitted. When he finally saw his paintings, taken out of all their fancy and expensive frames, he made a great fuss, but when he saw how well all the other paintings looked he decided not to be difficult.

The publicity we got was overwhelming. Photographs appeared in all the papers. Even if the press didn't altogether approve of Kiesler's ultra-revolutionary ideas, at least they talked enough about the gallery to cause hundreds of people to come to see it every day.

The next show as an exhibition for three artists' works: Laurence Vail's decorated bottles, Joseph Cornell's Surrealist objects, and Marcel Duchamp's valise, a little pig-skin suit-case he had invented to contain all the reproductions of his works. I often thought how amusing it would have been to have gone off on a week-end and brought this along, instead of the usual bag one thought one needed.

The third show was dedicated to the works of thirty-one women. This was an idea Marcel had given me in Paris. The paintings submitted were judged by a jury consisting of Max, Marcel, Breton, the critics James Johnson Sweeney and James Soby, Putzel, Jimmy Ernst and myself. Edward Alden Jewell, art critic for the
New York Times
, wrote a long article about this show in which he said, ‘The elevator man at Art of This Century, who is tremendously interested in art, told me on the way up that he had given the place an extra thorough cleaning because Gypsy Rose Lee, one of the exponents, was coming.'

I made Max work very hard for this show. He had to go around to all the women and bring their paintings to the gallery in his car. He was interested in women who painted. There was one called Dorothea Tanning, a pretty girl from the Middle West. She was quite talented, and imitated Max's painting, which flattered him immensely. They now became very friendly and played chess together while I was in the gallery. Soon they became more than friendly and I realized that I should only have had thirty women in the show. This was destined to end our marriage.