Sharon Lorenzo reviews this book about the hurdles overcome for modern art to be welcomed in America.

Hugh Eakin

Pablo Picasso

Hugh Eakin is a senior editor at the Foreign Affairs publication and a part-time contributor to the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker magazine. A graduate of Swarthmore College, his career as a writer is booming with this recent book entitled Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America.  His research and detailed observations chronicle many conflicts including World War I and II as well as the bombing in Spain of the town of Guernica in 1937. In addition, the two wives and two mistresses of the artist Picasso brought forth four children, one legitimate and the other three born out of wedlock producing additional war-like emotional conflicts for the artist which Eakin enumerates in detail.

There are 75 pages of books on Picasso available on Amazon today which again reiterates how brave Eakin was to even jump into this arena since art history is not his specialty.   With help from deep archival research and memoirs of the Paris art dealer, Paul Rosenberg, shared by his daughter-in-law, Eakin weaves a tale of how an artist born in Malaga, Spain migrates to France and meets his intellectual peers like Matisse and Cezanne to produce a massive oeuvre of paintings, sculpture, pottery, and drawings valued at his death in 1973 at over $250 million dollars. It took lawyers in France six years to negotiate an estate settlement and today the living heirs are all members of the Picasso Foundation which licenses endorsements for cars, perfumes, and gifts to museums each year.

Art Dealer Paul Rosenberg

Eakin’s thesis is that in the New York Armory show of 1913 a lawyer named John Quinn saw the art works of many European modernists and began to collect some for himself. It was difficult to circumvent an import tax on art made after 1910 due to legislation introduced by Senator Aldrich from Rhode Island at the behest of J.P. Morgan who had just founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With his peers, Henry Frick and Andrew Carnegie, they built mansions in New York and began to load up on old master art works from the infamous art dealer, Joseph Duveen.  Ironically it was the ladies, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and friends Lillian Bliss and Mary Sullivan who followed Quinn’s ideas and eventually started the Museum of Modern Art as Abby got her father to rescind the art tax.  Quinn’s successors hired a Princeton graduate, Alfred Barr, and funded his museum exhibitions, finally getting Picasso’s work known in New York with the show in 1939 entitled “Picasso: Forty Years of his Art”.

John Quinn

Alfred Barr

Abby and John Rockefeller Jr.

Eakin also traces the story of Picasso’s work which he began in Paris in 1937 in response to a request from the Spanish government for a work to be displayed at the Paris Exposition in its pavilion.  Measuring 11 x 25 feet, painted on canvas in somber gray and black tones, Picasso produced the work he called Guernica in response to the German Luftwaffe bombing of the small village in Northern Spain on April 26, 1937 on a market day where innocent women and children were murdered with 3000 tons of bombardment.  The painting was loaded onto the SS Normandie after the show in September of 1937 and toured the USA, raising awareness and funds for the anti-Hitler movement in Europe.  In 1939, the painting ended its tour at the MOMA and lived there until 1981 when Picasso said in his will that it could return to Spain following Franco’s death, since he had partnered with Hitler during World War II.  Today it resides in the modern museum in Madrid, The Reina Sofia, a former hospital converted to an art space with the classic art collection of the country still housed nearby in the Prado Museum.

Guernica, oil on canvas, 1937

This book is a chronicle of how the worldwide art market is a mix of investment, collection, dealers, museums, and art fairs that all fund and follow the work of artists from ancient times to the present.  Even after my 40 plus classes in art history, I learned a great deal from Eakin’s effort and recommend it for a close read.  There is an interview of the author on You Tube as well by Max Anderson, the former Whitney Museum director, that is very informative for all.

Hugh Eakin: Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America

Crown Publishing, September 26, 2023, 480 pgs. $19.89.