Artists as Actors in the Dissemination and Preservation of Avant-Garde Works

The role played by avant-garde artists in the dissemination of their works and those of their friends in France, just before and during the Second World War, is still largely unknown. The paths we are going to explore in this article are all untrodden compared with the usual market channels at the time: the Hôtel Drouot, intermediaries of the collaboration, and the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, ERR); they will lead us to another area of study and an entirely different ethic of trade, in which the transactions were generally used to defend and protect an art that was in the process of inventing its own legitimacy and even—we will discuss this in more detail later—the mechanisms of its institutional reception. Rescue and preservation strategies emerged during this difficult period, as opposing forces emerged, and, in a complete change of paradigm, the works that fill our present-day modern art museums were derided by the Vichy regime¹ and infamously regarded as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazi regime, which, as we know, perpetrated acts of aesthetic violence². Ultimately, it was nothing less than preventing the destruction of avant-garde works and its consequences: obscurity—the obliteration of a creative effervescence, ideals, high points, networks of artists, avant-garde cultures, and concrete realities. A painting that has been burned or lost, which has disappeared and has been swallowed up in the turmoil of history, is the death of a world.

Studying the fate of the works, their history, and their ‘ecosystems’³ provides a rich basis, as we now know, for any account of the history of art that endeavours to stand at a crossroads between the ideas, fields of knowledge, and the methods used—and not only research into provenance which can sometimes be confined to a purely social approach, by failing to analyse the artistic content and impact of the objects studied. ‘The biographies of things can make salient what might otherwise remain obscure’, wrote Igor Kopytoff.⁴ The defence strategies implemented by the artists question nothing less than the process of making art history. The strategies transformed the artists into agents and actors; they were not pawns of all the modernist genealogies or powerless victims of the times, a dangerous period that was deadly and fraught with difficulties. Lastly, they invite a shift of focus, extending from the very small (the micro level of the object itself) to the very large (the macro of the context), and are therefore rich sources of information from a historical, methodological, and epistemological point of view.

Before beginning our study, let us define the terms used. The very expression ‘avant-garde’ has become unusable in the opinion of many, due to the polysemous and often contradictory use of the term throughout the twentieth century. However, the concept is not devoid of interest, as it explicitly refers to a creative movement determined by shared struggles, dreams, and sociabilities; the term commonly refers to the men and women in the Dada movement and abstract art movement (the various practices and connotations), to which this study is devoted. We are using the notion of avant-garde in its original sense, at the height of the 1920s and during the period on which this study focuses: the term does not refer to a style or a precise period, but a concept, a modus operandi, or, more precisely, a fundamentally incomplete—and hence ever relevant—project. As Patrick de Haas underlined, there is no ‘historical’ avant-garde, because ‘not only has it not fully achieved its goals, but its objectives remain largely misunderstood’.⁵ Although the ‘project’ is not dated, the participants in the avant-garde were nevertheless men and women of their time, and the dissemination of works, which they organised, did in fact create the foundation for their reception, particularly in museums, in contrast with the general supposition that the avant-garde and institutions were necessarily opposed. It was ultimately a way of responding slowly but surely to the forces of reaction, initially, and then the forces of destruction.

The artist as an intermediary and organiser of collections

‘The French word “courtier” is probably derived from the old French word “corre, courre” (→ “courir”) (…); the word refers to one who puts buyer and seller in touch with one another for a fee or commission, in trade or securities transactions, and, by extension, one who acts as an intermediary in a transaction, a go-between (1740)’.¹ For artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Nelly van Doesburg or, to a lesser extent, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, brokerage was not always a gainful activity (or was carried out via a system of mutual aid that exceeded the commission system), and, in any case, never purely commercial. A relatively unexpected side of their work, this satisfied a much broader moral imperative, which consisted of creating the conditions for the preservation of avant-garde art, and even informing the public about it. Because ‘the only way to be followed is to run faster than the others’, as the Dadaist Francis Picabia once said, everyone acted quickly, as kingpins of the most important collections of their time, without endeavouring to steal the limelight. Discreet go-betweens behind our current masterpieces, they changed our way of seeing and the very idea of a modern art museum; or rather, they invented it.

As the war played no role in establishing this tactical practice, let us look briefly at its origin. In 1920, in New York, Katherine Dreier, a painter, patron, feminist, and soon a prominent collector, founded⎯together with Duchamp and Man Ray, at the height of the Dada movement—a museum devoted to modern art called the Société Anonyme—Museum of Modern Art;  this was the first time that the term ‘museum of modern art’ was used, as both notions were at the time, immediately as it were, essentially considered antithetical. It was a combination of individuals who merged into a higher collective entity, based on a quest for anonymity through Dada practices,² and under a name suggested by Man Ray and derived ironically from business organisations (in addition, it was a redundant pun in English, as it was a literal translation of ‘Société Anonyme, Inc.’, which is the French for ‘Incorporated’), even though it was a ‘non-commercial’ organisation³; it aimed to disseminate works, ideas, and projects that were as yet far from being approved: according to its statutes, it aimed ‘to introduce the American audience to modern art.’ The ‘Société Anonyme - Museum of Modern Art’ was to remain a prototype for ventures to come; retrospectively, Katherine Dreier highlighted the ‘great confusion’ caused by the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art)⎯established in 1929 with premises of its own—by ‘assuming its name’.⁴ The Société Anonyme was an open, living organisation established for and by artists; it was noted for its resolutely international scope, the far-sightedness and diversity of its choices, the eighty or so exhibitions held before 1939, and the intensive and enjoyable educational activity (many presentations, including in secondary schools, where Katherine Dreier gave lectures, taking with her works by Klee and Kandinsky, and the creation of a reference library). Initially a museum located  in an appartement at 19 East 47^th Street, and then without premises, and without its own collection, the Société Anonyme soon became an unparalleled ensemble of works, which, from every perspective, was made legendary by the passage of time, because the ensemble as such no longer exists, as part of it was given to Yale University as of 1941⁵ (in all, more than one thousand works by one hundred and eighty artists); and Katherine Dreier’s private collection was divided, besides Yale, between several American museums: the Guggenheim in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and so on—a dispersion that undoubtedly reduced and blurred the scope of a coherent whole. Duchamp was the architect of the organisation throughout its existence.

By influencing and deciding even on the composition of the museum collections, as much as or more than the curators, the avant-garde artists forged the very fabric of art history, including in the enthusiastic beginnings of the USSR, where, before the known general shift in orientation, Kandinsky was the first director of the Museum of Pictorial Culture in Moscow (1919−1920) and organised a string of Soviet museums (he was subsequently vice-president of the Société Anonyme from 1923 to his death in 1944); at the Museum of Art in Łódź, in Poland, where the poet and painter Jan Brzękowski and Henryk Stazewski had set up⎯exclusively through donations and in collaboration with the art critic Michel Seuphor⎯a collection of abstract art that was relatively small, but the most prominent in the world in terms of its quality (inaugurated in 1932);⁶ in the United States, where the painter Albert Eugene Gallatin, a member of the group Abstraction-Création, opened—under the advice of Jean Hélion—,⁷ the Gallery of Living Art on Washington Square in New York in 1927, which became the Museum of Living Art in 1936. Other initiatives include the pivotal role played by the artist Hilla von Rebay in her interactions with Solomon Guggenheim, which led to the opening of the Museum of Non Objective Painting in 1939 in New York (now called the Guggenheim Museum; ‘without her advice and management, Mr. Guggenheim and his museum would never have come to possess one of the world’s most beautiful and valuable private collections’, stated the Dada painter and filmmaker Hans Richter, despite the fact that he did not particularly like Hilla Rebay⁸).

In Germany, Nazism dealt a fatal blow to the opening and unparalleled richness of the museums of the Weimar Republic, whose collections of modern art were removed, stored, and partly burned or sold, most notably in Lucerne in 1939. In Paris, which was institutionally highly conservative, and where there was no actual museum of modern art, State museum staff did not deem it necessary to acquire works of modern art, which were actually the beating heart of young museums, despite a brief upturn in interest at the end of the Front Populaire (an alliance of French left-wing movements from 1936 onwards), which ended when the war began; however, this was the context, as in a parallel world, in which almost all the artists lived; acting as advisers, go-betweens, or collectors like Dreier and Gallatin, they organised the dissemination of avant-garde works. On the eve of and during the war, the need to fulfil their commitment became more urgent.

Preserving and saving the artworks that could be saved

In 1935, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and her husband Jean Arp went on a difficult journey from Clamart to Germany (‘The  situation of art and artists is absolutely desperate’, she stated); at the request of Gallatin, she subsequently offered to sell him paintings by Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, and Mondrian, which the widow of a collector, to whom she said nothing about the situation, was offering to sell ‘at very cheap prices’, because she could no longer ‘hang them in her house and they would eventually get damaged in the attic’.¹ Therein lies all the ambiguity of the era: it was both a business opportunity with somewhat questionable ethics (what happened to the husband?), and an opportunity to save artworks (the paintings were deteriorating, and, given the risk of further damage, removing them from Germany ensured their preservation). It is necessary to understand who was talking in order not to misinterpret the situation. Listed, like all the Dadaists, in a ‘black list’²—as she called it—published in the Nazi journal Völkischer Beobachter on 23 February 1933, four days prior to the burning of the Reichstag, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, who opposed National Socialism³, was looking for a viable solution, for herself and her circle. Of great lucidity, she could only see two ultimate places of refuge for modern art in 1935: ‘America and possibly Switzerland’.⁴ It was necessary to save the artworks that could still be saved.

Between 1937, when the idea of founding a museum had emerged, and 1 June 1939, the date of its opening, Solomon Guggenheim’s collection doubled in size, increasing from around four hundred to eight hundred works,⁵ most of which were produced by artists labelled as ‘degenerate’ in Nazi Germany, and in particular Kandinsky, whom the copper magnate and his friend Hilla Rebay had supported since their visit to the Bauhaus in 1929, and even after Kandinsky’s difficult move to Neuilly at the end of 1933. Despite his strategy, which was adopted by many collectors of the avant-garde (buying works directly from artists), and despite the decision he had taken in 1934⎯that, as a Jew, he would never travel to or do business with Germany again⎯, Guggenheim went to Germany again in 1936, where the protégé and boyfriend of Hilla Rebay, the painter Rudolf Bauer, sold him several works; Bauer acted as their intermediary until his exile in 1939, after he had been interned in a camp. In 1937, Hilla Rebay visited the exhibition ‘Entartete kunst’ in Munich, where her first act was to advise her boss to acquire works by Kandinsky from amongst the works exhibited (two paintings and twelve drawings, out of fifty-seven works seized in the German museums, which were henceforth discredited and denigrated). There was a rumour circulating that there was an opportunity to buy them. For the Americans, it was possible a short while afterwards. During Hilla Rebay’s sojourn in Paris in the spring of 1938, she received a letter from the art dealer Curt Valentin offering for sale works from German public collections; it is not known what her response was.⁶ Solomon Guggenheim did in any case acquire six works by Kandinsky, including a masterpiece, the painting Blue Mountain (1908-1909, formerly held in the Staatliche Gemaldegalerie, in Dresden), from Gutekunst und Klipstein in Bern, in the spring of 1939; the same year, Bauer procured for Guggenheim around twenty works by the artist, ‘none of which, apparently, came directly’ from Kandinsky.⁷ The Guggenheim Collection therefore grew through this channel, amongst others. Hans Richter, whose studio in Berlin was ransacked by the SA in 1933, who had not returned to Germany since then and who knew exactly what the word ‘destruction’ meant, saw no moral ambiguity in this. In the summer of 1939, in France, he wrote to Hilla Rebay, who was to facilitate his move to the United States in 1941:

To evacuate from endangered Europe works from all the important periods, in particular those of the last generation, which are so important for the future; to bring them to America and plant the ‘seed of culture’ directly into America’s soil ... . That is a great thought ... . This man [Solomon Guggenheim] is making history.⁸

Opening museums and ensuring that avant-garde works were safe from the Nazis was certainly not the same project as acquiring them in order to make a real profit out of them. The element that greatly contributed to the decision taken by Katherine Dreier and Marcel Duchamp to bequeath the Société Anonyme’s collection to Yale University on the eve of America’s entry into the war (on 7 December 1941) was the guarantee that the incredible collection that they had compiled for twenty years would be transferred to an ad hoc fire-proof location if the worst were to occur.⁹ In the Dada movement, which, according to its detractors, was the dark angel of the end of art, there ultimately emerged not only the idea⎯but the very reality⎯of a museum of modern art: ‘it shall be the preserve of fastidious historians and belated censors to express their indignation retrospectively over these deviations from the purity of the principles, of which, moreover, the Dada movement has never been a proponent’, observed Robert Lebel.¹⁰

Hence, it was largely the need to preserve works that underlay the decisions about and ultimately the future of the works, whose dissemination created a new geography of art, such as a new conception of the museum and the composition of its collections, on the eve of and during the Second World War. The various destinations of the art objects show that in the mid 1930s, and not so much after 1945, America largely ensured the survival of the avant-garde.

Peggy Guggenheim in Paris

The niece of Solomon Guggenheim but without his incredible wealth, while being infinitely wealthy,¹ and who initially had no link with her uncle and Hilla Rebay and even had a conflictual with them, Peggy Guggenheim is worthy of mention because she dreamt of doing what no one else had dared to do: opening a museum devoted to the avant-garde in Paris, where, over the course of the Phoney War, she compiled a collection that was capable, like few others, of providing an overview of the modern art produced during the preceding thirty years.

Initially a novice art collector as it were, in the sense that even in 1937, she was, as she herself admitted, ‘incapable of telling art from non-art’,² Peggy Guggenheim was initially given advice by Marcel Duchamp, and then by Nelly van Doesburg, whose role was more significant than was previously believed.³ A musician who took part in Dadaist events in the Netherlands, during which she played Satie on the piano, together with Kurt Schwitters and her husband Théo, the founder of the De Stijl art movement, who died  in 1931, and whose memory she held dear, Nelly van Doesburg was becoming a leading promoter of the avant-garde at the museum and elsewhere: we need only to think of the exhibition  ‘Abstract Art’, a model of its kind, which she organised at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1938;⁴ and ‘Réalités Nouvelles’, held at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris in the summer of 1939⎯probably the most comprehensive exhibition of abstract art ever held in the city,⁵ in which were presented several works acquired shortly afterwards by her American counterpart, including drawings by Raoul Hausmann⁶ (who had taken refuge in Paris), which now grace the walls of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice.

Duchamp had recently introduced the enthusiastic heiress to the circle of friends, of which he and Nelly van Doesburg were members in France. From the outset, he oriented her collection, which she began compiling at the end of 1937 with a sculpture by Arp and a painting by Kandinsky; he also conceived and facilitated⎯on a practical level⎯the excellent programme of exhibitions held at the Guggenheim Jeune Gallery, which Peggy Guggenheim opened in London in January 1938, and which closed in June 1939. At that time, she was hoping to devote herself to her ‘museum of modern art’, a name chosen by the prominent British art historian Herbert Read, who conceived the interdisciplinary project and, above all, in a list which has yet to be located chose the artists whose works were to be acquired to assemble a permanent collection of works produced after 1910. Following the declaration of war on Germany by France and Great Britain, on 3 September, Peggy Guggenheim, who was at the time on holiday in the south of France, decided to move her utopia to Paris, where, according to her, she bought ‘a painting a day’. She acquired seventy major works⎯drawings, sculptures, and paintings⎯in eight months, based on the list drawn up by Read and revised by Duchamp and Nelly van Doesburg; the vast majority of the works were acquired directly from the artists.⁷

While everyone found themselves in a terrible situation,  Nelly van Doesburg’s case alone highlights the difficulties. In February 1939, she wrote, on the verge of despair, to the Swiss art critic Carola Giedion-Welcker to offer her, ‘as things are going terribly awry at the moment’, a substantial discount on the price of a painting by her husband, about which she had written nine months earlier (1,750 francs instead of 2,750 francs):  ‘I am in urgent need of money (…) I also have two very fine drawings by Picasso (…), a 1925 canvas by Miró and another by Severini, executed in 1914, which I would like to sell (…)’.⁸ She certainly must have been relieved when Peggy Guggenheim acquired, by the spring of 1940, her painting by Severini, another by Balla, and a third by El Lissitzky, amongst others. There may also have been a form of subordination to Peggy Guggenheim, who was in reality her ‘boss’,⁹ while making her life infinitely easier. The two women were to remain partners for a long time.

Thanks to an inventory drawn up by Nelly van Doesburg with insurance values, probably in 1940¹⁰, we know that Peggy Guggenheim⎯who drove a hard bargain and had, quite frankly, the stinginess common to many wealthy people⎯nevertheless offered artists and writers such as André Breton (approached through Duchamp¹¹) and Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia (for L’Enfant carburateur by Picabia) prices that were actually higher than those offered as a last resort to Carola Giedion-Welcker. The prices completely dispel the common misconception that avant-garde works were worthless (as if, in any case, artistic and financial value were the same thing); up to the quite incredible price for the time of 4,000 dollars, i.e. around 100,000 euros in today’s money, for L’Oiseau dans l’espace by Brancusi, who had refused a lower offer as his work had for a long time been promoted by Duchamp and the writer and collector Henri-Pierre Roché, who established the value of his works and saw him from the outset as the great artist that he is now recognised as. Moreover, the American collector probably paid for the works in dollars, a system that was advantageous for her, due to the exchange rates, and the sellers who feared the devaluation of the franc.

A history of art in crates

In April 1940, Peggy Guggenheim had a crazy idea in the light of the deteriorating political situation: she rented a lavish appartement on the Place Vendôme, with the idea of setting up a museum there; Georges Vantongerloo was entrusted with the creation of the scenography. But such an impossible idea was unfeasible. Everyone told her to remove the works and take them to a safer place. On the advice of Fernand Léger, she sought help from the Musées Nationaux, which, after some prevarication, granted a measly cubic metre as part of the protection of private collections. Nelly van Doesburg and Peggy Guggenheim rolled up canvases by Mondrian, Klee, Léger, Chirico, Mondrian, and so on, and placed them in a crate; then they were informed that, ultimately, the protection of the works had not been granted, as, apparently, the collection did not deserve to be saved.¹ Maria Jolas (co-founder with her husband Eugène Jolas of the journal Transition) offered to house the works in her château to the north of Vichy; six crates, one of which was reserved for L’Oiseau in l’espace by Brancusi, were sent to the château.Peggy Guggenheim and Nelly van Doesburg left Paris at the last minute, three days before the Germans entered the city; they went to the Lac d’Annecy where the Arps joined them.

Near the end of the summer, Maria Jolas returned to the United Sates, and Giorgio Joyce, the famous writer’s son, sent the crates by train to Annecy. They remained there for days and days on the platform, as Peggy Guggenheim had not been informed of their arrival; miraculously, nothing happened to them. How, therefore, were they to be kept safe? Nelly van Doesburg contacted Andry-Farcy, the director of the Musée de Grenoble, which housed the best collection of modern art in France, and which was the only museum that remained open throughout the war: ‘Nelly sent a telegraph from Grenoble saying that she had succeeded in persuading Farcy’, wrote Sophie Taeuber-Arp in her diary on 13 September.² Despite the general consensus, it seems that the collection was ultimately not exhibited, and instead joined works by Baumeister, Grosz, and Klee, which had been stored in a room divided by a curtain, which prevented access to them. The crates, opened briefly for the purposes of drawing up an inventory and then closed again, remained there until the end of the winter of 1941, and then left Marseille for the United States on 4 March, under a false name, and as everyday consumer goods, on the advice of the carriers Lefebvre-Foinet, who organised the subterfuge. Peggy Guggenheim, who crossed her fingers on the platform when she saw them leaving, arrived in New York in June. Nelly van Doesburg remained in the Grenoble region where she seems to have acted, together with Farcy, as an intermediary in transactions of works of art, about which, given the current state of knowledge, very little is known.³ Farcy was arrested on 14 September 1943 by the Gestapo and interned in the stalag at Compiègne (the only stalag in France) until the camp was liberated. He wrote: ‘I read in the camp’s file the reasons for my imprisonment: ‘‘exhibition and publicity of degenerate works of art through official exhibitions held by the Musée de Grenoble’’ (…) there was nothing for me to confess to, as my crime was spread out on the museum’s walls’. It is not possible to corroborate his version, because it would appear that no such file ever existed at Compiègne, but there is also nothing to disprove it.⁴

There were those who left and those who stayed. There were the Arps, who did not renew their visas for the United States twice, because they could not afford to pay for the transportation of their works by ship, and did not wish to arrive in the US ‘as poor as church mice’, and ‘start all over again!’⁵ There was Sophie Taeuber-Arp who died in January 1943 in Switzerland, where they had no right to remain, and Jean Arp who was plunged into a deep existential crisis, even though his friends enabled him to avoid returning to France. There was Sonia Delaunay, who suffered terrible deprivation, who was Jewish according to the prevailing anti-Semitic legislation, and who watched over the crates of artworks that the couple had left in the South at the end of 1942 like a mother watching over her children; we undoubtedly owe their survival to her. There was Nelly van Doesburg, who woke up with a start for years when she dreamed of the times when she had almost frozen to death, with Farcy at her bedside, in her little hotel room in Grenoble, and the police were banging on the door in the middle of the night.⁶ There was Kandinsky, who rarely went out in Neuilly, but for whom the Galerie Jeanne Bucher organised a small clandestine exhibition in 1942, and then a retrospective again in 1944. There was Raoul Hausmann, who hid in the woods and burned a carboard box containing the few Dada journals that he still had when in 1944 the SS Das Reich Division passed close to the small village where he had been driven into exile in the Limousin region. There was Hannah Höch, the only Dadaist who remained in Germany, who⎯during the night and without any lighting⎯buried metal canteens containing works by Schwitters and Hausmann (including the Mechanical Head,which is now held in the Musée National d’Art Moderne, in Paris), and her own works in the garden of her house on the outskirts of Berlin. There were objects and paintings that remained underground during the war, others that were transported on the seas to other lands, others that were quickly repacked, and others that perished. Their history and that of their nondescript crates are at the heart of their creators’ destinies, and the development and survival of the very idea of avant-garde.