In 1911, Alfred Stieglitz exhibited 83 of Picasso’s Cubist works on paper at the 291 gallery, in New York. Each was priced at $12. He sold exactly one and bought another for himself. After the show closed, Stieglitz offered the remaining 81 drawings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for $2,000. (Marking up unsold material 200 percent to an institution was apparently different then.) There was nothing hopeful—or polite—about the Met curator Bryson Burroughs’s rejection: “Such mad pictures would never mean anything to America.”
A century on, Leonard Lauder promised 78 Cubist masterpieces to the Met. Its then director, Thomas Campbell, put the “transformational” gift into context: “Although the Met is unique in its ability to exhibit over 5,000 years of art history, we have long lacked this critical dimension in the story of modernism.” How American taste for the moderns evolved from incredulity to veneration is the story of journalist Hugh Eakin’s first-rate, if misleadingly titled, Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America.
