Spring 2021 • New York

Paris to New York: The Transatlantic Exchange of Modern Art & Ideas in the 20th Century between Picasso, Calder, and Lalanne

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  At the turn of the 20th century, Paris became the heart of a growing avant-garde movement known as the School of Paris. The movement ended roughly after World War II; however, the artists never formed a concrete school. It included luminaries associated with various movements, including the Nabis, the Fauves, Cubism and Surrealism.
  
  LEFT: In Paris, Le Bateau-Lavoir, No. 13 Rue Ravignan at Place Emile Goudeau, c.1910. Pablo Picasso and other artists called Le Bateau-Lavoir a home and studio in the early 20th century. (Image: Wikipedia Commons)
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  A young Pablo Picasso, who moved to Paris from Spain in 1904, soon emerged as a leader within the community; working with French painter Georges Braque, Picasso nurtured the development of Cubism and Surrealism.
  
  LEFT: Pablo Picasso, Mousquetaire et courtisane, 1968. Estimate $300,000 – 500,000. On offer in the Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale from the Collection of Kay Unger.
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  In the 1920s, New York’s Valentine Gallery emerged as an early American promoter of the School of Paris. Pierre Matisse, son of Henri Matisse, served as the gallery’s agent in Paris, scouting for artworks to sell in New York. The Valentine Gallery subsequently hosted the first stateside solo exhibitions of European Modernists, including Tsuguharu Foujita, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian. In the 1930s, the Valentine Gallery was a lead venue for Picasso, exposing his work to a New York audience.
  
  LEFT: An ad for an exhibition of Picasso's work at Valentine Gallery. (Image: the Valentine Gallery blog )
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  In 1926, American abstract sculptor Alexander Calder visited Paris for the first time; through his friend Joan Miró, Calder was likely introduced to Picasso’s work. Later, in 1931, Picasso attended Calder’s first exhibition of abstract art in Paris. While the pair were never great friends, Picasso likely influenced Calder’s formative artistic practice; Calder’s early work was more figurative, speaking to the simplified forms found in Picasso’s. Both men played with the ideas of the void, especially in sculpture.
  
  LEFT: Alexander Calder, Untitled, 1967. Estimate $50,000 – 70,000. On offer in the Contemporary Art Day Auction from the Collection of Kay Unger.
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  In the spring of 1929, the Fogg Museum in Cambridge hosted a traveling exhibition of Paris artists, entitled the Exhibition of the School of Paris; works from Jules Pascin, Moïse Kisling and Amedeo Modigliani were among those included in the exhibition. A review of the show presented a troubling comparison between American artistic styles: “This present collection presents a European style, international in scope and cosmopolitan in character with its center in Paris. [... ]These artists are to a greater or lesser degree innovators. In this they differ from the Americans of our last exhibition [Exhibition of American Art, 1929], and as a result of their calculated originality, they are more surprising, more intellectual, and more sophisticated.”¹
  
  LEFT: The Fogg Museum, late 1920s (Photo: Courtesy Harvard Art Museums Archives)
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  That fall, the Fogg Museum held another exhibition entitled The School of New York, designed to showcase younger, more innovative American artistic styles. Included were creatives who had emigrated to New York from Paris: Russian-born artists Maurice Sterne and Max Weber, and Japanese-born artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi. News that there was a New York School quickly made its way to Paris; in 1930, Albert Gallatin wrote in the art magazine Formes: “The New York School is as cosmopolitan in its make up as the School of Paris. Foreigners possessing ability as painters include the Russian Alexander Brook and Morris Kantor, the Italian Joseph Stella, the Swiss Jospeh Pollet and the Japanese Yasuo Kuniyoshi. The influx of foreign bloods is good for American art, this intermingling of various cultures.”²
  
  LEFT: A bulletin for the 1929 exhibition of The School of New York at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, MA (Image: Artist Info Blog )
  
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  Increasingly, New York became a hub for exhibiting European Modernism. In 1929, the Museum of Modern Art opened in New York City; museum director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. filled the collection with modern works from Paris, including examples from Picasso, Matisse and Léger. From 1927 to 1943, collector Albert Eugene Gallatin hosted the informal Museum of Living Art at New York University; on display were works by Mondrian, Gabo, El Lissitzky and others.
  
  LEFT: The opening exhibition at MoMA, featuring artworks by Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat and Van Gogh. November 7, 1929-December 7, 1929. (Image: Digital Image © 2007 MoMA, N.Y.)
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  In the 1930s, the Great Depression struck the US – but out of financial ruin emerged opportunities for artists, including the Federal Art Project, sponsored by the Works Progress Administration. The Federal Art Project gave many young American artists – including Jackson Pollock, Jacob Lawrence, Lee Krasner, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – a career path. And the American’s approach to art continued to be impacted by Paris; the dialogue of Cubism began to inspire artists across the ocean to break from traditional figuration and expert with more abstract approaches.
  
  LEFT: 100 water colors by easel artists of the New York City WPA Art Project. Poster announcing exhibition of watercolors at the Windsor Tower Grey Room, showing watercolor of woman with flowers. Date 1940. (Image: Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo)
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  Meanwhile, across the ocean in Europe, growing political tension created a hostile environment for Paris avant-garde artists. Leading up to the onset of WWII, French critics, fueled by anti-Semitism, moved to label School of Paris artists as a threat to French tradition. The shift prompted many anti-Fascist artists and creatives working in Paris to escape to the United States.
  
  LEFT: 1934 demonstration in Paris, with a sign reading "Down with fascism" (Image: Gallica Digital Library)
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  In the early 1940s, with Europe set as one of the main stages for WWII, the art world shifted focus to New York. An influx of European immigrants and refugees added creativity to the growing American Abstract Expressionist movement. Supporting the New York contemporary art scene were a few small but influential galleries, including Betty Parsons, Peggy Guggenheim, Samuel Kootz and Sidney Janis. With their support, the market for Abstract Expressionist art began to take hold.
  
  LEFT: Peggy Guggenheim and Jackson Pollock in front of Mural, 1943, first floor entrance hall, 155 East 61st Street, New York, c. 1946 (Photo: George Karger © 2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York)
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  The 1950s and 1960s brought a fever pitch to the interest in Abstract Expressionism in New York. Calder, dubbed the “American Picasso” by critics, is a Titan of the Modern art world. His iconic, abstract mobiles brilliantly distill the crucial elements of form, motion and color that define the Picasso champions in his own practice.
  
  LEFT: Alexander Calder, Untitled, 1948. On offer in the Contemporary Art Evening Auction from the Collection of Kay Unger.
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  But, in Paris, a new generation of innovators began to push against the narrative of abstraction. The French artists Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, known as Les Lalanne, championed “the supreme art is the art of living,” choosing forms from nature – including animals, flowers and fronds – as the base of their experimentation. Les Lalanne split their time between New York and Europe, and their play with the boundary between art and design, in turn, inspired other artists, including Picasso and Calder.
  
  LEFT: Kay Unger’s New York City apartment, featuring two Lalanne ‘Moutons’. Photography by Francine Fleischer.