ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL
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artists. Actually, it would reverse the flow. Marcel Duchamp played a
key part in this process. Although his nude was the main shock for the
audience at the Armory Show, Duchamp himself arrived two years later.
In an unpublished archive of his military files I discovered that he
refused to go to war, and didn't want his brothers to know that he was
leaving the country. He wasn't very proud of himself. He couldn't yet
speak English, and he was working as a librarian in Paris. When he came
to New York, he was welcomed by the Arensbergs, once again worked
as a librarian, and taught French to the Stettheimers. The Duchamp fam–
ily has so many brilliant artists: Raymond Duchamp-Villon, the cubist
sculptor; Marcel Duchamp; as well as the two sisters. For me, the
Duchamp family is an al legory of France during World War I: they
would lose Raymond Duchamp-Villon to the war in
1918
and Marcel to
America, where he would influence so many Americans painters, even
today. The way the Armory Show was brought into this country is yet
another story, not the beautiful one we usually hear, but a rather pathetic
one. Modernism seems to me to have arrived in the United States in a
very odd way: it was not brought by the kind of didactic exhibitions that
Roger Fry used to organize in London, but brutally, as a "coup," chaot–
ically. This explains a lot of things about modernism in America.
Another important moment has to do with the creation of the
Museum of Modern Art, which to my mind combined three elements
that belong totally to American culture. First, the women from republi–
can families, Abby Rockefeller, Lillie Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan,
whose modernist tastes differed widely from their backgrounds. They
consulted the advisor Paul Sachs, from the Go ldman-Sachs family, Ger–
man Jews who immigrated to this country. Paul Sachs taught a famous
museum course at Harvard, which trained generations of American
museum directors for thirty years, the last being Bill Lieberman from the
Metropolitan Museum. These women asked Paul Sachs whom he would
recommend as director of their new museum. He asked them whether
the age was a handicap. They did not see why it would be, so Sachs
camc up with his best student, the twenty-seven-year-old son of a Bap–
tist priest, Alfred H. Barr.
It
was the support of republican women, the
expertise of a German Jew with Ivy League credentials, and the energy
of a young Harvard cadet which made modern art possible in America.
Alfrcd Barr was asked by Abby Rockefeller to meet her at her estate in
July
'929.
Five months later the first show took place, complete with
paintings by Cezanne, Matisse, and Van Gogh, among others.
Alfred Barr had traveled through Europe two years before that. He
had seen the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Italy, France, Germany, and
