Here is a brief excerpt from an article by in HUMANITIES (Fall 2022, Volume 43, Number 4), the official magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities. To read the complete article, check out other resources, and sign up for the NEA newsletter, please click here.

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The groundbreaking 1939 exhibition “Picasso: Forty Years of His Art” at the Museum of Modern Art was a great turning point in twentieth-century art history. While war raged in Europe, it traveled to museums in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, New Orleans, San Francisco, and many other cities, forever changing how Americans thought about modern art. This excerpt from Hugh Eakin’s new book, Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America, revisits the landmark show, its reverberations in Abstract Expressionism, and its spirited reception.

In recent years, there has been a block of Midtown Manhattan that, even in New York, stands out as a hegemonic empire of art and money. Walled in by lustrous expanses of glass and blackened steel, the Museum of Modern Art is a city-state unto itself. In a place where the only room to grow is up, it luxuriates in an ever-growing horizontal sprawl of some of the country’s most coveted real estate. On its board sit more billionaires than are found in all but nine U.S. states; its paintings alone, more than two hundred thousand artworks from all over the world, are worth more than the GDP of a number of small countries.

At its pulsing center is the work of a single artist, a figure whose ghostly presence seems to course through all sixty of the museum’s white-walled exhibition spaces, even in rooms filled with work created long after his death. In the museum’s inner sanctum, through the luminous foyer and up the escalators, across the floating glass-walled bridge to the fifth-floor galleries where the core of the collection still holds sway, is a very large room that—even amid today’s frequently shifting arrangements—continues to be defined by his art. Here, some of the greatest works of Picasso seem to become synecdoches for the museum itself. Flanking the entrance are two huge 1906 paintings that speak of a revolt about to take place. Then, on the far side of the room, dominating an entire wall, is the jarring act, in mid-progress: a huge tableau of naked giantesses who seem to be tearing down the foundations of Western art. Surrounding them is the glorious, disturbing aftermath: In 2021, this included not only Picasso’s seen-from-all-sides-at-once Catalan townscape and his defiantly unbounded bronze Head of a Woman, but also Louise Bourgeois’s haunting painted-wood figurines from the late 1940s and the twisted, terrified bodies of Faith Ringgold’s civil-rights-era masterpiece, American People Series #20: Die—reminding us that the revolt never quite ended.

But the vast Picasso Valhalla was not always thus. Once upon a time, the art that is now synonymous with twentieth-century American culture was ridiculed and shunned. For years, even the idea of creating such a museum, centered around this art and this artist, went nowhere. And when the museum did finally get its start, it was brought into being by little more than a society lady’s whim. Occupying cramped, rented rooms, it had no endowment and hardly any budget—and not a single Picasso to its name. Once upon a time, the cultural hegemon had struggled to survive.

For nearly thirty years, the effort to bring modern art to the United States was continually impeded by war, economic crisis, and a deeply skeptical public. It was a project that might well have foundered, and almost did, but for the fanatical determination of a tiny group of people.

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From the book Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America by Hugh Eakin. Copyright © 2022 by Hugh Eakin. Published by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. 

Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Hugh Eakin is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs, and his writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. In 2018, Eakin received an NEH Public Scholars grant to support his work on Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America.