A Gaelic Medici? John Quinn: Patron of Modernism

“The patron does not create art but creates the conditions to make art possible” – Cary Wolfe, ‘Ezra Pound and the Politics of Patronage’

" . . . it was time the American people had an opportunity to see and judge for themselves concerning the work of the Europeans who are creating a new art."  - John Quinn, Speech at the ‘Armory Show’ in 1913.

Anglophone modernism was a transatlantic phenomenon – this is acutely apparent in its literary expression, whether poetry or prose. Cursorily flick through the biographies of T.S Elliot or Pound and you’ll discover their origins in a twilight milieu – not quite British, not quite American; betwixt a world receding (!) and one emerging; learned beneficiaries of tradition, thanks to a bountiful classical education, but with a gaze fixed on the future.

The fates convened and charitably conveyed the power of perspicacity and horizon to the generation of ’14, and how fortuitous – the ‘Death of God’ at their heels. Separated from Nietzsche by a mere generation and facing a grand chasm, they opted to transliterate their tragic quandary in poetry hostile to traditional metre.

In terms of biographic origin, English speaking modernism is irreducible to a state of ambivalence between the dyad of England and America. Geographic adjacency to England was a further facet, biographically speaking, of the modernist tapestry – phrased differently, Irishness.

That towering figure of Joyce comes to mind for most – rightfully so. As should John Quinn, the Lorenzo de Medici of the Modernist movement in art and literature

Quinn was many things: a lawyer, art collector, and patron of the avant-garde (when that term still meant something!). The conditions of his youth starkly contrast with the illustriousness of his mature years. The eldest of eight siblings, Quinn was the scion of an impoverished, immigrant family – the fecund paterfamilias, James William Quinn, had moved from Co. Limerick to the state of Ohio.

Quinn’s precociousness prefigured his life’s later path. During the course of his adolescence, Quinn purchased hundreds of dollars’ worth of first edition prints of British literature. Intellectually superior to his peers, Quinn possessed a nigh photographic memory.

As a nascent adult, Quinn found himself concomitantly working a position in the U.S.Treasury whilst juggling his night-time commitments as a Law undergraduate at Georgetown university, America’s oldest Catholic university and the setting for William Peter Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist’.

Following this, he attained a degree in International Relations at Harvard, but chose to work as a financier in the 1890s and 1900s on Wall Street; in this capacity, he rubbed shoulders with the top brass of New York’s banks and insurance companies. This choice of career may seem odd considering his latter object of focus, but his role vis-à-vis art was eminently pragmatic in a sea of impractical creatives. Bar financial patronage and a spiderweb of contacts from New York to Paris, he aided the modernists through his hardened skills as a litigator and policy advocate.

After having established himself as a litigator to be reckoned with, Quinn turned his eyes to the land of his father. The Gaelic revival and Celtic Twilight entered their stride at this time. Griffith said that the Gaelic league attained vitality once it attracted idiots and geniuses alike to its ranks – Quinn belonged indubitably to the more cerebral quarter of its support base.

He made his first trip to Ireland in 1902, during which he made the auspicious acquaintance of Lady Gregory, the knot-that-bound the standard bearers of Ireland’s folklore and theatrical effervescence together.  Quinn, who never married, purportedly was intimate with her – despite my best efforts, I can’t picture that, so I’m sceptical.

Quinn quickly insinuated himself into the senior stratum of the Irish artistic world, providing key services to aspiring artists. For established Irish artists, he offered the opportunity to break into the American market; he organised W.B Yeats and Douglas Hyde’s American speaking tours. Perhaps his greatest achievement was his assistance in the establishment of the Abbey Theatre.

This is not to imply that his relationship with Irish artists was purely transactional; depth and warmth indicative of friendship mark his relations to men such as John Butler Yeats, whose burial Quinn subsidised, and especially Synge, whose ‘Playboy of the Western World’ he went to bat for, legally and discursively – Synge’s play engendered a split between Quinn and the veteran Republican John Devoy. Synge, in turn, held Quinn in esteem as a figure in possession of a prodigious aesthetic sensibility.

As an aside, Quinn’s relationship to Irish Republicanism was complicated. Temperamentally and politically a Home Ruler, Quinn nevertheless admired the purity of motive and idealism of Padraig Pearse, whom he had known. Quinn profoundly disagreed with Irish Republicans who sympathised with the Kaiser. One wonders whether this owed more to American patriotism or Kraut-o-phobia. In response to his agent’s praise of German artists, Quinn once stated:

“You say ‘There is a very intense and marked movement.’ You do not say movement of what. I would like to have a ‘very marked and intense movement’ of Germans to hell or the Argentine or the headwaters of the Amazon in Brazil or the Sahara desert… I make fun of their pretenses to be supermen, and I shall continue to hate them as long as I live.”

As was obligatory for wealthy Irish-Americans in the early 20th century, Quinn had a brief Tammany Hall stint – he conveniently abdicated the political domain, which he declared to be a dirty trade, when his candidate lost. This was a mere warm up for a more important battle: overturning the 1909 ‘Payne–Aldrich Tariff Act’, which had retained a tariff on the importation of artistic works less than 20 years old.

Financially onerous for collectors and a hindrance to the proliferation of novel art in the new world, our Irish-American cognoscente vociferously condemned the Act in a speech before congress. Quinn condemned the “conservative” effect of the aforesaid legislation:

“The exclusive study and reproduction of the methods of the past, of the ideals and styles of the past, is the government of the living by the dead.”

In language reminiscent of Marinetti, Quinn with brevity explicated a Heracltiain vision of art:

“Art is subject to the eternal law of change. We want the art of today, charged with radium, the vitality, the electricity, the virility and the power of living things, as contrasted with the too-often dead and faded-out art, no matter how old it is or what great name is attached to it.”

Such was the impact of Quinn’s rhetoric that Congress overturned the Act. Although Quinn is remembered more for his role in the 1913 ‘Armory Show’, the first and most important exposition of modernist art in America, the overturning of this act was likely more impactful in the long run.

Quinn was a patron of the majority of transatlantic modernism’s literary vanguard. Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Elliot, and James Joyce – each was a beneficiary of Quinn. Of the aforesaid, Joyce particularly caught his eye, even prior to Ulysses. With Ulyssess, though, Joyce singled himself out in Quinn’s purview as a writer of import; he opined to a friend that it was the opening shot of something radically new and different in literature, and that its influence would reverberate.

He turned his eye in later years to painting rather than literature, and he acquired paintings from artists such as Matisse and Picasso. He had perhaps the world’s largest collection of modern art. He had a covetous relationship with his paintings, being notoriously reticent to allow others to set their gaze upon them.

If Plato considered the Philosopher to be the apotheosis of human types, for Quinn it was the artist. He once stated:

“Artists may not accumulate much money, they may not have houses and automobiles, but they ought to have peace of mind and a better chance of happiness than most people. The real artist creates, or tries to create, beautiful things. The work of the musician, the painter, the sculptor and the poet is an end in itself, done chiefly for the pleasure of doing it and the satisfaction of creating beautiful things. What they get for it is but the means to that end.”

This statement is revealing. For Quinn, art ought not to be instrumentalised; he would have agreed with the dictum “art for art’s sake”, a position held by the decadents of the latter 19th century and the Parisian Hussards, a post-war literary movement that, for a time, eclipsed the popularity of French existentialism and anti-collaborationist status quo. 

More notable is his concession that the beautiful is, despite novelty and vitality being cardinal, still the object of the true artist. How would Quinn have reconciled the form of the beautiful with the ever-changing imperative of the living and being authentic to today? Alternatively phrased, how did he reconcile being and becoming in art? I would ask him, but he’s dead.

Quinn, unlike most Irish boggers who happen across a pot o’ gold, was not a gombeen. He sneered at art speculators:

“I shall certainly not buy merely because you foresee a rapid rise in the prices. I never bought with that end in mind. I never sold a painting.”

Quinn elevated collection to an art form:

“Collecting art requires great patience . . . It isn’t a case of buying so many works of an artist, but of buying, or having the patience to buy, only the best.”

Plagued by health problems in the latter half of his life, Quinn, the grand partisan of the European avant-garde, succumbed to intestinal cancer at the age of 54. In lieu of God, men of his generation turned to Art as an idol toward which to sublimate their veneration and as a spring from which to derive meaning.  

But objects that inspire meaning demand more than mere worship; only the sacrifice of the faithful satisfies as recompense. And art, unlike religion with its martyrs, has never produced this among its faithful. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in ‘Discourse on the Arts and Sciences’, a caustic critique of science, progress, and art, mapped out a distinction that appertains to the question: “religion or art?”.

“O virtue! Sublime science of simple souls, are so many troubles and trappings necessary for one to know you? Are your principles not engraved in all hearts, and in order to learn your laws is it not enough to go back into oneself and listen to the voice of one's conscience in the silence of the passions? There you have true philosophy. Let us learn to be satisfied with that, and without envying the glory of those famous men who are immortalised in the republic of letters, let us try to set between them and us that glorious distinction which people made long ago between two great peoples: one knew how to speak well; the other how to act well”

Still, whilst John Quinn did not sacrifice life and limb for art, he went far further than the average acolyte. He sacrificed his time, energy, skills, and wealth for the sake of it. And for that reason, he ought to be celebrated amongst the ranks of great Irishmen.

Arthur Griffith in Valhalla, perhaps his rhetorically most impressive essay, commends those who silently contributed to the glory and renown of their nation – Quinn, through his subsidy of Irish art, was one such man.

“But if, then, the earthly career of those is over who worked and sought for the greater glory and good of the nation, and if but the cold and lifeless marble is the only visible memorial of their past being, yet without the temple, in the vast life of the nation their work is perpetuated and the monuments of their former prowess rest in the continued advance of the country.”