One October afternoon in 1957, Ernest Hemingway and his fourth wife, Mary, visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. They asked to see Alfred Barr Jr., the museum’s legendary founding director. At the time, they were spending much of the year at Hemingway’s home outside of Havana, the Finca Vigía, where he kept his African-big-game trophies and the small number of avant-garde paintings he’d collected back in the 1920s and 30s. They’d flown up from Havana a week earlier to sit ringside at the Carmen Basilio-Sugar Ray Robinson boxing match at Yankee Stadium. But Hemingway, who was nearing 60, had something else on his mind, too. He’d recently begun a score-settling memoir of his Paris years—the book that became A Moveable Feast—and was thinking about his art collection. Especially The Farm, the early Joan Miró masterpiece he’d acquired during his marriage to Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, his first wife.
Barr found the couple in the museum galleries, and after some banter about Cuba, Hemingway came to the point: was the museum still interested in his Miró? Barr almost fainted. The Farm was not only one of Miró’s most important works. It was one of the signal paintings of the modern era. It also hadn’t been shown in public in more than 20 years. “I replied with poorly restrained excitement that we certainly would be interested,” Barr told MoMA curator Jim Soby the next day.
As they continued talking, Barr noticed Mrs. Hemingway was even more enthusiastic about the proposed gift than her husband. At one point, she suggested turning over The Farm to MoMA immediately. But Hemingway was in no hurry. The painting hung in the dining room of the Finca, and whether he was entertaining guests or dining alone with Mary, he generally sat where he could see it. After they finished talking, Hemingway left the museum, leaving Mary with Barr to look at more art. But before he got on the elevator, he pulled Barr aside. “Don’t bother working on her because I have the say,” he told him.
The following year, Barr had an urgent new motive for getting The Farm. The museum had decided to stage a huge Miró show in early 1959, and nearly all the artist’s major works would be in it. Despite his coyness with Barr, Hemingway agreed to lend. But there was a catch: he and Mary were away in Ketchum, Idaho, and a full-blown rebellion was under way in Cuba against the U.S.-backed regime. It would be up to the museum to get the painting out. For Barr, it was clearly a test. “Any difficulties or damage to the picture may well affect [Hemingway’s] future intentions,” Barr told Soby and fellow curator William S. Lieberman, who were collaborating on the show. What none of them knew was that Hemingway’s ownership of the painting was also in question.
Miró was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, bringing together a radically original language of form and color with a spellbinding repertoire of primal imagery—stars, birds, vaginas, dogs—much of it rooted in his native Catalonia. With hallucinatory simplicity, paintings like The Birth of the World or Dog Barking at the Moon not only spurred on the Paris Surrealists; they also gave thrust to the postwar breakthroughs of Pollock, Rothko, and de Kooning. At the origins of this unique vision was The Farm, which the artist completed in 1922.
This month, The Farm goes on view in a major Miró retrospective at Paris’s Grand Palais. Immaculately restored and protected under glass, it betrays little of its long entanglement with the writer, his wives, MoMA, and one of the major political upheavals of the Cold War. In the years around the Cuban revolution and Hemingway’s subsequent suicide, however, the painting took up all the strategic resources that the world’s most important museum of modern art could muster. And almost nothing went according to plan.
Like Hemingway, Miró arrived in Paris soon after World War I. Then a bachelor in his late 20s, the artist was small, taciturn, restrained, obsessively neat; Hemingway, six years younger and married, was large, exuberant, hard-drinking, gregarious. They became friends. “We often went to dinner at the Nègre de Toulouse, and there we would see [James] Joyce, who was blind, accompanied by his daughter,” Miró told his French biographer, Jacques Dupin. Though hopelessly mismatched, he and Hemingway also sparred at the Cercle Américain boxing club on the Boulevard Raspail. At the time, both were struggling to make it. “My stories would all come back with rejection slips and Miró’s unsold canvases were piled up all over his studio,” Hemingway later recalled. One of those canvases was The Farm, a large and wonderfully strange picture of Miró’s family property in Montroig del Camp, near Barcelona.
Miró had worked on the painting for nine months straight, and every detail had been rendered with reverential precision. “I wanted to put everything I loved about the country into that canvas,” he said. Yet the entire scene was suffused with otherworldly moonlight and dominated by talismanic effects—intense blue sky and tawny, parched earth; a giant, twisting carob tree, half alive, half dead; a sinuous path covered in footprints; an unclothed baby, in light and shadow; a goat on a pedestal with a bird on its back; a watering can with a French newspaper beneath it. “Like Hemingway’s early prose,” the novelist and sometime art critic John Updike observed, “the painting is possessed by an ecstasy of simple naming, a seemingly innocent directness that is yet challenging and ominous.”
When he finished The Farm, Miró took the four-by-four-and-a-half-foot canvas around to the Paris dealers. Most of them were nonplussed; one suggested dividing it up and selling it in parts. “The Surrealists were not very much interested in it either,” the artist recalled. “And then there was Hemingway, who became so crazy about it that he wanted to buy it.” In the spring of 1925, Miró finally landed a show at the Galerie Pierre, and the dealer offered Hemingway’s friend Evan Shipman, the poet and inveterate gambler, a chance to acquire one of the works. Shipman chose The Farm, not knowing how badly Hemingway wanted it. According to Hemingway, the two then decided to shoot dice for it, and he won. (Shipman later said it was a coin toss and that he won, but that he let Hemingway have it anyway.)
But neither was able to pay the 3,500 francs (about $175 at the time) the dealer was asking. Hemingway liked to claim he raised the cash by giving boxing lessons; other members of the Lost Generation, including Gerald Murphy, said Hemingway got a part-time job selling vegetables. In any case, when the final installment came due in September 1925, he was still short. As Hemingway tells it, his friends Shipman and the writer John Dos Passos helped him borrow the remainder from the bars and restaurants they frequented and then they took the painting home in an open taxi. “The wind caught the big canvas as though it were a sail, and we made the taxi driver crawl along,” Hemingway later wrote. He told his wife Hadley it was a birthday present and hung it up over the bed.
A few months later, Hemingway fell in love with Vogue correspondent Pauline Pfeiffer and his marriage began to come apart. “I want you to take the Massons and Miró when you move the big things out,” Hadley wrote him in October 1926. But perhaps because it had been a present, or perhaps out of guilt over leaving his wife and young son, Jack, by the time the divorce went through the following spring, Hemingway had left Hadley with The Farm—along with the royalties to The Sun Also Rises, his breakthrough first novel. They were the two most valuable things he had.
During the next few years, the situation with the Miró was curious. In 1928, Shipman wrote Hemingway that the Galerie Pierre was offering a lot of money to buy it back. “Pierre [Matisse] can stick 1000 dollars up his ass,” Hemingway shot back, as if he were never giving up the thing. Hemingway remained close to Miró, and a year later he and Pauline, now his second wife, visited the artist and his mother at the farm in Montroig. “When I see [Miró] now,” Hemingway wrote in Cahiers d’Art, “he says, ‘I am always content, tu sais, that you have ‘The Farm.’”
Yet he didn’t have the painting—Hadley and her second husband, the journalist Paul Mowrer, did, in their new home, in Lake Bluff, Illinois. In 1934, the same year as Hemingway’s Cahiers article, the Mowrers lent The Farm to the Art Institute of Chicago and Hadley—“Mrs. Paul Scott Mowrer”—was listed as the owner. On the other hand, when Pierre Matisse, Miró’s New York dealer, asked to borrow it a few months later, it was Hemingway who gave permission. And after the Pierre Matisse show, the painting was returned not to Hadley and her husband but to Ernest and Pauline in Key West.
Around this time, Hemingway’s art collection began to interest Alfred Barr, the enterprising director of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1936, Hemingway lent the Paul Klee he had bought with Pauline, Monument Under Construction, to the museum’s celebrated “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism” show. Then, in 1941, the museum organized its first survey of Miró. ANXIOUS TO EXHIBIT YOUR FARM ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL TO EXHIBITION, Barr cabled Hemingway in Sun Valley, where he was duck-hunting. But the paintings were now in Cuba at the old house Hemingway had bought with Martha Gellhorn, the young war correspondent who had recently become his third wife.
Set on a lush, 15-acre property east of Havana, the house had been designed by a Catalan architect in the late 19th century. It was called the Finca Vigía, or “lookout farm,” for its stunning views of the city. For Hemingway, it was an ideal refuge, but it also made lending art far more complicated. In an apologetic letter to Barr, he said The Farm was in fragile condition and that it was too risky to ship it while he was away. Even so, he wrote, he hoped to take the painting himself to New York for repairs someday, and he hinted that in time he would “do something for the Museum.”
Seventeen years and another marriage later, Hemingway was ready. Along with the surprise visit to MoMA with Mary, his decision in December 1958 to lend The Farm for the Miró blockbuster suggested a new entente with the museum. As soon as Barr got word from Idaho, he turned over the delicate task of retrieving The Farm to Jim Soby, one of his most seasoned lieutenants. In his early 50s, James Thrall Soby was a scion of a wealthy Connecticut family who also led a colorful existence as an avant-garde collector. He owned several Mirós himself and had known the artist and his wife, Pilar, for years. With Hemingway, Soby hit it off almost immediately. “Your present address fills me with curious nostalgia,” Soby noted in his first letter to him. “I spent six weeks in Ketchum during the winter of 1951–52 getting divorced.” Soby added that his “chief consolation” had been a bar called the Tram, and that he hoped Hemingway liked it as much as he did.
By New Year’s Eve, Soby had a plan for spiriting The Farm out of Cuba. Bill Lieberman, his younger colleague, would fly to Havana on January 4 with a specially designed wooden box. He would go to the Finca, pack the painting himself, and fly back with it the day after. The flights would be personally arranged by the director of National Airlines, the Miami-based American carrier. (Hemingway had insisted they use an American airline because Cuban planes were often hijacked by Fidel Castro’s Communist rebels.) All this was relayed to Hemingway on December 31. That night, the Cuban regime collapsed, and President Fulgencio Batista and his cronies fled the country. The plan was off.
A few nights later, Soby put in a call to Ketchum. Herbert Matthews, the veteran New York Times correspondent, had cabled Hemingway that the Finca had survived the chaos of the revolt, and Hemingway agreed to let the museum try again. But there’d been riots on the road to the airport. If the museum was serious about getting his painting, he told Soby, they would have to get it insured against everything—including “acts of war and rebellion.” This was even harder than it sounded. No American insurer was willing to offer war insurance in the midst of a revolution. Lloyd’s of London would do it, but the premium was so high that Lloyd’s itself advised the museum to hold off. Hemingway thought this was a good idea. “He actually prefers to wait a while on the possible chance that there might be a counter-rebellion or dissension in Castro’s ranks,” Soby told his colleagues, after another call to Ketchum.
By late January, Castro had largely consolidated control and time was running out. Soby was now conferring with Hemingway three or four times a week, and on January 29 they finally reached a Jesuitical compromise: the museum would insure the Miró against “strikes, riots, and civil commotions” but not “war and insurrection.” With the help of a State Department official in Havana, the museum had found a company that would provide an armored truck, if necessary, to transport the painting to the airport. David Vance, MoMA’s assistant registrar, would fly to Cuba to pack it and fly back with it. And the whole thing would be done in two days. Hemingway was in.
On Sunday, February 1, Vance arrived in Havana and checked into the Hotel Nacional. But the all-important box for the Miró had been misrouted to Panama. Vance also lacked the loan agreement signed by Barr and Hemingway, crucial proof that Hemingway was not trying to get property out of the country in the wake of Castro’s coup. (Hemingway had lost the original and, in a fit of pique, told Soby at one point to make a copy and forge his signature.) On Tuesday, Vance moved to the Hotel Presidente because it was cheaper and he was running out of money. Meanwhile, at the Finca, he discovered how badly the painting had deteriorated. PICTURE POOR SHAPE BUT SAFE TRAVEL ONCE, he cabled the museum. By Thursday afternoon, the loan documents had arrived from New York and the box finally caught up with Vance. Soby cabled Hemingway that the painting was CRATED FOR PLANE TOMORROW. The Cuban official who was supposed to approve the loan, however, failed to show up.
The next morning, an old Cuba hand at the American Embassy managed to extract a signature from the fine-arts administration in Havana, and around midday Vance reached the airport with the Miró. It was raining, and the box was quickly loaded onto the plane. But it still hadn’t cleared customs. Minutes before takeoff, Castro’s police roared onto the field, summoned Vance off the plane, and demanded the box be opened. “Fortunately, the rain had let up at just that moment,” Vance later wrote. Tipped off by the museum, the American head of the Havana office of National Airlines held the flight on the runway while the Cubans checked the painting. Finally, it was cleared on the understanding it was coming back to Cuba. It never did. Vance and the Miró flew to Miami, and then on to New York. Soby cabled Hemingway: PLEASE TELL CHARLIE AT THE TRAM TO SERVE YOUR DRINKS ON ME TONIGHT. WISH I WERE THERE.
When the painting was unpacked at the museum, no one was celebrating. “The thing was a mess,” chief conservator Jean Volkmer recalled. Miró’s brilliant colors were gone. The surface was covered with grime and mildew, and the paint was cracking. Flecks of whitewash had splattered across the sky; there were water stains and candle-wax residue. And termites had eaten away the back of the painting to the point that in a few places the paint had no canvas underneath. (The only reason the surface survived, Volkmer later theorized, was that termites don’t like paint.) Miró himself, who came over for the show a few weeks later from his home in Mallorca, was in disbelief when he saw it. “He kept saying it has a skin disease. He was so upset,” Volkmer said.
All those years at the Finca had done ravages. It was a damp, tropical climate, and the Hemingways kept the old house wide open to the outside. There were ceiling leaks. And there was nothing protecting the surface of the painting itself. In early 1953, the documentary filmmaker Thomas Bouchard visited the Finca for his film Around and About Miró; it’s clear from the movie, which shows Hemingway and his favorite canine, Black Dog, in front of The Farm, that the colors had dulled considerably. (In his journal, now conserved at Harvard’s Houghton Library, Bouchard describes Hemingway shadowboxing with him after three glasses of gin. He later told Hemingway that filming him with the Miró “was worth the blow on the jaw.”)
Soby told Hemingway that MoMA would put the painting under protective glass for the exhibition, but afterward it would need to go straight to the E.R. Later, after Miró had gone over it carefully, Soby sent Hemingway Volkmer’s proposed repairs. He warned the project would be “long and difficult” but the museum could begin right away if Hemingway agreed to the $1,500 fee.
The letter reached Hemingway in Spain, where he was following the exceptionally gory 1959 bullfighting season for Life magazine. After a long silence, he wrote Soby that the conservator should go ahead, and that The Farm could stay at the museum after the work was done. But he was clearly unnerved by the painting’s condition and what he called its “ridiculous and tragic” voyage to New York. “No amount of money, as you know,” he wrote, “can compensate anyone for the destruction of a painting such as The Farm.”
The following summer, Volkmer finished the restoration after an intense eight-month campaign—nearly as long as it had taken Miró to paint it. The deep, intense colors were back, the termites and fungus were gone, the painting had been carefully relined, and it was now hanging in the museum’s main hall. At the end of July, Hemingway and his wife arrived in New York. Edgy about his Miró, which he hadn’t seen since it left Cuba, he went to the galleries alone, unannounced. Then, he wrote Volkmer a check, but he said nothing to Barr or Soby. Hearing about his visit, Soby tried to reach him but got Mary instead. Whether or not she was seriously inebriated, as Soby later claimed, she abruptly let loose: it was the museum’s fault the painting had needed major repairs, since it was in “perfect shape” when it left Cuba. It was outrageous that such a rich institution was asking her husband to pay for them. And why wasn’t Miró himself doing the work?
After all the calls to Ketchum, the delicate Cuban maneuvers, the battle on the tarmac in Havana, Volkmer’s extraordinary labors, Soby couldn’t contain himself, as he would convey to Barr: “I got mad and told her bluntly that it was impossible for the damage to the picture to have happened on the plane or in the museum and that, for one thing, termites did not exist in either place.” Soby managed to calm down, but he was badly shaken. “I’m afraid the picture is lost to us,” he said, “unless Hemingway sides with us, and unless some of her hysteria is due to recent developments in Cuba.”
In fact, even as his cherished Miró was recovering its first youth, Hemingway’s own life was unraveling. His eyesight, weak for years, was deteriorating; he was increasingly unable to write. And he and Mary had just spent what would be their last spring in Cuba. One night in April 1960, Phil Bonsall, the U.S. ambassador, had gone to the Finca for dinner and warned Hemingway that Washington was breaking off relations with Havana and that he needed to get out. Valerie Danby-Smith Hemingway, who was his secretary and later married his son Gregory, told me Hemingway was devastated. “The Finca,” she said, “meant as much to Ernest as the Montroig farm did to Miró.” In late July, he left Cuba for the last time, and a few days later, when he went to MoMA on his own, it would be the last time he saw the painting—perhaps his way of bidding it farewell.
The Farm was still hanging in MoMA’s galleries the following summer when, on July 2, 1961, Hemingway shot himself in the foyer of his house in Ketchum. The next day, Barr cabled condolences to Mary, praising her late husband as a lover of painting and friend of the museum since its early days. He and Soby were holding out hope they would, after all, get The Farm. Along with Hemingway’s intimations to Barr back in 1957, Miró himself was rapturous about the restoration and told Soby he wanted the painting to go to MoMA. But in Hemingway’s very short will he made no special provisions and gave everything to Mary. It looked like she would have the say after all.
Privately, however, Mary faced a new crisis. In December, she got a letter from Paul Mowrer asserting that the painting had always belonged to Hadley, explaining that Hemingway had borrowed it back and never returned it. “How do you like that?” Mary wrote Alfred Rice, Hemingway’s longtime lawyer, who was representing the estate. In all her years at the Finca, she told him, she’d never heard a word about this, and she wouldn’t hand over the picture to Hadley “unless compelled by law to do so.” At the same time, she also told Rice that she was still planning to leave the painting to MoMA, “with eventually a plaque saying it is in memory of Ernest.”
Fourteen months after the suicide, the Mowrers notified MoMA they were suing Mary Hemingway for the Miró; Rice asked for new assurances that the museum recognized Mary’s ownership. The museum responded that it could not return the painting to either party until the dispute was resolved. In fact there was a paper trail: after Mary got Paul Mowrer’s letter, she asked Valerie Hemingway, who had helped her retrieve the writer’s papers in Cuba shortly after his death, to look for any correspondence about the painting. Valerie Hemingway told me recently that she found both Hemingway’s request to borrow the painting in 1934 and Hadley’s positive response. “It was supposed to be for a few months,” Valerie Hemingway said. “But Hadley being Hadley never asked for it back.” She gave the letters to Mary, but they went missing from the file when she eventually donated the Hemingway papers to the John F. Kennedy Library, in Boston.
The ever volatile Mary began telling friends that she blamed the museum for the mess and was thinking of giving The Farm to the Met instead. Meanwhile, there were rumors the Mowrers wanted to put the increasingly valuable work on the market if their claim was upheld. The situation was particularly delicate for Pierre Matisse, Miró’s longtime dealer, who was close to the museum but would likely be involved in any sale. “There you are,” Matisse wrote his old friend Soby. “You and the rest of them, two wives, collectors, dealers and museums after one single picture!”
In the summer of 1963, the Mowrers finally reached a settlement with the estate and withdrew their claim. According to Valerie Hemingway, Hadley received a payment of $25,000—10 percent of the insurance value of the painting at the time. Now that her ownership was uncontested, Mary seemed to mellow, and in MoMA’s curatorial offices, it looked like she might be brought around. She acknowledged her husband’s “sympathetic interest” in the museum, going back years, and she was receptive to the idea of doing a memorial exhibition featuring the Miró and the other important paintings Hemingway had owned. But she was also setting up a life for herself in New York. She wanted The Farm for the dining room of her new Midtown penthouse, and in January 1964, five years after it left Cuba, the painting was returned to her. The Hemingway exhibition never happened.
Joan Miró turned 80 in April 1973. Picasso had died two weeks earlier, leaving Miró as one of the last survivors of the heroic age of the European avant-garde. In honor of his birthday, the Museum of Modern Art decided to stage a special show of Mirós from the permanent collection—along with a few others in private hands that were promised to the museum. By this point, Barr and Soby had retired, and Bill Rubin, who was organizing the exhibition, was keen to make a new attempt to reel in Mary Hemingway and the elusive The Farm. She was cordial, but nothing came of it. Three years later, she lent the painting to the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., which had no prior history with Hemingway’s art collection. When she died, in 1986, the loan became a bequest, in her own name, and that’s where it remains today.
In the end, Mary Hemingway never made clear why she turned away from MoMA. But a letter she wrote in 1976 to J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery’s director, provides some tantalizing clues. She insisted that MoMA had left the painting “nearly in tatters” when shipping it from Cuba; that she had had to get it restored herself by a private conservator; and that she wanted to find a museum where it would be properly cared for, in contrast to what she claimed happened at MoMA.
In almost every particular, the letter is wrong—flagrantly so. The painting was already in “tatters” at the Finca, and had been for many years; MoMA’s conservator had painstakingly restored the work; and both Hemingway and Miró were exceptionally pleased by the result. But the letter carefully omits any reference to Mary’s late husband. “Ernest would have given the painting to MoMA,” Valerie Hemingway told me. “But it wasn’t his painting.”
