The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  This process, this mud, these walls, the friends we made, contributed to the peace we felt. Life was quieter. We were more likely to reflect and accept.

  These two places, Aiken and Taos, seemed to bracket my life, until last year when, wanting to be closer to family, we moved back to New York City.

  One other place was never far from my consciousness, for many years. This was the Whitney Museum of American Art.

  Few days have passed without my awareness of the Whitney Museum. Mail, faxes, phone calls, memory, or dream, the Museum is always with me. It has provided me worthwhile and deeply satisfying work. Sometimes I embrace its current values, sometimes I abhor them. Sometimes, too, in rejecting my goals and hopes for it, it has seemed to reject me. In some ways, the Museum embodies that part of my family heritage I most respect, a heritage, too, that’s far from perfect.

  Once, giving a talk at the Whitney, my mother, who was then its chairman, said, “My mother left me the Museum — she said I could keep it, or sell it. I decided to keep it.”

  So it was that my mother Flora’s care kept it going from 1942, when Gertrude died, until 1966, for the twenty-five years of her presidency. For my mother, the Museum embodied not simply her love for her mother but her admiration, as well, for Gertrude’s achievement as founder of the Museum. In the same way, the part of the Museum’s story I myself can tell is also a love story.

  I’m writing it because I want to discover more than I now know. What really happened? I hope, with the distance I now have, with the comparative serenity of my life today, with the few but treasured advantages of age, that the years of turmoil will seem clearer, that some truths will become apparent.

  Always, the Whitney represented one kind of home. Always, the Museum has been a dream for me, as it was for my grandmother and my mother. I was formed by these extraordinary women. With time, however, I became increasingly influenced by others, by the Museum’s directors, its curators, and by new, nonfamily trustees. The Museum changed continually over my forty years of involvement as a trustee, as vice president, as president, as chairman, and as honorary chairman.

  Since I can remember, art was magic.

  That has never changed.

  Artists, I knew, saw the world through different eyes. If I applied myself and looked enough, I told myself when I was young, I, too, could see what they saw. Work and exposure would bring clarity and understanding along with happiness. What could be better for the world?

  But can one ever cross that bridge? Can one really pierce to the heart of creation? Only by a lifetime of making or studying works of art. I will continue to be rewarded by all forms of creation, including nature itself — but a barrier will always remain between me and the world I crave, because I haven’t given myself to it fully and always. Very few have.

  Early on, though, the Museum, for me, was the force that could bring about wonder and understanding for all who came.

  My grandmother, right from the start, had wanted the American public to become aware of its rich heritage. When the Whitney Museum opened to the press and special friends on Monday, November 16, 1931, she said:

  I have collected during these years the work of American artists because I believe them worthwhile and because I have believed in our national creative talent. Now I am making this collection the nucleus of a Museum devoted exclusively to American art — a Museum which will grow and increase in importance as we ourselves grow.

  In making this gift to you, the American public, my chief desire is that you should share with me the joy which I have received from these works of art. It is especially in times like these that we need to look to the spiritual. In art we find it. It takes us into a world of beauty not too far removed from any of us. “Man cannot live by bread alone.”

  At the time Gertrude spoke these words, the Great Depression had begun. Today, other problems confront us: small but devastating wars; the spread of drugs, of violence, in our disaffected youth; the erosion of our cities, and the erosion, as well, of a moral climate in which to bring up our young. In the face of all this, one may well question the validity of Gertrude Vanderbilt’s words, of the value of art itself. But I continue to believe that art is here to tell us who we have been, who we are, and who we can become. Whether its prevailing expressions seem dark and ugly or transcendent and sublime, artists, as always, remain our shamans and seers. They offer us the prophetic gifts of a Jeremiah, an Isaiah, or the Sibyl of Cumae. We are obliged to look and listen. Sometimes, to understand.

  This is what I still believe, although, with the years, I’ve grown far less innocent and more pragmatic. As reality demanded, my early adolescent views altered. I came to see that artists and museums, like the church, in which I had also fervently believed as the force that could transform all of humankind for the good, were prone to flawed vision and human error. Yet, at heart, I still clung, and continue to cling, to the belief that creativity brings truth, that art inspires wisdom, not only for artists but for their audience. Even at its most uncomfortable and probing, even when bizarre and impenetrable, art remains an affirmation of life.

  One answer to my current questions, then, is that the Museum supports this affirmation, communicating it to anyone who wishes to explore artistic vision and, in turn, to experience life in greater depth.

  In my grandmother’s time, it was simpler to do this. For one thing, she provided both the concept and the money. For another, there were far fewer artists.

  Today, the Museum has become institutionalized, complicated. No one person can make all the decisions. A lot more money must be found to carry on its programs. As a result, and by definition, Museum policy involves many people. Along with their various skills and talents, they provide a diversity of viewpoints. Our discussions and decisions are spirited and sometimes heated. Yet those who give money are not always equipped to make judgments about the Museum they generously support. They may not know enough about art and they may not have time enough to learn. Moreover, those who are giants of industry are accustomed to control When they meet the lively, free ideas of art, especially within the fragile institutions mediating between the public and the artist, it is not surprising that fierce struggles sometimes ensue.

  Changes. Growth. Constraints. As in the earth itself, as weather and seasons dictate.

  My views have changed since I began my story. Writing does that. Events of the more recent past have merged with older memories, with the Museum’s history and with my own, becoming part of a more thematic, consistent progression. Ten years hence, would I write differently? Perhaps. All I can hope is that this time is the right time for me to tell my story.

  My daughter Fiona represents the fourth generation of Whitney women to serve the Museum. Her devotion to the Museum is already bearing fruit, and her understanding is wise as well as caring. The Museum is now a public institution with a vast, existing, and untapped audience. I have faith that she will help it fulfill its promise.

  Two

  “Mama,” my mother’s mother — “Gamoo” to her grandchildren — was to me a vague figure, whose demands for her daughter’s presence were nonetheless compelling. Tall, thin, elegant, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney remained almost a stranger to us younger children, although we loved her munificent Christmas presents, including, one memorable year, a typewriter I’d longed for, allowing me the unprecedented freedom of a typing class with local girls at the public school. It wasn’t until I worked with B. H. Friedman on the biography he wrote, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (Doubleday, 1978), that I came to know her well.

  For my grandmother, her curls, unlike Samson’s, symbolized the weakness of women. By cutting them off, as she described in her unpublished autobiography entitled “My History,” she hoped to become a boy — to gain power and stature. Even as a small child, she understood her position through metaphors, and later, through different metaphors, she changed that position. Making sculpture freed her from a constricting world, her lovers represented the hurt and anger she felt
at her husband’s affairs, and her patronage, culminating in her creation of the Whitney Museum of American Art, became her expression of her family’s wealth and power. Her idealistic, fervent belief in art, artists, and her country merged with her ambition to form the particular identity of the Whitney Museum of American Art, which, in turn became a metaphor for Gertrude herself.

  For her daughter, Flora Whitney Miller, the Whitney was her adored mother. Her longing and then her mourning poured into the Museum, enriching it for more than twenty-five years and holding Gertrude’s passionate commitment fast. Artists appreciated Flora Miller’s devotion and continued to feel, as they had in Gertrude’s time, that the Museum was their special home. My mother held it as close and nurtured it as warmly as she had wanted to love and be loved by Gertrude.

  For me — it’s too soon, too hard, to assess. The metaphorical counterpart is Gertrude’s, I think, rather than my mother’s. Like an earthy stew simmering for years, by midlife I was ready for the table. Unlike Gertrude, I didn’t have money or power — only desire, and the family connection. Tom Armstrong, the Whitney director for fifteen years, in his wisdom saw their value, and helped me to use them for the Museum’s benefit. For those golden years, we teamed up to bring the Whitney to a new fruition: a conjunction of art and the public. When our team was sundered, I stayed on, I tried to mend fences, tried to make the magic live again. But my sadness weakened my ability to be an effective force. I love the Museum, and I always will, but there is little I can do for it today. Perhaps that’s partly because it’s no longer a metaphor for me.

  What would the Museum become, without the family who gave it its persona? The men who run it now are capable and dedicated, but they can’t project the Whitney’s — Gertrude’s — character. Their reasons for being there are different from hers. By the way they fired Tom in 1990, they betrayed the nature of a fragile institution. It has yet to recover. Perhaps, without the family, it would change unrecognizably. Perhaps it would even be better. But it could not be the same.

  On the other hand, perhaps Fiona will become a significant part of the future Whitney Museum. She represents the new generation of women. Because she has a self-confidence her predecessors lacked, her metaphors are different. She doesn’t need the Whitney for her identity. She already has her own. While she understands deeply the need for continuity and tradition, she isn’t afraid of change. Well educated, very capable, and just as energetic and resilient as her forebears, she can lead without feeling guilt. She represents hope.

  “I cannot remember when I first realized who I was,” my grandmother wrote at eighteen in “My History.” “At any rate when I was eleven I knew perfectly that my father was talked of all over, that his name was known throughout the world, that I, simply because I was his daughter, would be talked about when I grew up, and that there were lots of things I could not do simply because I was Miss Vanderbilt.”

  Why was this? And what did she omit from this abbreviated autobiography?

  She left out, for the most part, her mother’s family — the Gwynnes and the Claypooles — who seem to have had little impact on her consciousness or her life. The energy and power that young Gertrude sensed, even as a child, came directly from the powerful men in her family.

  Who were these men?

  Jan Aertsen van der Bilt, of the Manor of Bilt, near Zeyst, Holland, emigrated to New Amsterdam in the mid-seventeenth century. Fifty years later, Jan’s grandson Jacob moved from Flatbush, in Brooklyn, to a farm in Port Richmond, Staten Island. Jacob’s grandson, Cornelius Vander Bilt, and his wife, Phoebe Hand — a capable, handsome woman of English descent — bought a larger acreage in Stapleton, Staten Island, where they farmed with the help of their nine children. The fourth, born on May 27, 1794, was Cornelius Van Derbilt, Jr., as he first preferred to write his name.

  Sculpted in bronze, standing straight and tall in his fur-lined overcoat, he remains perpetually vigorous in front of his principal monument, Grand Central Terminal.

  Following is family history taken substantially from B. H. Friedmann’s biography of my grandmother, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney:

  This Cornelius (never again Jr.), combining the strong physique of his father and the rugged, sharp features of his mother, would radically change the economic situation in his family. As a boy, growing up on the farm and on the Staten Island waterfront, he had tremendous vitality. His dark blue eyes, his hawklike nose, his strong mouth and chin, even the mop of wild blond hair all seemed to exude energy. At eleven he stopped going to school. Just over six feet tall, he was strong enough to become his father’s regular helper on the farm and to assist him with some boating in New York Harbor. Within two years he was supervising the lightering of a ship; at sixteen he bought a sailboat for a hundred dollars and began ferrying passengers and freight between Staten Island and New York; and at eighteen, during the War of 1812, he had several boats under his command and received a government contract to provision New York Harbor forts. Except for money he gave his family, he invested the rest in more ships, and at the age of nineteen determined to marry his cousin and neighbor Sophia Johnson.

  His success began early and escalated until the end of his long life. At first he worked for others, then for himself; his businesses — hotels, steam ferries, steamers, then steamship lines — succeeded each other rapidly, and his family increased at the same dizzying rate: thirteen children, eventually Battling monopolies, winning rate wars, he planned and worked incessantly, and in 1829, at thirty-five, he moved his family from Bellona Hall, his hotel in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Manhattan. But penetrating New York society was more of a challenge for this entrepreneurial giant than making money. Tough and courageous, with a broad, clear vision, he had the reputation of sticking to any bargain he made. But “those direct, blunt qualities showed themselves also in coarse manners and speech. He was loud. He chewed tobacco. He used the slang and profanity of the wharves. What was admired in business was characterized in drawing rooms as ‘pushy’ and ‘cheeky.’”

  In the late ’30s, defeated for the moment in his desire to be accepted in Manhattan, he left to build a mansion in Staten Island. His rejection rankled, however, and in 1846 he launched a luxurious yacht, the first Vanderbilt, and began construction of a large house in Manhattan on Washington Place. When his wife, Sophia, refused to move, it was reported in the newspapers that he had her committed to a private insane asylum — an extreme reaction, but emblematic of this powerful man who was certainly accustomed to getting his way. A few months later, the story goes, she came around and was released.

  Cornelius, called “The Commodore,” was now very visibly a millionaire. During the Gold Rush in 1849, he gambled his fortune developing a shipping line, the Atlantic and Pacific Ship Canal Company. He built eight steamers and a twelve-mile macadam road through Nicaragua to the Pacific, multiplying his investment many times over.

  In 1852, he decided to take a long-delayed vacation. For four months he traveled with family and friends through England, Russia, Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, Malta, Turkey, and Madeira, on the North Star, his new, luxurious 2,500-ton, 270-foot yacht. The trip was a triumphant confirmation of his status, as he was received by royalty, feted and honored everywhere he went.

  After returning, the Commodore went back to work making deals, outsmarting rivals, and further increasing his wealth. In 1862, when he was almost seventy, he initiated perhaps his most significant project: transferring profits from his shipping business into railroads, starting with the New York & Harlem, which he soon controlled.

  Two years later, he finally recognized the ability of one of his sons, William, and named him vice president of the railroad and of all his business activities. William was already forty-three. The Commodore’s favorite son, George, had died, and he had rejected his oldest son Cornelius Jeremiah, a pitiful epileptic and gambler.

  William Henry Vanderbilt had been a sickly child. At nineteen, against his father’s wishes, he had married Maria Louisa Kissam
, the daughter of a poor but refined Brooklyn clergyman. The Commodore had bought them a farm at New Dorp, Staten Island, and — to his surprise — they had made a success of it, increasing its size fivefold and then taking over the bankrupt Staten Island Railroad, which William quickly rehabilitated. Now, in 1864, as if to make up for lost time, the Commodore bought him a house on Fifth Avenue, and took his advice when William urged his father to extend their railroad system to Chicago.

  In 1868 Sophia died, and the following year the Commodore, now seventy-five, married Frank Armstrong Crawford, a Mobile, Alabama, belle and a great-granddaughter of Samuel Hand, brother of the Commodore’s mother. His energy still undiminished, he continued to expand his businesses and began construction of Grand Central Terminal in New York City. Eight years later, on January 4,1877, the Commodore died at eighty-two, children and grandchildren by his side. His young wife led them in singing his favorite hymn, “Show Pity, Lord.” In Friedman’s words, “He left more than $100,000,000, of which about $90,000,000 went to William; $7,500,000 to William’s four sons ($5,000,000 to the eldest, Cornelius, the Commodore’s favorite [who was two-year-old Gertrude’s father]); about $500,000 to each of his surviving daughters; $500,000 in cash, 2,000 shares of New York Central stock, and his New York home to his second wife; and $200,000 to Cornelius Jeremiah. Women were thus treated only slightly better than charities, to which there were no substantial bequests; indeed during his life the only such gift ($1,000,000) was to Central University in Nashville, Tennessee, renamed Vanderbilt University in 1875 when the two-part gift was completed.”