She found teachers and studios, and she persevered in her efforts, and she began showing her work in exhibitions in both Paris and New York.
In 1904, already considering the new challenges of patronage, she wrote in her journal:
“Do not sink into a nonentity when the path for other things is open to you. And it is open. Go to your friends, to people who know you well and make them tell you what your good points are (everyone has some) so that you may make something of them. Why should you waste these talents anymore than your money and position which are also talents.”
By 1908, she was working steadily, sculpting in her studio:
“I love my work because it has made me happy and given me confidence in myself, and because it stretches into the future offering me always happiness. It is not dependent on humanity, it is something that I have made for myself and that I possess and cannot lose for it is a part of myself.”
This, then, is an introduction to the woman whose faith in American art and artists led to the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Three
During our short summer stays in Long Island, I occasionally visited my grandmother, whose house was very near ours. We played “Exquisite Corpses,” the Surrealists’ favorite game, in which you draw a head, then exchange paper and continue with the rest of the body.
Later, in the ’70s, during my years of research for B. H. Friedman’s biography Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, I came to know my grandmother much better. For this emblematic figure in my life, what did art really mean? And what did she come to mean to me?
Imagine a very young woman, around the turn of the century, immersed in her life as a “lady,” the mother of three children, and the wealthy wife of an equally wealthy sportsman-hero. With her abundant charm, energy, and intelligence, she yearned to do rather than just to be, but in her day almost all doors were closed to women. Especially to women in her social position. The male world of money and business, for instance. She entered a whole other world, an inner world that was to become an outer world as well.
When I immersed myself in research for her biography, I identified with my daring grandmother. When she changed her life, though, she managed to keep her old one. She had it all, as they say, whereas I left large shreds of my old skin behind when I left my home for a new world. Gertrude fought for her sculpture commissions, she sought recognition as well as self-expression. Ambition was surely part of my motivation, too.
In 1912, when she was thirty-seven, Gertrude recalled that earlier time in the “Beginning of Autobiography” notebook: “I couldn’t free myself of certain feelings. I wanted to work. I was not very happy or satisfied in my life. The more I tried to forget myself in my life the less I succeeded in doing so. … I had always drawn and painted a little, now I wanted to try modeling.”
Sculpture would allow her to express her emotions, would give her a certain freedom, and would enable her to compete in a milieu where women had some chance of success. Although her husband didn’t wholly understand her needs, he encouraged her to find the best teachers and to build studios or to rent them wherever they lived. Her favorite studio, however, was neither in Newport, nor in Westbury, nor even in New York, but in Paris, then the center of the art world. France, she wrote, was “the land where one moves and breathes and has one’s being.”
There she felt free to develop. There, and during a five-month trip to Europe and Africa in 1901, she felt inspired to change her life. To become an artist.
At twenty-six, writing in her journal about that trip, she agonized over her deficiencies:
“How marvelous is a really fine piece of sculpture and how can a person like myself dare to dabble in such things! It is a desecration. … I feel sometimes that I can never go on with my own work, that I am too old to begin with, that my aim would be too high for my knowledge, and that never, never in the world would I be willing to do mediocre things. … Technique takes time and time means the sacrifice of something, and the sacrifice of those things that perhaps cannot be sacrificed — who knows! There are some things that make us terribly unhappy but in the end these very things add a great deal to one’s life.”
A year or so afterward, Gertrude compiled another book of writings called Travels in Foreign Countries and in the Mind, a more mature reflection on what her voyage had meant to her. Perhaps she had intended it for publication; I believe it would still be of interest today. Aware now of her own transition to a different life and consciousness, she wrote that artists had “the sublime joy of giving themselves to the world. … And yet it is in the expressing that the real joy exists and not so much in the method. How else can one account for the bad pictures painted, the wretched books written, the weak statues constructed unless one takes into account the joy of creation?”
But Gertrude, convinced that she could never overcome the limitations of her upbringing, went on to say:
If one has been surrounded all one’s life by a great high fence … then when … one is liberated from prison one’s wings are so inconceivably weak that though one longs to fly one has abrupt falls which are painful. … My wings have neither grown nor have they spread. … The Anglo-Saxon temperament is the real constructor of high fences and in consequence the clipper and restrictor of wings. … What do the Latin races know of the inexpressible agony of the “shut-in feeling,” the perverted self-consciousness of “reserve,” the long, drawn out sorrow of the “unutterable?” … Though I may feel near to them, how cold my look which seems only to conceal my sympathy. I would rather die than show my real feelings once deeply touched, while they share with the world that which makes them so human and understanding. …
Would that we practical Americans with our love of money, our unbounded belief in ourselves, could cultivate an eye for the artistic in all phases of life. Not in art alone, though alas we need it sadly there, but in every part of our too full and hurried lives. If we could but rise in the morning artistically, to work or play artistically, to eat, sleep, and love artistically!
For Gertrude, art had become pivotal — not only as artist, but as patron. One seemed to imply the other, given the sense of responsibility her social position afforded. As early as 1904, she began thinking about the most effective way of becoming a patron. In her journal she advised herself:
Take Harry into your confidence. There is no one who really will be more pleased to see what you want to do than he will. Because he is uninterested in your present life and aims does not mean that he will be in these. He has no real sympathy for your modeling. He may be right not to have — it is only developing a little talent and leaving your real power, which is your money and position, out of account; … first of all get Harry on your side. Talk to him about your aims, let it bring you closer together, let it fill the gaps in your life — it will lead you to happiness.
To see artists and find out [their] wants would be a good start, … to found a Beaux Arts — with painting and modeling in connection. Tuition low. Scholarships. Exhibition rooms in connection. … Raise money for building. $1,000,000 at 7% interest [she crossed out 7 and changed it to 5]. $50,000 for me to pay. Work government to give some. Best teachers such as [she left a large space].
Money, even then, an issue. …
From that time on, the twin dreams of being both artist and patron coexisted in Gertrude’s mind. The one fed the other. As artist, she hoped to be able to communicate her deepest feelings: “We can never really approach one another. Forever we strive to get closer and forever we cannot. … Everyone must have felt the longing to lay all bare, to be absolutely understood, to understand someone else, to know the bottom. Think if one could express that feeling. It would be a work of Art, for it is essentially universal and it has not been expressed so far as I know, and feeling it as I do, if I have the technical ability I will be able to express it. It is for that I work.”
While in Paris, waiting for her new studio to be completed, she wrote lyrically of what she hoped to convey:
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p; Love, hate, friendship, passion, faithfulness, suffering, joy, mental torture, conscience pains, jealousy, envy, longing, desire, cunning, self-sacrifice, hope, morbidness, etc. These are all things everyone understands. I have done despair, passion and paganism … my favorite idea of the separateness of humans in spite of all physical and even intellectual nearness … the satiety of the body in contrast to the eternal unsatisfaction of the mind. The big wanting of little things, the roads that lead to the unknown, the mystery of the future, the touch of genius, the big stagnation of riches, the wall that separates kings from the world, the “common touch.” …
Then there could be just beauty — a simple standing figure of a man, so beautiful and so beautifully modeled that it need have no other meaning. …
A sarcophagus, I want to do for myself. The shape of the old ones and in the reliefs to represent my life symbolically. For instance, up to the present time (and I can go no further) the biggest items have been in my life — love and struggle. Struggle for the things I wanted and against the influences of stagnation etc. around me. So I should take these 2 splendid subjects for the long sides of the box. At the ends I should let “youth” meaning children be at one end and “pleasure” at the other.
In 1914, in a building at 8 West Eighth Street, adjoining her studio at 19 MacDougal Alley, Gertrude opened the Whitney Studio. Her friend, architect Grosvenor Atterbury, redesigned the building with two large rooms on the ground floor for exhibitions of the artists she’d realized had no place to show in a New York obsessed with European art and culture.
That same year, Gertrude obtained her first significant commission. No easy thing: “Time and time again I discovered that where a group of laymen had to decide between two people a question of assigning a commission to an artist, the woman of wealth lost out. And for no other reason than because she was a woman of wealth.”
In her journal she wrote of her pride in making a monument to those who had perished on the Titanic: “When life is over and worms destroy, remember that the most foolish saying of your little soul will exist and in the face of the Titanic Memorial will be seen the love, the agony, the joy of my soul. I love what I have written, for it is the truth.”
This granite monument stands today in a Washington, D.C., park near the Potomac River. Enlarged (and therefore simplified) by stonecarvers from Gertrude’s clay model, the cruciform figure of a youth stands straight, arms stretched out, his head flung back in sacrificial heroism. He’s Christlike, destined for eternal life, stepping forward to meet it. No pain mars his sensitive features, age has left his smooth young body unmarked. Not only does this figure express Gertrude’s ideals, but also those of a nation about to plunge into a world war that would forever change that idealism. Never again would violence and war become romanticized. Gertrude’s sculptures a few years later, depicting the men and women in World War I, already are different: emotions gouged from clay, she called them — men and women whose forms and details reveal her own anguished responses to heroism, agony, and death.
In 1929, as the last stones of her immense monument to Christopher Columbus in Palos, Spain, were being hoisted into place, she summed up her feelings about creation:
I was so tired the first days and I did not know why, now I do. It is only now that I realize I was living in emotions. … To see suddenly before you the real dream in great blocks of stone is overpowering. The cloud shapes one visualized come down to earth. God. The fascination of building, of creation! Now I see it all more clearly. At first it was just this is to be done, that, how can we get so and so to act, such and such to progress. Where will more stone men be obtainable, how shall cars, dredges, cement come into being — and always back of it the dream come true — the vision materialized.
And now, a week later, the tiredness is gone. … Why worry that old age has come if it has not come with atrophied mind and energy. The face may fall but the spirit may rise.
Tomorrow I will feel nothing recompenses for youth, but tonight nothing recompenses for expression.
Clearly, art had become Gertrude’s central focus. Through it, she was able to find and express all the emotions and ideals she wished. Although she went on fervently searching for love, she declared herself and probably most fulfilled herself in art — in sculpture, in patronage, in dancing, and also in writing, not only in journals and letters, but also in one published and one unpublished novel, and dozens of short stories.
Today, Gertrude is remembered most for having founded the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her sculpture is seldom exhibited. In 1997, however, the Metropolitan Museum showed the bronze Caryatid it bought from Gertrude in 1913, the year she made it. Reviewing the show in the New York Times, Grace Glueck singled out the piece for mention. How pleased my grandmother would have been.
Today, we can see the passionate, creative side of Gertrude’s nature in her sculpture. The Whitney Museum of American Art embodies her dream as patron.
Four
Flora Whitney Miller was the favorite child of both Gertrude and Harry.
“Flora Miller was a very exceptional person,” writes her cousin, talented actress Beatrice Straight — Harry’s sister Dorothy’s daughter. “Growing up as she did in a world of great wealth and to say the least a somewhat eccentric world, she might have been overwhelmed by those around her. But she was encouraged by her brilliant mother whom she adored, to develop into an amazing woman in her own right, a woman of great purpose and style. She combined the qualities of warmth and openness, a fine sense of humor, plus the ability to carry through to conclusion such a vast and demanding undertaking as the developing of the Whitney Museum of American Art, at the same time raising a lovely family. She had the vision and strength, the business acumen to continue working for the growth of all these things she loved.”
Her life as a child was unpredictable. As her parents made their plans, their children were included in trips or sometimes left with Gertrude’s mother in Newport. For example, in 1912, Harry went to England, Gertrude to France. Harry took Barbara, not quite nine, to stay with him in Little Dalby Hall, his rented house in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, where she rode and her father hunted. “Barbie rides every day & looks awfully well & is very sweet,” he reported to Gertrude. Sonny was a student at Groton, an elite boarding school in Connecticut, and Flora, fourteen, went to Paris with Gertrude. She had her own apartment near her mother’s, with a maid and governess, where Gertrude often brought artist friends to lunch or dinner before the opera or the theater. Flora wrote about her life in her journal:
January 19: We went to see Mamma’s studio. Then went to the school I am going to, to see about my lessons, Wednesday and Saturday mornings. … Had lunch with Mamma at her studio. It’s awfully nice. I loved my first day in Paris.
School, ballet lessons, modeling in clay, piano lessons, riding lessons, roller skating, church, and the opera followed quickly.
January 21: I like Madame Butterfly much the best. It’s the most lovely thing I have ever seen, the music is wonderful.
January 24: I like school much better than in New York but I don’t love it.
February 19: Lessons. After lunch I went to Poiret’s with Mamma. I helped her choose dresses. I loved to see the people come in with all the clothes on, some are awfully funny and we liked them almost all. Mamma got two coats and 16 evening dresses, suits, and afternoon dresses. I loved all of them. Then we went to get my clothes. I got 12 dresses, one suit (blue), three hats, and four coats. I love them all. We went to get a present for Mlle., had an ice cream at Rumpelmeyer’s and then came home. I had a fine day.
When she left to stay with her father in Dalby Hall, Gertrude wrote to her:
“I miss you awfully and wish you were still here. Paris is just about the same, only now I hardly ever go out as I work even more than ever.”
After spending that summer in Newport with her grandmother, on November 12 Flora finally went back to the Brearley, in New York, the school her mother had also attende
d. Except for one day, she had missed school since January 9. No wonder she had a lifelong struggle with spelling and math! But in other areas, her knowledge was above average. She had a phenomenal memory, and could recite poetry for hours. In a game they both liked to play, she or her brother Sonny would recite the first lines and challenge the other to complete the poem. I have a few volumes of poetry inscribed with her name and the date: “To Flora Whitney, Xmas 1908, from Mamma,” a small leatherbound two-volume set of The Golden Treasury, well thumbed, with pencil-marked poems by Keats, Shelley, Browning, Rossetti, Wordsworth, Byron, Blake, Burns, and others; French Lyrics, from 1910; and a blue leather Italian Skies, with “Flora Whitney, 1913,” tooled in gold on the cover, also well marked. In 1914, she probably took this with her on a trip to Italy, before entering the Foxcroft School in Virginia, where she was in the first graduating class.
Close as they were to become later, when she was eighteen Flora felt some of the same tension with her mother as Gertrude had with hers, as she wrote in a letter she transcribed into her diary:
Just now, and indeed it happens quite often, “a change came o’er the spirit of my dream” … I fell to wishing I were the daughter of different kind of people and in an entirely different environment. My life would probably have been so much more worthwhile. I have a horrid feeling that when I am old and look back on my life, there will be no feeling of any satisfaction of having been of any use in the world. The powers that have been given to me, as well as to everyone else, will have been absolutely wasted and I will die, having lived a useless, flippant, and futile life. Pleasant prospect!! I don’t know exactly what I would have done under other circumstances but at any rate I would have been sent to a public school and at 18 would have had a properly trained mind and a brain that worked a little instead of what I have now. It is disgusting! My love of music surely would have showed itself because of possessing a properly developed mind and of having been made to work hard I probably or rather might have been a music teacher and I rather like the idea. I probably would have studied music in Germany, it’s very cheap, and then I would have seen and maybe appreciated all the beautiful pictures and other works of art. … Here comes my only real sorrow. I can’t talk perfectly frankly to Mamma. I never feel that she understands or gives me the smallest bit of credit for any sense at all. She treats me as though I were about 12 and I don’t ever feel that she makes any effort to give me a chance to say what I would like to. … I really feel much worse about not being able to talk to Mamma than anyone thinks I do. … Oh! It’s awful. If only I could — I admire and respect and of course adore Mamma, but there is no companionship at all.
The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made Page 7