The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  With affectionate cheers

  A unique, enchanting lady

  In whose heart mindless of the years

  There is a corner of endless spring.

  While bridge was my father’s game — and he was much in demand — my mother played Canasta, although she liked to reminisce about the high-stakes poker game in New York of which she’d become a member, a sophisticated, male, literary group that included Raoul Fleishman, owner of the New Yorker, Ralph Pulitzer, the members of the Algonquin Round Table, and other luminaries. She loved to stay up late, unlike my father, who went to bed early. After a play or a dinner or that poker game, she would go with a friend to the Stork Club or El Morocco and stay until nearly dawn. Then she’d sleep until noon.

  Strangely, Flora was drawn to boxing. Why does a person want to see one man hurt another? Like the ancient Romans watching gladiators? I could never imagine my mother at ringside, fiercely rooting for Joe Louis to knock out Max Schmeling. But I still remember her excitement over that heavyweight bout. Perhaps, like her poker games and her flirting, she simply had a very human attraction to danger. Was it also the sensual pleasure she felt, watching those splendid near-naked bodies dancing their way through their bloody struggle?

  Mum loved to read, everything from Conrad to the latest murder mystery. When we children were sick, she would always read aloud to us from the same books her mother had read to her — Kipling, Twain, or Conan Doyle. Sometimes, in the slanting autumn sun of a long South Carolina afternoon, I would read to her. Sitting on canvas stools in a cornstalk blind, shotguns at our sides, as we waited for doves to fly in and feed on benne seeds, we’d laugh aloud at Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, we’d thrill to the Adventures of Tish.

  As far back as I can remember, my mother was for me the essence of elegance, and as I grew up I discovered that for a great many people she represented that as well. In the country, she wore well-cut trousers with a bright print shirt. In the city, she was elegant in a Chanel suit, wedge-heeled shoes, and pearls. Suede gloves, a hat by Paulette, feathered or sequinned or veiled, and a snappy bag completed the look. Smoke perennially curled around her head from the Turkish cigarette in the ebony holder dangling from her long red-tipped fingers. Slim, with small ankles and shapely legs (my father always noticed other women’s less lovely legs!), she often received compliments about her clothes. Always going to the “collections,” as had her mother and grandmother, she ordered suits, day and evening dresses, blouses, and hats — in Paris at Chanel or Balenciaga, and in New York at Hattie Carnegie or Mainbocher.

  I have often wondered why some women are obsessed with clothes. When I think of all the money those women, today as always, will spend on the latest and finest for each new season, I am bothered, perhaps because I recognize in myself the same tendency to want such garb.

  “Clothes create at least half the look of any person at any moment … when you are dressed in any particular way at all, you are revealed rather than hidden,” writes Anne Hollander, in Seeing Through Clothes (Viking Penguin, 1978). But for some, “clothes,” Hollander continues, “stand for knowledge and language, art and love, time and death — the creative, struggling state of man.” Gertrude and Flora often chose avant-garde, exquisite, and daringly festive looks.

  Gertrude and Flora, intimately connected to the world of visual arts, “creative and struggling,” were natural leaders in fashion.

  Besides, despite all her charm and abilities, my mother, just as millions of women before her, needed the shell of fashion to cover insecurity, to insure the approbation of others. This she also taught me. As a teenager, I learned to wear a girdle and stockings with my tweed suit when we went to the races or a polo game. Later, a “little black dress,” with gloves and a hat, for lunch in New York; and a well-cut suit for meetings at the Museum. Thus garbed, I felt secure, just right for the image I wanted to project. I’m more relaxed now, but the urge for new feathers in springtime and autumn remains, and I still dress up in my best suit for meetings, or something spiffy and different for a party.

  Only now do I finally perceive with clarity that I absorbed from Mum lessons in deceptive magic, passed on from one generation of women to the next. And it seems I’ve passed it on, too.

  But whatever fashionable shell she chose, it could never altogether hide the woman within my mother. She was a vibrant person with strong feelings and opinions. I remember, for instance, the way our whole family would eat meals together every summer in the Adirondacks. “You can say anything you like,” Mum would tell us all, “but you must be able to argue for what you believe. You must stand up for it.” And we surely had some lively discussions at that long table — a few even better than the pies filled with juicy, wild raspberries we’d pricked our legs and hands laboriously collecting. When my brother Lev, for instance, wouldn’t eat his boiled eggs, demanding that they be scrambled instead, our mother initiated a long-term, recurring argument on the rights of children versus adults. “How do you like your eggs?” became a metaphor, in our family, debated again and again on different issues, all the way from our bedtime to whether Whitty should leave Harvard to join the Air Force before our country joined World War II.

  Diana Vreeland was a childhood friend whose memory of my mother was offbeat and poetic. This is part of her contribution to the “Flora” memorial book.

  Flora, the Divine One.

  Flora — beautiful, bewildering, and magnetic with an enchanting laugh. Her voice, her appearance, and her thoroughness in every form of charm was wonderful.

  Flora was flirtatious and gave away charm beguilingly. She was naughty, very naughty. She loved fun and laughter as children do.

  Flora was a very private person, almost mysterious. She was an elusive beauty and was not seen everywhere. Flora was unique, remarkable, and will never be replaced.

  We will always miss her.

  Captivated by my mother, always yearning for her approval and love, I absorbed whatever I could of her. Perhaps having her name intensified these feelings.

  Despite their efforts to give us more attention than their parents had given them, my parents were often absent, in body and spirit, from us children. Before World War II, when we were small, they actively sought pleasure, fun, the good life. They ate, drank, and made merry. We often felt left out, and we were, abandoned to the strict nanny who taught us discipline, restraint, and humility When very young, feeling lonely, I’d lose myself in books and horses. Later, as a teenager, I’d found it hard to make friends at bigger schools. In reaction to my rather isolated childhood, I was determined to give my own children every chance to have a “normal” life, with lots of classmates and varied activities. Sleepovers! Team sports! Culture! But today I value solitude. Time to read, to write, and to think.

  I believed in God and in Jesus. Before each Sunday, our nurse would insist that I memorize that week’s “Collect,” marked with a purple ribbon in the prayer book with gold-edged pages my mother had given me. We would walk to the big white church in Aiken for the 11:00 service, then I’d recite or listen or sing, kneeling or sitting or standing, as the stately Protestant ritual prescribed.

  Because my mother had been divorced, the Episcopal church had forbidden her to take Holy Communion, so we always left before that most sacred sacrament. Nevertheless, my mother and father wanted us to grow up in the traditional faith of their families, and at thirteen I dressed in white for the solemn ceremony of Confirmation. It turned out to be much more of a rite of passage than I’d anticipated, because my very first menstrual period began at the same time. My mother, sympathetic, mixed gin and hot lemonade into a kind of reverse martini for my cramps, while she warned, “Don’t talk to men about it, not even to Daddy.”

  Yet another thing to hide! But, so it was. Our female curse must be borne in secret.

  Woozy from her cure, I nearly fainted when the bishop placed his hands on my head. And I was terribly aware of the Holy Spirit, descending right into me!

  I felt uniquel
y blessed. For days, I walked around in a prayerful haze. I made certain never to eat before taking the sacred bread and wine, and, after the confessional prayer and communion, felt altogether sure that my sins were forgiven.

  Like most adolescents, I was searching for meaning. Christianity seemed to offer such a moral and also artistic way to live properly in our logical, ethical universe. God had planned it all, in His “many mansioned” house. The beauty of the church’s language, of its music, perfectly suited its lofty ideals. As I understood it, human perfection was possible, with God’s help — one had only to want it enough.

  Much later, disillusioned upon learning a lot more about the church’s history of intolerance, I lost my faith. But my understanding of its doctrine remained, though still lacking perspective and life experience. Nevertheless, when our children were born, my husband and I wanted them to have the same opportunities for that choice we’d had. We attended church with them and even taught Sunday school. For me, though, the intensity of my early belief was gone.

  Today, I find myself thinking through all these questions once again. For, despite everything, religion still remains a powerful source of humanism and hope.

  Of course, there was another side to churchgoing.

  The boys’ school in town sat before us in neat gray rows in their designated pews. If we were lucky, my parents would invite one or two of the older boys to our home for Sunday lunch. That made the most boring sermon worthwhile!

  Looking back, now, I see that our mother and father gave us an inestimable gift, the sense that happiness in this life is possible. That gaiety and humor and friendship and love are all-important. Yet we never connected any of this with money, perhaps because our parents were neither pretentious nor ostentatious. They gave us few material things, except for what we needed to learn what they deemed important — horses, shotguns, tennis racquets, classic books, fishing rods, bicycles — but even these came only for Christmas or birthdays. Our monthly allowances were minuscule. Movie houses and movies were rarely allowed (too germ-filled and exciting, respectively) — no candy either, and, once in a very great while, an ice cream cone. Our lives were protected, monitored, and structured. We had no fabricated entertainment. We learned early to amuse ourselves.

  Yet, just as one mercifully forgets the physical pain of childbirth, so it’s difficult today to entirely recapture the full extent of the adolescent rage and frustration I remember feeling when I first became aware of the meaning of certain words that revealed a world I’d never been aware of: pellagra, segregation, concentration camp, torture, prejudice, holocaust. There were many others. All at once, the life we’d led seemed petty, oblivious to others, selfish, immoral. I can still recall how desperately, then, I wanted to take control of my life. To be a “grown-up” instead of obeying them. To begin the job of changing the world. Even today, looking back at the events of the ’30s, at Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, at the years of depression in our own country, I’m troubled by how removed we were from the suffering of that dark decade. A gauzy curtain seems to undulate between my fragrant memories of Aiken and my adult realization, now, of what life was like elsewhere. Early on, I felt that pain at the Whitney Museum, through the etchings and paintings of such artists as Reginald Marsh, Jack Levine, John Sloan, Rafael Soyer, and Ben Shahn, who illustrated graphically a wide range of societal ills and evils.

  I’ve often wondered about the price of such a privileged childhood.

  After emerging, ignorant, so long ago, into a bigger world, I’m still trying to grow up. I still have trouble recognizing and accepting the mix of good and bad in all of us. The struggle is endless. Still, I remain grateful for the firm grounding my parents provided, for their love, and for that blessed house from which we could expand and grow.

  Five

  In 1930, in a press release, Gertrude announced the new Whitney Museum of American Art:

  “Not only can the visiting foreigner find no adequate presentation of the growth and development of the fine arts in America under a single roof; the same difficulty faces the native who wants to get what American art is all about. …”

  Its primary purpose was, she said, “to discover fresh talents and to stimulate the creative spirit of the artist before it has been deadened by old age. …

  “It is not as a repository of what American artists have done in the past that the Museum expects to find its greatest usefulness. …

  “Ever since museums were invented, contemporary liberal artists have had difficulty in ‘crashing the gate.’ Museums have had the habit of waiting until a painter or sculptor had acquired a certain official recognition before they would accept his work within their sacred portals. Exactly the contrary practice will be carried on at the Whitney.”

  This, then, was the root and character of the Whitney: to show and to buy work by living artists. It was a museum for artists, with artists as both staff and board. Gertrude hoped to develop a comprehensive collection of American art.

  The Museum was on Eighth Street, and it personified Gertrude. Everything in it came from her and represented her generous, ambitious, and energetic spirit, from the idealism of her concept to the sensuous beauty of the rooms, from the expansive spaces to the works of art themselves. Artists felt at home there, felt welcomed and nurtured. No other institution believed so passionately in their work, gave them such support. Museums, collectors, and most of the few galleries then in existence focused on European art. In the limited world of American art, patron, artist, and curator were as close and natural together as they would ever be, in those years before the rush of collectors and galleries changed the stakes and heightened the tension.

  In those days, so little money changed hands.

  Artists were poor. Gertrude often paid a hospital bill, an overdue rent bill, or sponsored a trip to Paris at the right moment in an artist’s career.

  Always, she bought the work.

  Her many conflicting responsibilities may have kept Gertrude from fully developing as an artist. When she and John Gregory, a sculptor with whom she’d had a romantic friendship and probably a brief affair, broke off their relationship in 1911, he sent her several revealing letters. Despite his pride, he’d borrowed money from her, but he was angry at her and expressed it in a letter, teasing her about:

  “living and enjoying the simple life … Probably no one has ventured to find fault with you and I know I have done so often, but I plead that it was always because the situation impelled me to. … The trouble is that you act according to your station in life and I don’t. … Your whole life you have imposed your will on everyone but your equals. … You offer me the sincere contact of one third of your life, for you have told me there are three worlds in which you dwell, in exchange for my completeness — I think that an imposition.

  “Do you think I’m flattered to escort you to Bohemia?”

  By “three worlds,” he was referring to family, “uptown” society, and “Bohemia.” Balancing these as best she could, Gertrude remained active and involved in each. But keeping them separate must have been extremely complicated. John Gregory, when he wrote this letter, felt categorized and discriminated against. Maybe others did as well.

  During much of its history, the Whitney Museum, still reflecting Gertrude’s complexity, has aimed to be both daring and conservative, sometimes in turn, sometimes simultaneously. While showing the latest trends in theme exhibitions or the Biennial, it also emphasizes its permanent collection and explores the work of earlier artists. It aims to serve a broad public, yet such favorite artists as Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, John Sloan, Jackson Pollock, and Alexander Calder aren’t always on view. It wants to maintain its original warmth and welcome, its close ties to artists; yet its admission fees, nonexistent in both the Eighth Street and the later Fifty-fourth Street locations, now keep rising, and the exclusive benefits of the Museum membership program attract only those who can afford them. On the one hand, the Museum hopes to keep the intimate familial flavo
r it enjoyed on Eighth Street, while, on the other, it plans to expand and continues to add to a collection of which it can exhibit less than one percent.

  Moreover, in Gertrude’s descendants, it has the benefit of devotion but little money.

  Going to the Museum on Eighth Street just west of Fifth Avenue was a big step toward a closer relationship with my mother.

  What I saw there in 1940, at twelve, was much the same as it was on Tuesday, November 17, 1931, the day the Museum opened officially, as vividly described in the New York Times:

  The Museum differs physically from virtually every other such institution in the country. The severity and bleakness which characterize many such institutions have been done away with in this latest addition to American museums. Instead of the uniform gray or white walls the museum visitor is accustomed to see, he will find here a variety of coloring.

  The walls of the sculpture gallery are painted powder blue, against which marble and bronze are defined sharply. Two of the picture galleries have white walls and white velvet curtains, but two others have canary yellow walls, carpet and hangings, and furnishings which give it somewhat the effect of a drawing room. Two other galleries have been finished in gray, and two others have cork walls. Except in these two galleries, the sculpture gallery and in the hallways, the wall coverings are of woven paper, painted. The coloring of the walls, naturally, has necessitated careful hanging of the pictures in order to obtain the most harmonious effects.