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The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

Page 14

by Flora Miller Biddle


  Within the family, we wondered if he was spending enough time at the Whitney, but agreed that by using his talents as spokesman and roving ambassador he was more valuable than if he sat in his office all the time. And we knew Jack, a fine manager, was actually handling the day-to-day work.

  Lloyd was instrumental in enlarging the Museum’s base of people. “We needed a select membership of individuals vitally interested in American art,” he later wrote, and, toward that end, he drafted the proposal for forming the Friends of the Whitney Museum, the institution’s first membership group, which stated:

  “One of the greatest needs facing the Museum today is to increase its purchasing funds so that it can fill many serious omissions in the permanent collection and do fuller justice to the vastly expanding field of contemporary American art. A central aim of the Museum has always been the prompt recognition of creative ability in the one way that brings prestige, encouragement, and material aid to the artist in equal measure — that is, by purchasing his work and exhibiting it as part of the Museum’s collection while he is still living.”

  The living artist — key to the Museum’s history and policy.

  In 1956, David M. Solinger became the first president of the new Friends, nineteen in number, soon to multiply many times. Annual dues were $250. A joint committee of staff and Friends spent the money on new acquisitions.

  For the first time, people other than staff were involved in choosing art for the permanent collection. This was a necessity in order to raise money, said Lloyd and Jack. If we were to continue to buy art. And what is the point of a museum of contemporary art, if it can’t do that?

  Since its founding in 1931, the Museum had changed. By the late ’20s, the Whitney Studio Club was no longer the only institution responding to the needs of contemporary artists: new galleries, collectors, and even museums were realizing the worth of American art. The Whitney began to be more selective upon becoming a Museum, and still more so when it moved uptown. The number of American artists was growing fast. Impossible, now, to show or buy them all, even to know them all. Instead of helping artists directly, as Gertrude had, the Museum’s relation to artists necessarily became more diffuse, indirect, filtered through exhibitions chosen by professional curators. Increasingly, the Museum was directed toward the public, toward providing a venue for recognizing our culture. Traditional “viewings” continued Gertrude’s catholic approach, however, until the late ’60s, by allowing any artist to bring a work to the Museum, knowing curators would look at it on a certain day of the week or month, and possibly include it in an Annual or a group show.

  Another change: until the move to Fifty-fourth Street, the Whitney accepted no gifts of art or money. Why? A reluctance, I believe, to turn down a work of art, or to be obligated to donors, whether patrons, artists, or dealers, with the implied compromises of the Museum’s authority and integrity. But the urgent need for more money to add works to the collection impelled the Museum to abandon that policy. Soon, it gladly accepted, and then sought, contributions for other purposes.

  What did all this mean for the Whitney?

  First, it meant survival. Without enough money, the Whitney would have shrunk in size and in function. It would possibly have remained as a historic museum of the first half of the century, with no way to show the glorious blossoming of those early years. The staff would have left. What self-respecting directors or curators would be interested in working for such a static institution?

  These changes brought about a dissemination of authority. Decision-making by groups or individuals sometimes less knowledgeable about the traditional values of the Whitney, or less committed than the family had been to the traditional values of the Whitney. To balance this, a freshness, a new excitement, entered into our deliberations, enriching the Museum.

  How did these changes evolve?

  To encourage the inevitable growth, Lloyd recommended the expansion of the board of trustees, and suggested the inclusion of non-family members who could bring financial support.

  This was a turning point, key to the Museum’s survival as an independent entity. It started a new chapter in the Museum’s history.

  And in my own.

  Seven

  Many years later, as my second husband, Sydney, and I lived in Taos, I remember watching dramatic cloud formations under a New Mexico sky change from pale rose to salmon pink to deep gray-black as we sat with a group of friends, eating, drinking, talking. There was Vija Celmins, whose paintings evoke sea and sky and desert, mysteriously, ravishingly. Kevin Cannon, sculptor of smooth sensuous leather pieces reminiscent of thighs and breasts, argued that sculpture was the essential visual expression. Happy Price showed us the delicate clay cups she’d molded and fired, and we looked at work by her husband, Ken, the ceramic artist: large globular nodules in phosphorescent hues, like meteorites, glowing, compelling.

  Agnes Martin invited us to visit her in the small studio near her home where she paints five-foot-square abstractions. She showed us her latest paintings, taking them into the light, leaning one on the other as we gazed, enraptured, at their bands of color glowing in the late afternoon light. Permeated by their beauty, and by the feelings of joy and serenity they inspire, we wondered at the woman who could create such magic. Agnes is both ethereal and earthy. She loves to be with good friends, but she also spends much of her time alone, meditating, waiting for inspiration. She has written about art in words that are like poems — here are a few lines from “Beauty is the Mystery of Life”:

  “When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection. …

  “Our emotional life is really dominant over our intellectual life but we do not realize it. … I have been talking directly to artists but it applies to all. Take advantage of the awareness of perfection in your mind. See perfection in everything around you. See if you can discover your true feelings when listening to music. Make happiness your goal. … Find out exactly what you want in life. Ask your mind for inspiration about everything. … You must find your own way.

  “Happiness is being on the beam with life — to feel the pull of life.”

  And in another piece, “Reflections”:

  “I’d like to talk about the perfection underlying life/when the mind is covered over with perfection/and the heart is filled with delight/but I wish not to deny the rest.”

  Barbara Haskell, the curator of an exhibition of Agnes Martin’s work shown at the Whitney in 1992, wrote this about her in the catalogue:

  “For her, perfection is neither otherworldly — something separate from and transcending the temporal process — nor is it a holiness that inhabits physical matter. It is the intensity of absolute beauty and happiness experienced when our minds are empty of ego and the distractions of the everyday world. In these flashes, worries dissolve and we feel enormous exultation and peace, not unlike the state of grace in Christian theology. However elusive and fleeting these experiences are, they are nevertheless available at every moment to everyone. The task, as Martin defines it, is to further our potential to see the perfection within life.”

  How extraordinary it has been for us to be close to Agnes, to hear the stories she tells in her silvery voice, to take long drives into her beloved mountains where she used to camp for months at a time; to absorb her wisdom; and to see her total dedication to her art. And also to laugh, and eat, and drink with her — because she enjoys all that is good. Sydney and I felt her presence as a delight and an inspiration as, during those enchanted summers in Taos, we struggled to find our own voices. Her paintings and her ideas helped us to work through our goals and think through the way we wanted to live.

  In considering the contrast between our circumstances during my most intense Whitney years and those in New Mexico, I realize that the Taos years wouldn’t have been possible without the Museum years, just as my own life wouldn’t have been possible without the lives of my fo
rebears. The one, with all its excitement and complexity, resulted in the other, with its uncomplicated stretches of peaceful time.

  But why so long, so long, before arriving at this place, this time, where to write seemed natural? How did my grandmother manage to work at her sculpture, be head of her museum, see her artist friends frequently — while also functioning as wife and mother?

  Different times, different personalities, different circumstances.

  At the Whitney, while working on projects with Margie or Jack, almost as a staff member, I learned about art and artists. I met the artists themselves. Pretty soon I began to understand the Museum’s basic premise, that art and artists are vitally significant; that without them, life is hardly worth living; that it is they who illuminate meaning — good and evil, joy and misery, beauty and ugliness, love and hate. What about churches? Has the artist, or the museum, replaced them? Not exactly, but museums have become centers for ideas, where people talk of serious things while looking at serious works of art.

  All too soon, the pressing reality of the Museum’s need for money became apparent. My responsibility was to address that reality, the need for money, while recognizing, understanding, and trying to articulate the other, more urgent reality. My task was to work not inside the Museum, but outside it. Of course, that awareness didn’t arrive suddenly. Today, though, I see how the need for money gradually but relentlessly infiltrated all I did at the Museum, for better and for worse, influencing my judgment and mixing my motives. We never seemed to have enough.

  Thus the Museum came to exert different, ever-growing pressures, carrying both delight and anxiety.

  Eight

  Many years after my mother’s death, some letters I found clarified the reasons for the Museum’s precarious financial state. I also understood why my mother found it so difficult to make the decision to expand the board.

  My grandmother had left $2.5 million to the Whitney Museum, plus the forgiveness of all its outstanding debts to her, and a general instruction that “the remaining estate shall be devoted to such charitable and educational purposes, including the encouragement of art, as my children shall determine to be most worthy and deserving.”

  Clearly, she had hoped that her children would give the remaining estate (upward of $3 million) to the Whitney Museum, but she was reluctant to chain them to her beloved project. According to all who knew her, this gesture typified her liberal spirit. She didn’t want to exert control from the grave.

  In the end, the only one of her children who gave her share of the money to the Museum was my mother. Closest to Gertrude, devastated by her death, she wanted to do all in her power to memorialize her adored Mama. Flora pressed her brother, Sonny, who came up with relatively small sums from time to time, but gave the bulk to his personal interests, especially to provide for a wing of the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming. He somehow convinced himself that, since one of her biggest and best monuments, her statue of Buffalo Bill, stood right in the middle of Cody, the museum there was more suitable than the Whitney to give this money to, to memorialize her. This despite his knowing the Whitney had been central to his mother’s life and work. Was he jealous, perhaps, of his sister’s inheritance of the Museum? Of her closeness to their mother?

  My aunt Barbara, Gertrude’s younger daughter, gave fifty thousand dollars to the building campaign in the ’60s, but, influenced by her manipulative husband George Headley, she used most of her share for a museum in Kentucky devoted to the “bibelots” he made.

  My mother struggled to carry out what she felt sure were her mother’s wishes.

  Here’s an excerpt from a letter to her from lawyer and Museum trustee “Watt” Dunnington, written as the Museum was planning the move uptown from Eighth Street. With a few name changes, this letter could have been written at many other times throughout the Whitney’s history:

  You have probably received Mr. More’s [Hermon More, the director after Juliana Force] letter of August 15th giving his report.

  I am sorry he made any reference to the financial condition of the Museum because in the first place our income for the past fiscal year was abnormally high due to extra dividends, which we cannot reasonably expect in the future. In the second place, our expenses when we move to 54th Street will be greater and it is going to be hard to make both ends meet. Aside from this, if other people are of the opinion that the Museum is in a good financial condition it will make it all the more difficult to obtain gifts [from the family]. …

  I am anxious to get the finances of the Museum entirely away from Mr. More as soon as we can diplomatically do it. I do not think he knows any more about that end of it than I do about art, which, as you know, is about all I can say.

  Already, besides the financial crisis, a conflict reminiscent of that between church and state was surfacing — as it would many times over the next forty years. Trustees, with their fiduciary responsibility, versus directors, trying to fulfill the Museum’s mission.

  By July 1954, when the Whitney was actually moving, Flora had given her share of the income from the trust to make the new building possible and would eventually give the principal as well. Watt Dunnington advised her to try again with Sonny, saying, “Turn the heat on him when you get to the Adirondacks.”

  Mother probably didn’t. She disliked confrontations, and preferred asking him by letter. Sonny’s reply to Flora, after the Museum had moved to Fifty-fourth street:

  My dear Flora,

  At a meeting of Mama’s Trust last Tuesday, Barbara and I considered your letter to me about the Whitney Museum. We agree that we have a moral commitment as far as the extra costs of the glass ceiling and lighting for it are concerned, and we are prepared to pay the $110,804.54 involved.

  We have some very heavy commitments of our own, including a $250,000 gift to the Buffalo Bill Museum at Cody, Wyoming. … this will attract millions of visitors to the Buffalo Bill statue.

  In the autumn of 1959, drafting a letter to her brother and sister, Flora expressed her outrage. The cover page indicates that she wanted this letter summarizing the situation kept for the record:

  Letter to Sonny & Barby autumn 1959 asking for $5,000 from Mama’s Trust for Museum

  In her flowing hand, she copied the letter itself on paper from a small pad:

  This is an appeal of two sorts. The monetary side of it is important as evincing an interest, as well as fulfilling an obligation that you either recognize or deny.

  The Whitney Museum is a unique institution in that it is regarded by the public as a family Museum, and it is. (There are only one or two in the whole country and they are not primarily for American Art.) The formation of the “Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art” barely three years ago has shown us how many people prominent in the art collecting world are interested in the Museum, but it has also posed a few problems, one of them being that they will want representation on the board of trustees. They know it is a family affair but they also know that it is practically an inactive board. I feel very strongly that I would like to keep it a family affair for as long as possible. As a memorial to Mama it is something that her wisdom and foresight created when no one else was interested in the American artist, and most of the concepts that are incorporated in its charter are now recognized as fundamental in Museum organizations. It is in every sense her Museum. It seems to me it is a frightful shame that it is not supported by the family.

  I know that it is impossible for you to come to openings, or to be involved in any of its activities, but it is not impossible to support it in other ways. There are approximately 160 Friends bringing in $40,000 a year, all the money (except a few thousand dollars) going for purchases. Our needs are also for general upkeep and hoping for a fund for better publications. I give varying amounts — about $17,000 this year when we started the Pension Fund. All I am asking for is $5,000 a year that I had hoped between you, Barbie, and the Trust you could give. With the $10,000 I have promised we can do very nicely.

&nb
sp; Some time we hope to be able to divert some of the Friends’ money to other usages. More exhibitions — longer hours for the Museum to be open — but at present those things are not possible. The enormous increase in its activities since moving uptown has put a tremendous strain on the staff, but it is difficult to increase it much owing to insufficient funds. If we did more about our various rich Friends I think we would get money for some of these other needs but I am much against this at the present — being always hopeful that we will squeak through.

  I hope you and Barbie will come to the opening of the Zorach show on Tuesday. As you know he is one of the outstanding sculptors of our day — & they are not very “modern!”

  It is unlikely that her brother and sister came, even though they did give the money. “Got it, FWM,” appears in my mother’s hand at the top of the page. This trust contained the $3 million in Gertrude’s estate, to be spent by the three children for charitable purposes. Flora had already committed her share to the Whitney.

  For the moment, the Museum remained a “family affair,” limping along financially, with an overburdened staff. That staff, however, was buying paintings, prints, sculpture, and drawings of variable quality — as always, with contemporary art — thanks to the Friends’ intellectual and monetary support. And a Museum’s permanent collection, after all, is its primary responsibility.

 

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