The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  Most trustees pledged from $50,000 to $100,000. Arthur Altschul and his family pledged $200,000.

  My mother soon increased her pledge to $500,000, subject to the successful sale of The Smoker, the Manet painting that had always hung in her mother’s and then her own living room in Long Island. The painting was sold, at Parke-Bernet (now Sotheby’s), for $450,000 on October 14, 1965, and my mother gave the money she realized from the sale to the Whitney. After changing hands again, it now hangs prominently in the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

  On November 12, ten days before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Breuer presented plans to the trustees and, in the hope of involving them more deeply in fund-raising, three officers of the Friends: Allan Emil, David Prager, and Eloise Spaeth.

  The plans were well received.

  We were a tiny band, trying to raise $8 million. We had plenty of energy and ambition but few rich patrons. Committees were formed to raise money, plan parties, enlarge our basic constituency. I served on most of them, although I was a neophyte at this business.

  Following her mother’s example, my mother gave lavishly to her children, to her friends, and to the Museum. If we were going on vacation, she’d slip us an envelope of cash. If we built a house she’d help, so we didn’t need a mortgage. She paid for her grandchildren’s and even her great-grandchildren’s education. We were very comfortable, if not extremely rich. Since there always seemed to be enough money for important needs, we’d felt secure. I’d never asked for, or borrowed, money.

  Now, in my new persona, I felt an urgent need. But the Museum seemed like family, and why, after all, should strangers support my family?

  I couldn’t distance myself enough to see the Museum as a separate entity, benefiting the public. Because of this, the pathway the Museum provided to a creative world became weighty, as well as joyous.

  So, in those days, I wasn’t good at raising money. I didn’t like it any better than my mother did. Besides, like my mother and grandmother, I had no old friends with both money and an interest in art.

  Why was this? Very few rich people from old “society” families seemed to like or to understand contemporary American art. Perhaps much of it was threatening to those who still believed in and lived by the customs and values of earlier times, forgetting that those too, once, were new and hard to accept. Those who did appreciate newer forms of art preferred the more professional, intellectual, aristocratic, and international milieu of MoMA to the Whitney’s artist-oriented, low-key, very American ambiance.

  Also, most of the Whitney’s American art held little value on the open market, compared to MoMA’s mostly European collection, whose high monetary worth gave the whole museum a status far beyond the Whitney’s. Of course, by then most of the Impressionist, Fauve, and modernist painters had died. Their deaths conferred yet more status and, therefore, higher prices, on their remaining work.

  Still, I tried. We invited Connecticut friends to Museum events. We attempted, to some extent, to integrate our country and our city lives, not wanting the two to be totally disconnected. I remember my struggle to balance both worlds. While my mother was in Paris, for instance, I rushed to New York from my New Canaan home to sign a check in seven figures to buy the land for the new building, staggered by taking responsibility for such a sum; then I rushed back to New Canaan to pick up kids from ice hockey and piano lessons and cook dinner for the family.

  In 1964 Uncle Sonny astounded me with a letter saying that after a visit with Mum, he’d decided to give $100,000 to the Whitney “on account of your great interest in it.” “Pass this information along to the people at the Museum,” he continued, “as I wish you to get the credit for raising this sum.”

  He ended the letter with his hope that our family would be in the Adirondacks the following summer “with lots of children,” as, he said, “both we and our children enjoyed so much last year having you there.”

  I was flabbergasted. Why did he change his mind? Probably that “pleasant visit” with his sister, the first in years, was the answer. Maybe our children’s new friendship in the “Ads” with his wife Mary Lou’s four children also helped. We’d had fun organizing the sailboat races with them at their camp, Deerlands, and they’d come to Togus for picnics and water-skiing. Or maybe Marylou wanted a closer relationship with Sonny’s family. … Whatever the reasons, I was grateful for the support.

  Sonny’s recognition that I needed “the credit” for being able to bring in money was a revelation. All too aware of that new need, I’d had no idea of his sensitivity to my new position vis-à-vis the Whitney. No longer was it enough to be Gertrude’s granddaughter. I had to earn my way, just like everyone else. I was expected to do that now by the new trustees, and had come to expect it of myself, too. Especially if I were to lead the Museum, some day.

  Longing perhaps for the more private life she’d had in Aiken, in Long Island, in Paris, fishing on the Gaspé Peninsula, or in the Adirondacks, my mother tried bravely to live up to her role at the Museum. By December 1964 she wrote of nosebleeds, of many doctors’ visits, and finally, on December twenty-eighth, of the death of their beloved brown standard poodle, Banco, who had traveled yearly to Paris on the steamer with my parents, who always sat up straight in the front seat of their car next to the chauffeur, to whom they talked as a friend, and whom my father had often painted.

  While apparently excited and happy about the building and the plans, Mum looked forward most to her travels with my father. She seemed, as president, to enjoy the new trustees, and they loved her. But whenever she was back in New York, it didn’t seem to agree with her — she appeared listless, depressed.

  My father and I were concerned. Mum had begun to skip meetings. At sixty-seven, she was in good health but didn’t want to see many people. What was wrong? Wanting to perpetuate what her mother had begun, hoping to immortalize her, my mother had become president of the Whitney. But the very qualities of modesty and reticence that made her a beloved leader were also the ones that made it so hard for her. Her public role went against her own nature. Although he and I were all for it, my father said she would never consider a psychiatrist. Depression is so openly talked of today that it’s difficult to remember how recently many people considered it weak and shameful. People in my parents’ world kept it a secret if they saw psychiatrists. My mother never did see a psychiatrist. How I wish I’d had the courage and wisdom at the time to insist, because I believe she was tormented by bouts of depression for the rest of her life. Instead, I kept quiet about it, even with Mum, certainly with the Museum world. I’d been conditioned, too. It took a lot more life experience for me to open up.

  She did acknowledge problems, though, to her little red leather Line-a-Day. In 1961, the same year non-family trustees joined the board:

  Friday — feel awful but up & around.

  Tuesday — 4:00 — meeting about price of our museum

  Wednesday — still feel horrid.

  Thursday — stayed in bed. feel awful.

  Friday — bed

  Saturday — bed

  Sunday — bed

  Monday — Russians big bomb. still feeble.

  Also, at about that time several of her close and good friends died, people with whom she’d loved to talk, to sit up late at night, to laugh and play. (My father, like me, went to bed early and arose early. My mother liked to sleep until noon.) Bruce Buttfield, her beloved and brilliant decorator, was one. Tim Coward, one of her first loves, intellectual, passionate publisher, founder of Coward McCann, was another. Carnes Weeks, her seductive doctor and a drinking companion with whom she used to sit until all hours at the Stork Club, passed away. Her closest woman friend developed a disease we now call Alzheimer’s. While Mother was as beautiful, elegant, and charming as ever, the awareness of aging, the losses that we all suffer as we grow older, and thoughts of mortality surely added to her anxiety.

  I think she felt somewhere in her heart that she’d let go of the reins too soon, that the
Museum was out of the family control when it shouldn’t have been. She perhaps felt that she had failed her mother, who had wanted the family to run her museum without outsiders.

  Reflecting on this today, I don’t agree. Gertrude was a pragmatist. She would have known the Museum couldn’t survive without infusions of money and people. Competitions and struggles to get sculpture commissions and to complete them, long leadership of the Museum, and Gertrude’s native determination had impelled her to learn the tradeoffs necessary for accomplishment, change, and growth. My mother didn’t know them. She had chosen a calmer life, far from ambition. To be faced with a public life at this stage was uncomfortable, if not alarming.

  Logic wouldn’t have swayed Mum’s feelings. She was instinctual. She believed in things invisible, in astrology and space ships and extraterrestrial beings, in life after death, and a throng of mysteries. She loved baseball.

  My mother put on a good act. No one at the Museum realized her feelings.

  As for me, still innocent of institutional politics, still curious and idealistic, still yearning, I had yet to find my own way. The Museum was different for me than it had been for Gertrude or for Flora. Rather than a personification of either of them, it represented a real, attainable paradise filled with all I felt I lacked: art, intellect, accomplishment. Somewhere inside my self-deprecating being lay the hope that I could become a person with those qualities. Since I was the only interested and involved family member besides Barklie, who I knew would leave someday, the way was open to me.

  Despite my excitement, however, the money business frightened me. I knew I’d have to work as Gertrude and my mother never had.

  I began taking more responsibility, running meetings, discussing their content with Lloyd and Jack, making decisions. In a letter to Michelle, still at Woodstock school in Vermont, I described the trustees meeting in September 1964. “I passed my first test at the first fall trustees meeting at the Museum — there were about 20 men there, more than ever before, and I was very severe and rapped my gavel a lot, and after the meeting they all clapped and said, ‘You ran a tight meeting,’ which apparently they like. We are really going to have to work hard this winter and raise a lot of money, if we are to be able to pay for the building, which has already started to be built. It will be a very hard job especially for me since I hate asking people for money.”

  And I worried. About Mum. About money. About my own family, as I spent still more time in New York. Miche was in boarding school, but the other children were at a peak of activity in a school that asked for lots of parental involvement. Running the “Toss a Sponge at a Teacher” booth at the Frogtown Fair. Driving a carload of boys to a lacrosse game in Greenwich. Making costumes for the Mother Daughter Dinner. Conferences with the children’s teachers. All this, important and good. And then the day-to-day business of getting and cooking meals for ever-hungrier children and their friends, driving to parties and lessons and friends’ houses, being a cub scout leader, a Sunday School teacher — it added up to a busy life.

  Still, I worried about putting businessmen like Benno on the board, those who weren’t much interested in art and who might try to change things without knowing enough. About the precious but potentially threatened independence of the director and curators. About the hunger for power around me I increasingly began to sense at meetings.

  About change.

  Already, despite the allure of the new, I was becoming more cautious about the speed of that change. Maintaining the Whitney’s traditions, as I’d learned them from Jack and Lloyd, seemed vital. That meant continuing the liberal policy, in effect since my grandmother’s time, of showing a broad spectrum of American art. Exhibiting the young and emerging but not forgetting the older artists. Keeping in the Museum a spirit of joy and adventure. Maintaining the Museum’s close relationship with artists. Perhaps the Biennials symbolize many of these traditions. The Whitney has always drawn criticism, ranging from “intellectual sterility” to “trendiness,” from being “too conservative” to being “too avant-garde.”

  Barklie was the one I counted on most for advice. We could never lose, he said, by being daring and taking risks — only by conservatism and fear of change. He made me feel more confident in my increasingly demanding role.

  From Suriname, around 1964, when I worried about both arguments and jealousies simmering, about the evident tension between David Solinger and Benno Schmidt, Barklie wrote about leadership, describing my own role.

  … no matter how various individual cards are played, it looks pretty much to me as though the real inside leadership will come (over a period of time) from those who really like the subject, first, and the peculiar Museum challenges second. I don’t think the social need ever dominate the Whitney. And I predict that the “Bennos” are not a real threat because they lack the passion (re the subject) and will burn out fast. They can change the atmosphere — cool it a bit — but that won’t stop people who really care. Like at first a pause for inserting a diaphragm is pretty unromantic but pretty soon you adapt and accept the little realities. In fact, they can add spice as Benno has in his own way — See, I don’t think Benno really wants to wake up some morning to find that the Museum is his. He wants to be heard … to get close to the power center. He may even want to get in some good arguments — So many of these businessmen develop a pattern of going as far as the other guy will let them — for the zest of it, not with malice — as a sport without much purpose. They are bluffers. Their excitement comes from the close calls, the infought strategies.

  Most of them don’t know what the hell they’re really doing. You have to remember this. They find out while they’re at it, fists flying. …

  Who are the passionate ones? They shall and should inherit the Whitney, whoever they are — and of course, yours and my … point all along is that most of the passion at any one time is in the professional staff & it’s our job to see that it is … protected.

  You and I are a little different in that I kind of like fights and arguments because I like people to show their colors. You like people to get along happily — And what I want you to believe is that all the protagonists would not have at all the same level of disagreement, etc., if you (& your mother) were not felt and assumed to be somewhere at the center and reliably non-partisan and protective of the Museum in the long run.

  Only a month later, back in Washington, Barklie wrote a sharply critical letter. We had agreed, he reminded me, that family and staff should act in harmony — but we weren’t talking together, ahead of time. “A concealed iceberg of implications” was left dangling. “Not yet having had any sustained discussion about the Museum with your mother, I am at a loss to know where she believed a harmony of our views might begin to be based,” he wrote, adding that he had for her the greatest respect and would always, “repeat always, publicly (or in any meeting with others) defer to her view. … I don’t think the credit due her for what the Museum is in the process of becoming can be overstated.”

  What Bark didn’t realize was that we were protecting Mum from just the kind of analysis he wanted. She didn’t want to confront the issues he longed to discuss, she didn’t want to have a conversation with him at all. I found it impossible to tell this to my dear cousin. Wrongly. He was giving us his best ideas, his commitment, and it seemed bizarre to him that we’d go off with my parents for dinner after meetings and not include him. And I never explained why. How could I have been so silly? So afraid to tell him. To hurt his feelings. Or was I afraid he’d reject me, and therefore the Museum, for my wrong-headedness or sentimentality?

  The question of board responsibility for policy and board involvement was key to our success, according to Barklie. His letter continued.

  Two areas of the meeting especially interested me in terms of my tired old saw about the importance of the board being brought into basic policy matters during our money drive and as we are about to make some sort of a big leap forward: The discussion of admissions, membership, turnsti
les, hours open, etc., where, after some fumbling around, Lloyd mentioned that the staff is in the process of a study of these matters. Whereupon David, I think, asked that when the study was complete it be presented to the board for approval and discussion. There it is in a nutshell! Perhaps you noted the several nodding heads as Lloyd agreed to do this … and A RESULTANT FEELING BY MEMBERS OF THE BOARD THAT THEY WERE CONSULTED, THAT THEIR OWN IDEAS HAD A HEARING, AND THAT THE MUSEUM GENERAL POLICY HAS BEEN SET BY THEM AS ACTIVE BOARD MEMBERS. But, of course, I felt a certain dismay that this just happened at a meeting rather than that it was specifically anticipated and led into by the chair …

  Another instance, of course, was the general discussion of our opening show in the new building. Two things were wrong with that, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to notice them. First, there was no statement by the president making clear the distinction between the board’s right to determine the character of so important a show for the Museum and the staff’s right to have a completely free hand in the execution of the show. Don’t tell me this is implicit and understood by all. Schmidt for one was beginning to enter the area of telling the staff how to gather such a show and when to get started. Secondly, there was no relating of a board-level discussion of the objectives for an opening show to a board-level consideration of the Museum objectives in, say, its first year of shows. I know I wasn’t the only person to wonder — Are we all to assume that the board having spoken in one instance, that the staff will just proceed as during the past years in general programming of exhibits in the indefinite future? Good God!

  He went on to delineate areas in which he felt the board could be involved, without impinging on the staffs autonomy. Jack Baur could present, say, a three-year philosophy of programs for the board’s consideration, with ideas about a balance of permanent collection and temporary exhibitions, historic and contemporary. He could then ask for the freest possible hand in determining the specifics of that philosophy. If, that is, Jack, the staff, and ourselves, desired an active, committed, and enthusiastic board.