The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  Barklie concluded, “I wish we could lie out on some sunny beach for a few days free from distraction of little ones, etc., and have a half stream of consciousness, half brainstorming about much of the above and much more. It always seems so rushed when I see you.”

  Yes, it certainly did — but my life didn’t allow for those few days on a beach. And while I thought very highly of Barklie, neither of my parents approved of many of his ideas, and Jack and Lloyd were wary of them, too. Perhaps, to them, he was a “troublemaker,” someone who stirred the pot unnecessarily. Perhaps, for my parents, it was still those sneakers!

  And so we didn’t address many of the basic issues he saw so clearly, and which would resurface from time to time, never more so than in the late ’80s. In the ’70s and ’80s, I thought I was dealing with them, but in retrospect, I believe I didn’t push or dig deep enough. In the ’90s, their accumulated weight had to be faced, and those who lead the Museum today have tried to resolve them in their own ways — the ways they know best, from their business experience. More specificity in the by-laws, tighter organization, committees to address ethical and legal issues, increased power for the board through its president and chairman. More structure, a bigger institution.

  A year or so later, judging by a letter in November 1965, we must have paid attention to some of Barklie’s suggestions.

  “Leadership of this sort of board, I believe, IS a continuing expectation by its chairman of individual creative effort of each member. There must be an atmosphere of nothing being sacred, nothing being beyond discussion, of every policy being open — open to a current thoughtful judgment of its rightness-under-the-circumstances.”

  We were “really in wonderful health,” he continued, saying this had a great deal to do with me, more than I myself realized. “It has long since gotten to the point where I cannot imagine this enterprise without you. If this occasionally makes you feel claustrophobic, I hope it also makes you feel engaged and proud.”

  His words indeed gave me pride. But he was right. If I could have accepted the “fights and arguments” as valuable lessons, and heard their underlying themes, I might have been, in the ’70s and ’80s, far more helpful to the Museum. If I had stayed nonpartisan. I covered a lingering insecurity by being stubborn rather than wise. Dedicated, hard-working, but too easily influenced.

  Now, though, excitement was growing about the new building. Breuer’s own words best encapsulate his hopes that it would be appropriate to its purpose and site:

  In the designing of the project and after establishing its workings and its program, we have faced the first and most important problem: what should a museum look like, a museum in Manhattan? Surely it should work, it should fulfill its requirements. But what is its relationship to the New York landscape? What does it express? What is its architectural message?

  It is easier to say first what it should not look like. It should not look like a business or office building, nor should it look like a place of light entertainment. Its form and its material should have identity and weight in the neighborhood of 50-story skyscrapers, of mile-long bridges, in the midst of the dynamic jungle of our colorful city. It should be an independent and self-reliant unit, exposed to history, and at the same time it should have a visual connection to the street. It should transform the vitality of the street into the sincerity and profundity of art.

  Tuesday, October 20, 1964, in another letter to Michelle I describe laying the cornerstone. “Lots of people sitting in the middle of the street, which was blocked off to traffic! Mayor Wagner sat right next to me, and made a very nice speech about the Museum — and Bani [her grandchildren’s name for my mother] made a short speech and everyone clapped. … We’re having a terrible time raising money — and this is supposed to help by giving us some good publicity. The building is being built, anyway.”

  People were highly curious about Breuer’s first building in New York City. The details were intended to reflect the Museum’s earlier buildings, and to continue the original Whitney spirit of welcome and intimacy. Parquet floors in small galleries on the second and third floors were thickly carpeted. With pearwood walls and ceilings, comfortable sofas, handsome desks and tables, they were inviting spaces. The “family” — trustees, Friends, and staff — appreciated the structure’s boldness. We admired its forceful, elegant — some said “brutal” — stance on Madison Avenue, and its remarkable details: the granite stairs, the bush-hammered concrete, the bronze hardware, the granite sheathing. We knew the excellence of the circulation patterns and servicing systems. The democratic arrangement of office space appealed to us; everyone seemed to have equal position, windows, and square footage. We felt grateful to Jack, Bob, and Mike, largely responsible for the workable, functional planning, as well as for holding costs to a minimum. And, most important, we found the galleries superb.

  To keep a little flavor of the old Museums, Connie Breuer, Marcel’s wife, chose furnishings for some of the galleries. A desk for one room, a few sofas, benches, chairs. For upholstery and carpets, she chose Breuer colors — brilliant blue, red, yellow, elegant gray. Bit by bit, show by show, curators, disliking distractions from the works they installed, removed them. Visitors, however, enjoyed the casual ambiance they helped to provide, and I’m sorry those bright bits of furniture are gone. Apparently, “growth,” in our case, meant “cooler”; a new distance between informal and formal, between private and public, between amateur and professional.

  Soon after the opening of the newly built, newly created Whitney Museum in 1966, glowing reviews filled the architectural press, while the popular press remained cautious, sometimes negative or mocking. In time, the building became for most people a monument of Modernism, an icon of New York City.

  There was, however, no space provided, as there was on Fifty-fourth Street, for my grandmother’s sculpture. It was put in storage. I supported this decision, assuming that my grandmother wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to put herself and her work in a central position any more. If she hadn’t been my grandmother, I would have had no problem with honoring her work as founder of the Museum. I neither understood nor thought through her central importance to the Museum. In my youth and excess of discretion, trying to be fair, I pulled back from what would have been the right decision — to acknowledge and signify our beginnings. To show our pride in the Whitney’s founder! The most significant aspect of the Museum’s history and philosophy was thus invisible: my grandmother’s unique roles in furthering American art, in the Whitney, and as an artist. My judgment in this matter was wrong, and, I believe, destructive to the Museum, since its founding has always been such an intrinsic part of its mission and character.

  The balance between public and private, between old and new, essential to the strength and longevity of institutions, has always been difficult to maintain and understand at the Museum. We have swung wildly from emphasizing one to focusing on the other. In the ’60s, the excitement of the “new” won the day. Instead of a room to honor the founder and provide a peaceful respite for visitors, we gave valuable space to a Friends’ dining room, symbol of our new priority: the need for money. (Not well patronized, it was soon converted to other nonpublic uses.)

  I realize today how easily I could have swung this decision the other way. But I was intent upon our new patrons. For their Museum potential, to be sure. There was, of course, my own pleasure in a new life, with new “friends” I saw as entrées into the exciting world of New York. But there I was again, following the same pattern of wanting to please, just as I’d pleased teachers and parents as a child. Too quick to dismiss too much of the past.

  We also began to charge admission to the Museum, for the first time.

  I opposed this, convinced that Gertrude would have, too. The Whitney was never about making the experience of art contingent on having or spending a certain amount of money.

  I hated the connection between looking and paying. I didn’t think of art as entertainment, comparable to the movi
es. It seemed all wrong. Think of the theater, the ballet, the opera, said my friends on the board. They were persuasive, pointing out it was the only way the Museum could come close to a balanced budget, with the increased expenses we expected: more space equaled more guards, more staff, more exhibitions, more visitors, more everything. “Wasn’t the whole idea to welcome everyone, have American art free to all? …” “Yes, but …” And there seemed nothing to say. I wasn’t capable of making the forceful arguments that might have convinced them. What, compared to them, did I know about money? “As soon as we get on our feet, raise more money for endowment, we’ll go back to free admission.”

  The subject still recurs, and when I was president we raised money to make free admission possible for nearly half our visitors. But the basic prevailing policy is to pay, more and more all the time.

  We always hoped to add to the $2.5 million endowment my grandmother had left, so that the income from that money would increase, but immediate needs often took precedence. Does having to pay money, one’s first experience on entering a museum, alter one’s experience of the art? For me, it was hard to erase that first impression, and it continues to be a difficult concept. Even Gertrude had to cut back on funding for her Museum, but the concern as well as the cost has grown with each move, each expansion, each year. What is the solution? To cut back on programs? On acquisitions? On space? On staff? On salaries, already low? Or to raise more and yet more money, requiring more development staff and richer trustees?

  Difficult, unresolved issues.

  But what a great time I was having, despite the worries!

  Marcel Breuer —“Lajko”— and his wife, Connie, became our good friends. Lajko was a stocky, attractive man with sharp eyes, and a wide smile often spreading across his broad face. Connie was tall, with hair pulled back from her handsome oval face, dark clothes graceful on her slender body. She expressed her views with precision and clarity.

  We saw a great deal of them in New York, in New Canaan, and in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where they had beautiful houses designed, of course, by Breuer. He prepared delicious chicken paprikash from old Hungarian recipes, and we met the I. M. Peis, Tician and Judy Papachristou, artists like Constantino Nivola, and patrons like Rufus and Leslie Stillman, who eventually commissioned no fewer than four Breuer houses. Around a square granite table set with delicate Japanese plates and lit by candles in massive bronze holders originally designed by Lajko for Saint John’s monastery in Minnesota, we talked, we learned. Breuer’s architecture, in elegant but simple materials, flowed naturally, beautifully, through light-filled spaces. The apparently effortless control of the environment, the serenity he created, pleased us greatly. These evenings, these conversations, fostered our growing intimacy with these new friends. Impelled to keep some kind of record, I see now from my notes how much it meant to us.

  Another time, Connie called. Could we come to Lajko’s surprise birthday party in New York? When we saw the surprise she’d organized, we were as amazed as he was: a friend of theirs had come to entertain him with her best belly dances. She was a pro. And how delighted he seemed! We loved seeing the earthy side of Breuer — such a sensual man, appreciating beautiful women and raunchy stories, too.

  We visited the Breuers in Wellfleet, where I played chess with Lajko — as I did again later when he was ill. He was an excellent player, yet kind enough to humor my inexperience. I can see him in my mind today, in a silk robe, at the end of his life, concentrating on his next move, cheerful despite his weakness.

  One of my last glimpses of him in public was at the Whitney in a small exhibition of Robert Venturi’s work. This architect represented the antithesis of all Breuer had worked for in architecture: a modernist purity of language and ideal, translated into the finest materials. Bob Venturi was glorifying the vernacular expressions of mainstream America. And yet there was Lajko, at the opening, saying, “Well, I don’t believe in his ideas, but I respect him. He’s very bright, very talented. He’s the future. We must look and think about what he’s doing.”

  I admired his open-minded tolerance, and wanted to emulate him.

  People of Breuer’s caliber made me increasingly aware of a deeper imaginative and examined life. Through the Breuers, my self-confidence grew.

  Once, ending a long evening at the Museum, we went to “Yellowfingers,” a disco near Bloomingdale’s. After everyone else had left, we persuaded the manager to put on a Viennese tape, and Alfonso Ossorio waltzed me around the empty floor. Twirling, spinning, I was enchanted by this elegant, handsome artist of Filipino-Spanish-Chinese descent. The best dancer imaginable, Alfonso was also the most educated man I’d ever met. He offered to guide my reading, he lent me books, and talked of them with total recall.

  After spending a weekend with Alfonso in Wainscott, we realized that his house and his collection were major works of art. In the portico, festooned with flowering plants, bright parrots greeted us. I’ll never forget walking into the music room for the first time and seeing Jackson Pollock’s Lavender Mist over the refectory table. The painting’s powerful, otherworldly beauty seemed to open up childhood feelings and memories in me, feelings of yearning, happiness, and loss. Just thinking of that painting brings back those intense emotions, and also the excitement of being with Alfonso, of feeling myself in the presence of an extraordinarily gifted person. There were exotic objects everywhere in that house: a Turkish shoe-shine box, its brass fittings gleaming; an art deco vase, etched in gold, filled with dried grasses from the dunes; a small de Kooning painting; a group of prehistoric pots; chairs bristling with horns and antlers; a painting by Clyfford Still; a richly decorated altar; oriental jewel-like carpets. Alfonso’s own work, paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, as original and dazzling as he himself, was expertly installed in the house Albert Herter, the early-twentieth-century muralist and portrait painter, had built. It looked across the whole length of Georgica Pond to the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Alfonso’s big “congregations” seemed to watch us: glass eyes embedded in bright plastic, wooden shoe forms, shells, crosses, every imaginable detritus of nature and modern civilization, combined in myriad forms. Metaphors, I thought, of humanity in its infinite variety, displaying exaltation, joy, despair, cruelty, faith, and horror.

  Alfonso and his longtime companion, Edward Dragon, a dancer and musician, presided over the household with grace.

  To end the evening, we walked out under the stars to the pond’s edge where pale swans glided, stately on the dark still water. Our final image of Alfonso’s magic castle.

  Alfonso’s generosity, the information he shared, his strong opinions, his energy, and his very example helped me to further understand the creative life. But in Bob Friedman’s Alfonso Ossorio, the frontispiece shows Alfonso with a slight frown, a questioning look, giving an uneasy sense of a man whose lifelong search hasn’t brought him all he’d hoped. Alfonso epitomized both the advantages and the disadvantages of wealth for an artist. He certainly took pleasure in his large and well-appointed studio, in the ability to focus on his work without worrying about the humdrum details of daily life, his beautiful surroundings and gardens. But in his lifetime he never achieved the recognition he deserved. I was to learn more about that, later, while doing research about my grandmother. About her endless struggle for acceptance. “Dilettante,” they said, “not in earnest, just playing around.”

  Apparently, rich American artists are seldom taken seriously. We have other myths — like Horatio Alger.

  Still determined to be different from my grandmother or my mother, to really be there for my children, I nevertheless was becoming more and more involved with the Museum. Although Mike and I wanted our children to be aware of what their parents were up to in New York, we were glad that their interests were focused in their own developing worlds. We didn’t want the formidable names of Whitney and Vanderbilt to give them false values. I didn’t want them burdened with the ancestral identity some of my relatives still clung to.

  R
ecently, I asked two of them, long grown-up now, how they had viewed Mike’s and my times at the Museum, away from them.

  “I thought,” said one, “it was all about social events. Parties.”

  “It was all about money,” said the other.

  “Why did you think that?” I asked.

  “Because you always talked about raising money, how much the Museum needed, when you came back.”

  Neither remembered minding the time we’d spent there.

  Did I have to choose one role or another? Or could I continue to be a “perfect” wife and mother, and also a “perfect” trustee? Which was my “real” life? I’d been a brooding, introverted child, but with marriage and children, I found very little time or energy left over for thinking. So I slipped gradually into this double life. Looking back, I’m certain that I was reaching out for a bigger world, a greater challenge. That I’d been simply one of the countless women who loved their families, but wished for a fuller life.

  The friends I’ve described were helping me build a strong foundation for all my subsequent beliefs about the Whitney. And building it on my early love of art, coming originally from my father and his painting.

  I love the photograph of my mother cutting the ribbon at the dedication ceremony of the Breuer building on opening day — Tuesday, September 27, 1966, at 1:30. With Jackie Kennedy, head of our new National Committee, smiling at her side, she beams as the ribbon falls from her scissors, her arms outstretched in a wide gesture of welcome.

  Flora spoke briefly.

  I cannot tell you what this moment means to me. It is the culmination of a dream that my mother had nearly sixty years ago. As I cut this ribbon my heart is full of gratitude to the devoted people, our trustees, our staff and others, who helped with such generosity to give that dream, that vision, reality. It seems a fitting moment to dedicate this building, and at the same time to rededicate ourselves, to the ideal which the Whitney has always stood for — the service of this country’s living art.