The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  Like my mother, I, too, was always more comfortable with written pages before me. Did I fear sounding inarticulate or stupid? Or was I afraid of what I might blurt out — some dangerous truth or opinion? At the trustees meeting later the same day, she read more informal words.

  This is an exciting moment! Our new building is beautiful beyond words. I doubt that it will ever seem more so to me than now — when all of you who made it possible are meeting here for the first time.

  It seems like such a short time ago, doesn’t it, when we first met together as trustees? We knew we were there to plan and build something new — something, I feel, totally consistent with my mother’s ideals on behalf of the American artist.

  This board’s first important decision was to build our own Museum — away from the shadow of any existing institution. Not long after that decision, I remember when David [Solinger], heading a Planning Committee, told us we would have to raise $8 million to accomplish this — and even more amazing, saying that we could! This seems like yesterday — in spite of the fact that a year ago I wondered if the time would ever come when we weren’t completely preoccupied with fund-raising. I think that time has come. Not that our campaign is completed — there is still much to be done. Not that ever again will there be a time when this board is not searching for new sources of support. But that now we can balance our awareness of this against the responsibility entrusted to each of us to assure that this Museum plays an expanding and vital role, because I think all of you, as you feel joy at the beauty of this building, also feel the seriousness and depth of the challenge it imposes on us.

  You are marvellously dedicated trustees — you have been unbelievably generous with your time and your money. Again and again your talents, creative and organizational, have been indispensable to our progress. Truly this is your Museum. It is the product of your vision and your hard work.

  Then she thanked people individually. Finally, she ended on this rousing note:

  The new Whitney Museum is capable of greatness. Because you who have been entrusted with its ideals — and now its beautiful new home —you are capable of greatness. Four years of our association on this board have convincingly demonstrated this. I hope charting the development of our Museum in the years ahead will be exhilarating for you. I’m sure it will be more fun than just raising money — and every bit as important.

  Thank you all so much.

  These words are nostalgic — bittersweet, in their trust, their joy, their underlying melancholy, and their implicit farewell. “Truly, this is your Museum.”

  Ten

  In 1967 my mother was ready to resign from her position as president.

  In my photograph album my parents, Mike, and Jack Baur linger over wineglasses and fruit around a table on the porch of our house in Connecticut. It’s a lovely fall day, maples blazing red and gold behind the waterfall. Laughing at the camera, they are relaxed as always with each other. With the board, Mum could be rather formal. Only we on that porch, perhaps, could sense how tense was her big smile, how strained her too polite words, how hard she worked to deliver her customary warmth and friendliness — all, of course, for the sake of the Museum.

  That day in New Canaan, we discussed the succession. We’d create the new position of chairman for Mum. She’d hold it as long as she lived. The title would imply no work, no responsibility.

  Would I now become president?

  Please, please, said my mother. Looking at Mike, at the children playing below the house, I said no. I just couldn’t give it all it needed, couldn’t spend enough time away from home. Waving my arms at all that lay around us. Mum, I could tell, was bitterly disappointed.

  Was I afraid?

  Continuous fund-raising would mean reaching out to people I didn’t know and had no idea how to find. It would mean a different relationship, too, with those I already did know — demanding ever more work and money from them. Perhaps I might jeopardize my new friendships.

  I didn’t want that.

  And again, I remember thinking that asking for money seemed like asking it for myself. I identified with the Museum, as had my mother.

  My mother’s self-image was closely related to that of her illustrious family. The Whitney was part of her, to the point that when she felt things weren’t going well, she’d get sick. Names are so magical, so powerful. Spells against darkness and oblivion …

  Gertrude had been tougher. When her name seemed a disadvantage to her career, she wished she’d been born into a more ordinary family, but she also knew how to use her position for what she wanted. Fighting for her sculpture commissions, she was often asked to contribute her services, but she always demanded to be paid as a professional. And she grew hardened to criticisms (both of her own work and of the Whitney’s exhibitions) by her teachers and by critics. My mother, with a less passionate nature and a quieter lifestyle, was more vulnerable.

  Learning to raise money, then, meant learning to separate myself from the Whitney. This was easier for me than for my mother, because I’d always been ambivalent about my connection with the family. Had downplayed it. Had moved away physically and also emotionally. Perhaps the isolation I’d felt as a little girl had strengthened as well as distanced me.

  That semiconscious pushing away from the social position implicit in being a Vanderbilt or a Whitney eventually enabled me to push away, too, my identity with the Whitney Museum. Loyalty to the family and to the Museum had buried my recognition of these feelings, parts of the many secrets it had become a habit to keep. When I needed to, later, I found I could ask for money. I even enjoyed it. I enjoyed the power.

  Thinking of these generations of women, I see us as emerging from each other, fitting together like those Russian “Matrushka” dolls. Using our collective past to go on to an independent future. Gamoo’s and Mum’s lives, revealing and concealing in a perpetual dance, weave in and out of mine.

  “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” Kierkegaard said. None of this was clear to me then, nor, I think, to Mike or my parents. Jack not only sympathized with my family reasons, but agreed with my suggestion that David Solinger deserved the title and the honor of being the first nonfamily president. He was not a Russian doll, far more like the proverbial new broom. First president of the Friends, David had led the fund drive — not in giving, but in organization and hard work — and for that alone we owed him, But he was prickly. My father, who had strong instincts about people, had little faith in him. And a close friend, Dick Salomon — father of Duncan’s friend Ralph — who knew David in other contexts, warned me to be careful about giving David a position of power at the Whitney Dick felt Solinger couldn’t inspire the trust our institution needed, and too many people disliked him. I didn’t then know why, but I respected and believed my friend.

  Could Jack, who would soon be director in the normal, traditional succession at the Whitney, deal with David? Yes, Jack could, he insisted, and it was the only fair thing to do. That was Jack. Equitable, living out his ideals.

  But what about Benno? Our biggest donor, our best fund-raiser. In the big world, our most powerful trustee.

  But how could we have someone who didn’t really care about art as president? What would artists and the art world think? That the Whitney’s nature, its commitment to art and artists, had changed? That now, money and power were more important? No, Benno could not be our choice.

  And Bob Friedman, whom we’d all have preferred, had gone off to Cornell to teach. Besides, the job would take too much time from his writing.

  “It’s time,” I said, “to show we really mean it when we say it’s not a family museum any more. What could be a better way? A stronger statement?”

  We avoided discussing one cogent reason for the change.

  Quite simply, that the family could no longer support the Whitney Museum.

  Our resources had dwindled, through a combination of bad management, lack of sibling solidarity, and a dearth of entreprene
urial energy. Bright and spirited as my generation was, none of us had earned a lot of money. Although my mother was comfortable, her grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ enormous fortune was dissipated. I didn’t understand why. In our family, we talked of money even less than we did of sex or death. For us, as children, the source of our daily bread had been as mysterious as that of babies, and still remained so. Not until I did exhaustive research about my grandmother for a book, not, really, until my mother died, did I discover the facts about our “downwardly mobile” journey.

  Fund-raising was now a necessary job for the president. David, for this reason, was an unsuitable choice. For me, though, the fear of feeling guilt if we didn’t choose him overrode the good of the Museum. What would he think? (Of me.) What would he say? (To me.)

  The decision made, David was delighted. For three or four years, we told him. Until I was ready, was the implication; another important thought unspoken, left unclear.

  When my mother and I visited Benno in his office to give him the news, we were staggered by his reaction. David! That twerp? How could we give our Museum over to him? He couldn’t believe it. Why wasn’t I taking the job? He’d support me, help me all he could.

  We reeled out of his paneled office and leaned on the elevator bell, and I feared Mum would faint onto the thick carpeting. Why was Benno so upset? He must have expected we’d ask him to be president, Mum and I agreed. And that, as I remember, was nearly the last we saw of Benno at the Museum, although he remained on the board until 1984.

  Looking back, I believe that Benno, a powerful businessman, knew David lacked a platform from which to attract people with money to the Museum. Therefore, he couldn’t lead the Whitney successfully.

  As I couldn’t easily come to New York the day of their appointment, we agreed that Mum could tell Roy Neuberger by herself, thinking he’d be pleased. He was horrified, too. And Mum was shaken again. Roy felt he deserved the honor more than David. A few years later, after we’d turned down his suggestion that the Whitney be renamed for him if he gave it his collection, he left us for the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York.

  Benno’s angry rejection probably changed the direction of our board expansion. Choosing David Solinger, in retrospect, relates to those other decisions not to merge with the Metropolitan Museum, which, while ensuring our financial survival, would have denied our principles. Benno would probably have been an excellent president. Besides, he would have respected Mum’s wishes.

  Without Benno, we had little access to bankers and businessmen, so we concentrated on finding patrons with new money and new collections who were drawn to the Whitney’s art, as well as to its cachet.

  Today, I recognize the varied reasons people may have for wishing to join a board such as the Whitney’s. Social ambition, business contacts, diversity, a desire to influence programs, idealism, wanting to fill up time — and still more. This is reality. A genuine love of art may or may not accompany any of these compelling drives.

  The presidency of an institution is a highly political job, requiring insight, intelligence, experience, ambition, a certain ruthlessness, and the individual’s dedicated time. Of course, the director needs to be even more perfect, taking big responsibility but receiving minuscule pay compared to a corporate executive. Small wonder there’s such a high turnover in directors today. Wealth was, and remains, the primary condition for election to the board. The Museum has always needed more money — immediately, upon moving to the new building, and progressively ever since. Our endowment is still small in relation to our expenses; therefore, most of the yearly budget must be raised. Much of it comes from the trustees, who have been extraordinarily generous over the years.

  Until recently, hoping to identify members who would genuinely care about the Museum, we required that prospective board members sit on committees for at least a year before being elected. If a “big shot” can’t wait a year or so to join the board, that individual will not prove helpful in the long run. And institutions are for the long run.

  Mum, as chairman, came to meetings when she could, and the tone of the meeting changed with her presence. Egos were submerged in a sharper perception of our responsibility to the Museum. Engendered partly by the awareness of its history, as my mother projected it, these good feelings also came through her encouraging, enthusiastic personality. She always made a big effort to look well, to be at her very best.

  Much later, when she no longer came to New York, I would take new trustees, staff, or patrons to meet her at home in Old Westbury, where she welcomed them with the same courtesy and zest. I’m sure they found the experience memorable. I recall when Mum first met trustee Brendan Gill. He, as were many who met her, was enthralled by my mother.

  The ultimate conversationalist and charmer, Brendan gave her a wonderful time, telling stories, responding to hers. She reacted with an almost childish delight. “Oooh, what a marvelous man!” she said later. “I hope he’ll come back!” This was true praise, not given to many new people at that stage of Mum’s life.

  ***

  David, as president, kept the Museum within its budget, ran efficient meetings, and gave his time and money as generously as his nature enabled him to. The Whitney was his biggest interest, always, and his biggest commitment. The Museum, in turn, enriched his life.

  As soon as David became president, our relationship seemed to change. In soothing, rhythmic tones, he began patronizing sentences with “Well, you must understand,” or “Flora, I must tell you I don’t agree.” I was naive, he reminded me, as if it were a given.

  I was vice president, but he was president.

  Although I was ready for more involvement, for more responsibility in preparation for taking the role myself, David Solinger believed that the Museum was no longer a family affair. In fact, the less it was identified with the family, the easier it would be to raise money from others who would then be convinced that Whitneys were no longer supporting the Whitney Museum. Perhaps we should even consider changing its name.

  Jack disagreed. He believed that the Museum’s health resided in its history and in the family’s commitment.

  Upset by David’s rejection, I made an appointment to have lunch with him, to discuss things openly. Although the day he chose was inconvenient, I was right on time, and settled down to wait in Giovanni’s, a wonderful Italian restaurant, a favorite of my parents. A half hour later a message came: David would be another half hour. Annoyed, I waited, only to get another message: could I come to his office, he was tied up in a meeting. Hungry and mad, I walked a few blocks to his office, waited another half hour without seeing David, and finally left to catch my train back to the country. I had gained a painful sense of my position in relation to David.

  He was intelligent and dedicated but shadowed by a lack of grace.

  In 1980, after I had been president of the Museum for a couple of years, David said, “You’ve done a superlative job as president, Flora. Really better than several of us thought you could have done.”

  Recently, meeting David at the Met, although elderly and almost blind, his razor tongue was still intact. “Oh, Flora,” he said, “It’s so nice to see a trustee looking at art. That’s so rare these days.”

  The Museum was probably the most important thing in David’s life. He gave it his best. He maintained the Museum’s stability during the transitional years in the new building under new leadership. And he led a very significant project: the purchase of a middle building on Madison Avenue, south of the Museum. As I wrote to my parents in Paris in 1967, “The building involved is much smaller and rather run down. However, those present felt it was the key to the whole block and necessary in order to prevent someone else ‘assembling’ all the others and building a huge apartment building. I was the only mild objector, and then only on the basis that we’d become slumlords, after David’s description of the inside of the building, which wasn’t so great — and as this apparently must be a great secret, we can’t very well go in & fix
it all up! However, this objection was quickly disposed of by the illustrious trustees present: Benno, Alan, David, Roy, Mary, and Mike — a pretty good group to decide such a thing — and David had spoken to Bob on the phone. He was very much in favor.”

  I was certainly glad that we now owned the whole blockfront, ensuring the possibility of expansion to future generations.

  In general, David’s presidency was a time of consolidation. However, the recognition of American art and artists created unprecedented opportunities, in those years, for those artists and for our museum, still the only major museum of contemporary American art. While some of our programs reflected this flowering, the board, in terms of new patronage and new money, only took advantage of it later. David made some fine additions to the board: Susan Morse Hilles, daughter of Samuel Morse, a major benefactor of both art and money, and Charles Simon, a generous and devoted trustee from 1972 until he died in 1995.

  In 1968, another change at the Museum. Lloyd Goodrich had been director for ten years. His age left his energy undiminished. He relished the job. But Jack Baur was getting older, too, and it was his turn. He was virtually running the Museum, with Lloyd turning increasingly to outside activities and writing. Barklie and I discussed the succession with Lloyd, and he reluctantly became director emeritus, continuing on the board, with an office and secretarial help in the Museum. Jack became director.

  Both Lloyd and Jack understood the Museum’s basic mission. They supported showing all American art, rather than just the realistic work that not only they, but also my grandmother and Juliana Force, much preferred. In retrospect, I see that their understanding was extraordinary, given the public’s lack of acceptance of abstract work. That which is most popular, most accepted, is often not what lasts the longest. I am grateful for the example set by these four heroic figures for me and for the Whitney. I hope we’ll never abandon the “liberal principles,” as Lloyd called them, that Gertrude espoused, the rock on which she had founded her Whitney.