The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  Then, Arthur Altschul summarized his theory. Tom had a basic personality problem. It stemmed from his inferior artistic professionalism and administrative deficiency, so he rode roughshod over both staff and trustees. He was insensitive to the value of trustees who lacked money but brought other qualities to the board: scholarship, knowledge, historical involvement. Surprisingly, however, Arthur concluded that, all this notwithstanding, Tom was perhaps the right man in the right place at the right time.

  Tom neither knew Arthur’s history at the Museum nor understood how much his earlier commitment had contributed to the Whitney’s growth and its present building. Still, Arthur wanted to be one of those Tom favored.

  Most people did.

  I wanted to stick it out. But I doubted my ability to improve matters. And I could barely speak to Tom.

  Marcia, meantime, decided to start her own museum (the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Soho) and said she would love to work with me, if I decided to leave the Whitney. A tempting offer, but I shelved it.

  Then I wrote a rough draft of a statement I planned to read to the board, ending with these words: “I have lost confidence in our director, and at this time would like to ask the board, after discussion, for a vote of confidence in Tom, and then proceed from there.”

  Even then, with my lack of experience and know-how, I sensed the proper procedure for such a drastic action as dismissing the director. I knew the whole board must be informed and involved.

  But before I could act, before the next trustees meeting, Steve Muller asked to meet with Tom and me. He felt he could help us to resolve our problems. Reluctantly, out of respect for Steve, I agreed. He arranged for dinner in a fine restaurant, and over drinks and food we relaxed and started to talk.

  Steve was skillful, probing gently for problems, unearthing spiky truths, enabling Tom and me to safely confront each other.

  I was furious about Marcia.

  Tom had been afraid to tell me, he said, fearing my emotional reaction. (Such emotions were always difficult for him to deal with.) He considered her insubordinate.

  Then Steve said, “If you work together, you can be a great team. You balance each other temperamentally, emotionally, in style as well as substance. This museum has infinite potential. You both know that. I believe the two of you can lead it to where it should be, the finest museum of American art in the world.”

  I walked home with renewed faith, greatly surprised that this should be so, and thankful to Steve. Although it took another dinner and subsequent meetings with Tom, and also more time, this was the beginning. Tom and I were on the way to establishing a rock solid partnership.

  ***

  Since then, I’ve sometimes wondered why I so quickly changed my mind.

  Undoubtedly, I was subconsciously ready to accept Tom’s view that the Museum must change in order to take its place in a changing world. My new friend, Victor Ganz, already had prepared me for this attitude. A shift in emphasis was inevitable. The sheer number of artists and new galleries in New York made our former mission hopeless to fulfill. We couldn’t possibly show all emerging artists, couldn’t possibly buy and store their work. Only a museum such as the one Marcia was going to found could attempt it, a museum that didn’t collect. But the Whitney was already burdened by a collection it couldn’t show and hardly had the space or the money to store. This collection represented a unique, valuable overview of the first half of the century. If we were to continue collecting, we must focus on quality, exclusively — no longer on one of everything. In addition, by the late ’70s, much of the new work had been found and shown by a number of sophisticated, competitive galleries. Adhering to its worthy but now unrealistic ideals, the Whitney had missed out on some of the greatest art of our time. (I say that from my perspective today, flawed as any such short view must be. Who knows what will be considered “quality” in a hundred years?)

  All in all, the Whitney’s top priority was now to show the very finest of American art. And Tom believed we could best serve the public by focusing on just that, which meant, of course, making judgments. And judgments can be flawed.

  At dinner with the Ganzes, sitting among their Picassos, Stellas, Johnses, Rauschenbergs, Hesses, I listened as they told stories of these artists, of these acquisitions, and — most significantly — discussed their meanings. Home again, I sat up half the night reading Leo Steinberg’s Other Criteria, stirred by ideas that seemed to apply to the Museum as well as to art: “Contemporary art is constantly inviting us to applaud the destruction of values which we still cherish, while the positive cause, for the sake of which the sacrifices are made, is rarely made clear. So that the sacrifices appear as acts of demolition, or of dismantling, without any motive.”

  Victor let me know he thought the winds augured change. I must stay close to the Museum, must support that change. But when I asked him to join the board, he said he’d never allied himself with any one museum, and he didn’t think he could begin now. Secretly, I heard that as a challenge.

  Soon after, the president of the Museum of Modern Art, Blanchette Rockefeller, invited me for lunch. Blanchette encouraged me, warned me, counseled me. You’ll need people with lots of money, she said, but be careful, find people who really care. It was important advice.

  My schedule was already changing. Now, opening my calendar for 1977 at random, I find January 27:

  9:30, meet with Walter [Polechuck, director of development]

  10:30, meet with Tom

  Lunch with John Hanhardt

  2:30, David Hupert

  4:30, Budget and Operations committee at Dan’s office

  7:30, dinner, Tom and Bunty, Louisa Calder [Alexander’s widow], her daughter Mary and husband Howard Rower.

  A typical day.

  I knew it was the right time, this time.

  No one had formally asked me to be the next president of the Whitney except for my mother and Howard, but somehow this intention became known and accepted. (The choice of a new president would never again be so casual.) A letter thanking my mother for money she had sent me for Christmas so I could begin to prepare for my new job reminds me of my qualms:

  “… that amazing check, which should make it physically possible for me to do the job at the Museum. Whether I have the other qualities it takes, is a whole other question — I’ll surely need everybody’s faith and prayers and help. As soon as we get back [from a family sailing trip in the Caribbean], I’ll start working in earnest — as I think most of my work on the book should be finished in a month or so. Your wanting me to do it, and thinking I can do a good job, makes a tremendous difference — so, thank you for all that, as well as for all the $$.”

  And to my lifelong friend since childhood, artist Clare Chanler Forster, with whom I exchanged letters that approximated journals, I wrote: “The upshot of it all was that I decided to have a go at being president of the Whitney for a while. … I had to make a decision to either resign from it altogether or take the responsibility; at any rate, that’s what I thought. So — am in the midst of a kind of maelstrom of meetings, telephonings, letters, lunches, people, talk, talk, talk. I fear my lack of executive experience and financial training, but hope for some on-the-job training. It’s quite awesome to be responsible for such a big budget; not to speak of the policy part. I also fear the lack of time to reflect, and a kind of loss of identity. … But there are things I enjoy — mostly, people. It’s certainly challenging; whether it’s possible to keep some of the spirit of the place in spite of all the $$ problems and pressures is the big question.”

  Clare, in her typically generous way, wrote back, “Dear Flora, that’s wonderful news about you being the president of the Museum! I’m sure you’ll do an excellent job. Who could do better, really? For a long time I’ve thought there was another race of people older, smarter, more experienced. Now I know that isn’t true. We are them. This is it.”

  I was excited. Proud. Intimidated. Happy. All of these, all at the same time.


  Since, unlike my grandmother and my mother, I’d have little money to give the Museum, the job would require all my time, energy, and strength. I’d have to live in New York, at least during the week. There were too many evening events I couldn’t miss. Mike had supported me in the decision to become president, but we both realized the difficulties and questioned my decision. I wrote as much to Clare, after we’d both read a memoir by Liv Ullman about giving up one’s profession for love: “in the long run that idea of giving up doesn’t work, I suspect, because, after all, ‘what we are’ is not what we were born with but what we do with ourselves, and one has to develop to be anything. … Sometimes I wonder why I’m putting myself under all this pressure, jeopardizing to some extent my relationship with Mike, whom I love, struggling and getting exhausted and tense — and I suppose it’s a feeling that I must catch up, or it’ll certainly be too late to become whatever my potential allows me to become.”

  But, to me, in 1977, change seemed inevitable. Why was this? Was it ambition? My desire for a bigger world? A bigger part in the glamorous life I was glimpsing? And added to that, a belief that only I could help the museum to its next phase? Was it sheer ego?

  All of these, probably. Perhaps our marriage, Mike’s and mine, had a certain lifespan. As our lives diverged, what had once fulfilled us, occupying us wholly, was no longer enough. Filled with a new, willful energy during this transition, I fled the familiar.

  Eventually, in 1979, Mike and I agreed to divorce, as we both sought and found others who complemented the new desires and different directions of our middle years.

  How and why did I become involved with the Whitney Museum? While my involvement may not have sprung directly from love of art, it began there. And from that involvement it had grown steadily, sustained through good times and bad, through challenge and satisfaction.

  It became about art. More and more, I realized the centrality of art, curators, and artists to my life.

  In the ’70s, I felt a tingle, a buzz permeating the art world. It was a time of change, diversity, and excitement. Philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto has written about it.

  “The seventies in America … was certainly socially and, in a view I am becoming increasingly convinced of, artistically the most important decade of the century. It was the seventies in which the objective pluralistic structure of the art world first began to show itself as something distinctive. It was the seventies in which indeterminately many directions began to show themselves as available to artists without any historical possibility of showing themselves as the historical direction for art.”

  All around me, a wondrous multitude of directions. The variety and excellence were astounding: such artists as Donald Judd, Elizabeth Murray, Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse, Richard Tuttle, Richard Serra, Brice Marden, Mary Miss, Robert Irwin, Ursula von Rydingsvard, James Turrell, Robert Smithson, and many more.

  Philip Guston, painter during an earlier generation, became central to the ’70s when he stopped painting abstractions and made work related to his much earlier figurative mode. His new paintings, like much art of the ’90s, were wild, angry, and cartoonish. He said once, “There are so many things in the world — in the cities — to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free?” In 1966, before the change in his work, he had spoken of some shift: “It has to be new and old at the same time, as if that image has been in you for a long time but you’ve never seen it before. …”

  Henry Hopkins, director of the San Francisco Museum of Art, organized a Guston retrospective, revealing the wide range of Guston’s work. The exhibition traveled to the Whitney in 1981, and Hopkins as curator wrote for the catalogue:

  “When I finally arrived at Guston’s studio in 1978, there it was: the next body of work, painting, after painting, after painting. Whatever psychological dam had been blocking Guston’s creative surge had burst. Self-revelatory, self-deprecatory, urgent, tormented, dumb, sad, humorous, anything and everything but pretty, the hand and the heart were moving with a will of their own.”

  This work was emblematic of that time. I was excited by it, and by other artists’ too, — by their ideas, by meeting and talking with some of them. Some, such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, were making art out of the earth itself. Some, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Maria Nordness, made it out of light. One, Richard Serra, threw molten lead against the Whitney’s walls. Some were dancing, making music, writing on walls, walking on ceilings. I was delighted when the Whitney’s print curator at the time, Elke Solomon, invited me to take part in a performance. Some used traditional materials in a new way, some were still doing abstractions — it was a time when anything seemed possible.

  A scrawl from my cousin Barklie encouraged me a lot.

  “In the remainder of this page I’m going to convince you that you’re going to be the best president of what’s-left-of-that-dream-museum so far. Just be clear on (and keep privately reworking) the basics: What is the Whitney for? Who are the real family of the place — who feels family feelings? How would my dream-president lead us through, guide us (in the Adirondack sense)? and most of all — YOU earned it. … Anyway, Flora, have fun with it. Be true to yourself, trust your instincts, go for it!”

  Rereading these words, how innocent, how impossibly naive, they sound! And, at the same time, how right.

  Fifteen

  In 1977, at the annual meeting of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Joel Ehrenkranz, chairman of the budget and operations committee, reported a surplus of $445,000 for the first nine months of the fiscal year. He attributed this money almost entirely to attendance at the exhibition “Calder’s Universe.” The eighteen trustees present at that May eighteenth meeting were pleased and impressed. Although I still felt the same about preferring free admission, the good news tempered my immediate view. Alexander Calder’s retrospective, during which, sadly, he died, was more than popular; it was critically acclaimed.

  Tom reported on the 1976 addition to the staff of an associate curator for the permanent collection, Patterson Sims. Despite this welcome emphasis on the collection, the appointment had been controversial, since Patterson had no advanced degree and no museum training. His professional experience had been limited to working as assistant director of O. K. Harris, a commercial art gallery. Tom’s instinct was sound, however, in choosing a bright and articulate young man with a passion for art. Patterson learned quickly. He studied the collection, and used it in many fine exhibitions; he spoke widely and well about the Museum, its history, and its collection, and, reaching out to a wide audience, he made hundreds of new friends for the Whitney. Lithe, pale-skinned, with wide blue eyes, Patterson wore his tender orange-red beard like a flag. It lent him a maturity that belied his years: he was in his late twenties and bursting with the energy and idealism that are intrinsic to his personality. Intense, prone to strong emotions and loyalties, he soon became a close friend.

  Patterson delved deep into whatever interested him, which was almost everything, and this was evident in his work. Besides his larger-scale exhibitions and the courses on aspects of American art that he taught at the Whitney, in 1980 he gave direction to the Museum’s plans for expansion in his series of one-artist “Concentrations” for the lobby gallery in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Whitney’s founding. These shows revealed the Museum’s commitment to certain artists it had collected in depth over the years — Charles Burchfield, Alexander Calder, Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan, Ad Reinhardt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Stuart Davis, and Charles Sheeler — thus emphasizing through the Whitney’s strengths its character and history.

  John Sloan, for example, had his first one-man show at the Whitney Studio in 1916. Afterward, he wrote to thank my grandmother: “Due to the prestige which my exhibition at 8 W. 8 established … I have passed through the most successful winter of my career. … Mr. Kraushaar is to handle my etchings and paintings as well — his attention was quite surely attracted to
my work by my Whitney Show.”

  A charter member of the Whitney Studio Club, founded by Gertrude in 1918, Sloan exhibited in almost all its group shows. He had a one-man show of etchings in 1931, the year the Whitney Museum opened, and continued to show there regularly all his life. In 1952, a large retrospective of his work, organized by Lloyd Goodrich, opened at the Whitney. As Patterson wrote, the 1980 show “charts a relationship between Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the Whitney Museum, and John Sloan and his work which has flourished vigorously for sixty-five years.”

  One could trace the same commitment with the other artists shown in this series. Charles Sheeler and his wife, for example, lived for several years in rooms on the third and fourth floors above the Whitney Studio Club’s galleries at 10 West Eighth Street. Besides the professional relationship, in those days there was almost always a personal one as well.

  At that same 1977 trustees meeting, Tom also reported progress toward another goal: the number and quality of acquisitions gained in the past year had been the greatest in the history of the Museum. He’d accomplished this without using the Museum’s budget, but by raising money from new sources.

  Then Howard Lipman announced his last meeting as president. He went on to say how pleased he was by the Museum’s progress in implementing the report of the planning committee — the expanded membership, the strengthened board, the regularly exhibited permanent collection. He proposed a resolution to especially thank Barklie, now retiring from the board, for his contributions to the Whitney. (Barklie was about to move to the West Coast.)

  Finally, Howard gave the nominating committee report, proposing my mother as honorary chairman, himself as chairman, David Solinger as honorary president, and me as president. Joel Ehrenkranz, head of budget and operations, a lawyer and collector who would become president of the Museum in the late ’90s, and Daniel Childs, a member of the finance committee, would become vice presidents, protecting the Museum in my weakest area, the financial.