At that time I lived in Connecticut, in a wood and glass dream house designed by my husband Mike for us in New Canaan, by a waterfall, with airy spaces and an open plan, symbolizing the way we hoped to live. Mike and I had a full and happy life, and we adored our four children. After Columbia Architectural School and apprenticeship in New York, Mike had become a fine and busy architect, earning a good living. My mother, always extremely generous to her children, paid for all her grandchildren’s education, and also gave us gifts of money, making our lives so much easier — and depleting her fortune. (This we didn’t know until after her death.) Mum loved to help us, as her mother and father once had helped her. I’m sure she never dreamed that her money could ever run out.
I had set goals for myself, and believed I was succeeding. Everything about my life seemed ideal. Why then did I sometimes feel unsatisfied? I longed for more time to myself, time to reflect, read, or write, undisturbed by the needs of little ones. How could I be so selfish? Impatient? Anxious? Exhausted? Why was it so hard to be that perfect person whose image already was becoming a bit blurry?
And what does all this have to do with the Whitney Museum?
I had always been restless, attracted to different kinds of people and activities. As I began to grow up during my marriage, to accept the needs I’d denied for so long, I espoused liberal political causes, demonstrating against nuclear testing, marching for equal rights, working for an interracial summer program; attracted still to difference. Intrigued by people black, French, Jewish, rich, poor, creative, energetic. Wanting to plumb their secrets, to understand everything in the world. A “groupie,” uneducated, but craving education, wanting to learn, still questing. Spending one day a week away from New Canaan at the Whitney Museum meant a great deal to me.
Juliana Force, the Whitney’s first director, died in the summer of 1948. Museum minutes record that she was “courageous, swift in decision, prompt in action,” that she had fought gallantly for the recognition of “progressive” art, and had lived to see her belief in it vindicated. She was “always on the side of art that was alive and against the reactionary and dead.” Another big part of the Whitney’s history was gone.
My parents were in Paris. Mike and I, with our first child, Michelle, were spending our vacation in the Adirondacks, in a log cabin within a family enclave of forests, streams, lakes, and rustic camps. My parents asked me to represent them at Juliana’s funeral. My uncle C. V. Whitney, then a Museum trustee, who summered there as well, flew me in his plane to New York. I only had shorts and bathing suits with me for our month on Forked Lake, so my glamorous aunt Eleanor, a singer, outfitted me with a sophisticated black dress, gloves, and hat. Off we went to New York, and there I met for the first time a large group of artists, all mourning their great champion. As organ music swelled through the lofty chancel, as we sang the old hymns of life eternal, I sensed the deep feelings flowing around me. This compelling woman I’d barely known had even had an impact on me, and I too felt sorrow. Talking with artists after the service, I was very taken by what they told me of her importance to them and to their work, and realized then that this was a world I wanted to know better. I was, however, all too aware that its members accepted me merely because of my heritage. My grandmother.
From the very beginning, a mix of emotions, reasons, and motives informed my feelings about the Museum.
Until shortly before her death, all the Museum staff but Juliana had been artists, and Hermon More, the next director, was no exception. I remember him only as a quiet, gentle man with glasses, looking more like a banker than an artist. His curators, Lloyd Goodrich and John I. H. Baur, were the first professional art historians to hold positions of authority at the Whitney. Both were “old school” gentlemen, and both were vivid characters, while differing markedly from each other. Lloyd became director shortly after the move to Fifty-fourth Street, and Jack, associate director.
What was the Whitney like in the ’50s, and why did I want to be part of it? Why was I following in the path of my mother and my grandmother, as, long ago, I had expressly decided never to do?
For one thing, as my children grew older, my feeling of loyalty to my extended family increased. So did my awareness that I might one day succeed my mother at the Museum — that she, in fact, was preparing me for that. I’d always backed away from identifying with my family’s past. But what if I could bring the inheritance I’d rejected productively into the present? Into active change and growth? I’d be fulfilling a responsibility, not simply enjoying the residue of long-ago glory. I’d be earning my way.
For another, at the Museum I felt a tremendous charge of energy, a powerful emanation of ideas and possibilities. The art I found extraordinary, puzzling, intriguing; the people, compelling. And being there with my parents — because my father was a trustee as well as my mother — gave me a whole new relationship with them; for the first time, we were working together as equals. I loved that. I loved them!
My father, as architect “Gus” Noel’s partner, had been involved in designing the new building and was very proud of it. I was, too. After walking by the beautiful sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art, one passed under the stylized American eagle our friend, the sculptor Lewis “Skinny” Iselin, had cast for the Museum’s entry. On the left stretched a long counter, where, behind it, sat a striking woman, erect and dignified. Marie Appleton. “Miss Appleton,” to my parents and to me. Dressed entirely in black, with a fluffy halo of white hair, a bold silver spiral Alexander Calder had given her pinned over her heart, she presented the aristocratic, elegant aspect of the Museum to all who entered. Sitting beside her, greeting people, in my first official role at the Museum, I was thrilled and proud to represent the Whitney. And I loved hearing Miss Appleton’s stories about the old days on Eighth Street.
After visiting the galleries, people would ask questions, make comments about the building or the art, and then pay admission to enter MoMA through a passage behind the sculpture court — as they didn’t have to at the Whitney.
Upstairs, a small windowed room with plants, a desk, and comfy sofas held sculpture by my grandmother. People enjoyed relaxing in this echo of the old Museum. I admired the galleries’ modernity with all the latest in lighting, walls, and floors, and thought the whole place more appropriate than the old building had been — but despite the design collaboration between my father’s architectural firm and Bruce Buttfield, decorator of the old Whitney, the new interiors had lost, I now think, the intimacy and warmth of the old. Never mind; it all pleased me, and my mother too, who had been the most responsible for the new building.
How I loved hanging around the Whitney! Everyone seemed eager to help me learn. Wiry Jack Martin, with his Scottish brogue and great twinkle in his eye, installed exhibitions with immense skill and speed. I remember Ellsworth Kelly, exacting and critical, saying that thanks to Jack not one of his many exhibitions had ever been installed so fast or so expertly, anywhere, as at the Whitney. And then there was slender, energetic Margaret McKellar, who seemed to actually run the Museum while allowing the director and curators to think they were the bosses. Efficient, hard-working, in a trim suit and low-heeled black pumps, with a warm smile and wry humor, she oversaw the tiny staff — secretary, engineer, preparator, carpenter, guards — keeping a sharp eye on curators and numbers. Margie (with a hard “g”) taught me precious details — I still address envelopes in her correct formal style — and she supervised my reorganization of the Museum’s artists’ files. Aha! Now, I thought, I’m approaching the heart of the matter. Familiar with art since childhood, predisposed to love it, in these photographs, letters, and documents I’d surely discover its secrets.
What I did find was some of the Whitney’s history.
When, for example, I met Stuart Davis in front of his painting Egg Beater, No. 1, I already knew that he had first shown his work at the Whitney Studio Club and that my grandmother had paid for his only trip to Paris in 1928, a seminal experience in the development of his painting. His stay made him realize, as he’s said, the “enormous vitality of the American atmosphere, as compared to Europe, and made me regard the necessity of working in New York as a positive advantage.”
“Paris,” John Russell wrote years later, “was wide open to the intelligent high-stepping American and the dollar went a long, long way.” George Gershwin was writing his American in Paris, and Davis’s paintings from that time were love letters, too. I knew, from the papers in his folder, that his drawing had appeared in the Little Review with the first publication in this country of an extract from James Joyce’s Ulysses. I had read his recent interview with director Hermon More and curator Jack Baur, in which Davis said:
“The Museum in its early days played a unique role in giving the American artist the public importance that he actually should have had. … There was no other center where he was given any importance … it not only gave him a place to show his work but also did a great deal in tangible support, in buying paintings and giving money to live on. … Nobody else did it.”
Thus certain principles impressed me right away. The worth of the artist, as well as the work. The relationship between Museum and artist, built on trust, supportiveness, friendship, and faith.
When, at another opening, I met Edward Hopper, I remembered the photographs and writings I had filed, including those about his first exhibition in 1920 at the Whitney Studio Club. Lloyd Goodrich, a close friend and one of the first to recognize the worth of Hopper’s painting, had written, “It is hard to think of another painter who is getting more of the quality of America in his canvases than Edward Hopper.” Hopper himself, agreeing with my grandmother’s feelings about the specific character of American art, had written:
“Now or in the near future American art should be weaned from its French mother. … We should not be quite certain of the crystallization of the art of America into something native and distinct, were it not that our drama, our literature, and our architecture show very evident signs of doing just that thing.”
And Hopper’s words about artists brought me insights, not only into his work, but into all art:
“Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. … The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form, and design. The term ‘life’ as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it implies all of existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it.”
Inspiring words. How could I develop an inner life, when I could barely keep up with the outer? Look. Read. Write. Think. So I told myself.
A few years later, in the mid-’60s, traveling with our four children on Cape Cod, Mike and I parked our VW camper in a flat, deserted spot near Truro. We had just set up our tent and were heading for the nearby beach when a tall menacing figure came striding toward us across the cranberry bog.
“You’re in my view!” he roared, bearing down.
The children stopped in their tracks. Mike and I recognized Hopper and rushed toward him, our hands outstretched. As soon as we identified ourselves as part of the Whitney “family,” he greeted us warmly and invited us to his clapboard house for tea. We listened to Jo Hopper talk of their lives on the Cape, while Edward gazed beyond her at the landscape we had seen so often in his paintings. He took us to see his small bare studio, where a blank canvas sat on his easel by the window facing the sea. We hoped that the children would remember meeting this towering figure. I was glad to make a connection, through the Hoppers, between them and the Museum — I didn’t want my two lives to be completely separated.
When Josephine Hopper died in 1968, a few years after her husband, the Whitney inherited Hopper’s estate, more than two thousand works of art. I’m sure that the Hopper collection, one of our major treasures, is thanks to his long relationship with the Whitney and especially with Lloyd Goodrich. Now people flock to see Hopper’s paintings, to ponder their meaning. I do too. Is the woman bathed in golden sunlight, sitting on an empty bed drawing on her stockings, blessed or abandoned by a lover? The serenity of Early Sunday Morning evokes spirituality in an ordinary street in an ordinary city, leaving it up to us to populate its spaces, or not. And the mysterious women on the porch of a country house in Second Story Sunlight—are they mother and daughter? nesting together, or living in that house as strangers? Do they await a man, or men? Hallowed by clear ocean light, or raked? Sexual, though remote, the younger woman stretches like a cat on the railing. We learn from Jo’s notes that Hopper nicknamed her “Toots … a good Toots, alert but not obstreperous — a lamb in wolf’s clothing.” Later, Lloyd quoted Hopper: “This picture is an attempt to paint sunlight as white, with almost no yellow pigment in the white. Any psychological idea will have to be supplied by the viewer.” Yes, one can spin tales endlessly about Hopper’s paintings, but it’s the paintings themselves that draw us in, compelling our attention with their spare intensity of design and color, and, above all, their light.
I’m especially fond of a photograph of my mother and Edward Hopper at the Whitney, both in profile, greeting each other with big smiles in front of Early Sunday Morning.
In the early ’60s I worked with Jack Baur, and came to admire this scholar with a big handsome head, a craggy face, and a generous mouth. He was then associate director, and later, from 1968 to 1974, director of the Whitney. Once a professor of English at Yale, he had come from the Brooklyn Museum to the Whitney in 1951 as part-time curator of painting and sculpture. From September 1, 1952, to September 1, 1953, he was paid one thousand dollars! Passionate about art and literature, Jack had a fine sense of humor and absolutely no pretensions. He soon became my friend and closest Museum counselor. Despite his dedication to the Whitney, Jack had put the Museum in its proper perspective and managed to keep it there. His family came first — three children and his intense, energetic wife Louisa, a Quaker and teacher. Even as director, Jack had no trouble leaving a trustees meeting if it continued past train time. He would simply get up, stuff his papers into his ancient briefcase next to a Trollope novel, don his raincoat and brown fedora, and depart.
Jack was a father figure to his young staff. Kind and supportive, he would suggest rather than demand, guide rather than challenge. Sometimes I would hear his exasperation when a curator’s essay wasn’t good enough, but that curator was only conscious of Jack’s patience in improving it. It was Jack’s way, to work with employees who weren’t doing well enough rather than to replace them. In our private discussions, however, his criticisms could be wonderfully pointed and eloquent. Funny, too.
Yes, I was infatuated with the Museum. Enchanted by my new life there, I saw what I wanted to see. As usual, alas, it was the possibility for perfection. If only the Museum had more money, there’d be no limit to what it could bring to the world. Jack, of course, was central to this ideal.
Jack and my mother got along famously. He told wonderful stories about her: in 1951, when he met her in the old Museum on Eighth Street, for instance, he’d just been appointed curator and was “feeling quite grand,” as he later wrote in the memorial book about my mother, the “Flora” book:
“In the opening hubbub I was talking to the sculptor William Zorach, and failed to hear the name of an effervescent lady who interrupted us to congratulate me on my new job. I shrugged her off, quite abruptly I’m afraid, then asked Bill who she was. When he stopped laughing, he told me.
“That Flora forgave me was a mark of her usual generosity. She had the great gift of putting people at their ease — even artists … one could multiply examples of Flora’s genuine concern for artists. … Her kindness tamed Philip Evergood’s distrust of the rich and dispelled Charles Burchfield’s social inarticulateness. After the latter’s one-man show at the Whitney in nineteen fifty-six, Flora took his whole family back to Ten Gracie Square for a champagne dinner and bought his Goldenrod in December Her spirit played a crucial part in establishing and nourishing the Whitney’s policy of supporting living artists. We all loved her.”
And my mother loved Jack. When he retired, she praised him in a ditty that also recalled the other directors she’d felt close to. The ditty ended with the lines “And Hermon and Lloyd and Jack and I/Were minced together like pie.”
What a different ambiance, in those days! While we needed more money, that need was less obtrusive, less apparent. Jack’s mode was gentlemanly. Not weak, but mindful of the past. His care for artists enabled him to make generous judgments about them, especially if they had shown at the Whitney for years. He honored old associations when, for example, selecting artists for the Biennial. In addition, his awareness and social concern for problems led him, in the ’60s, to set up various programs for the disadvantaged.
In the late ’70s, some questioned the validity of those programs. Why should the only museum of contemporary American art in the country, with its great influence and potential, spend valuable time and hard-to-find money on classes for a small number of troubled adolescents? How was this program relevant to the Museum’s mission of showing and buying the best of contemporary American art and interpreting it to the public?
And should the Whitney, for old times’ sake, continue to show artists whose work no longer seemed vital?
I admired Jack’s integrity, his ideas, and his belief in the Whitney’s traditional role, and, at that time, gave his policies strong support. Later still, working with a new director, I changed my mind about some of them.
When I first worked with Jack, he was curating the Bernard Reder exhibition, which opened on September 26, 1961. Today, I think of this exhibition and this experience as quintessential Jack: his distress over Reder’s refugee experience, his respect for Reder’s unrecognized sculpture, his enthusiastic response to the work and to the man.
Reder, a Hasidic Jew born in Chernivtsi, after many difficult journeys had come to America during World War II His sculpture, suffused with the religious traditions and mythology of his people, came filtered through his own vivid imagination. His big bronzes evoke marvels: flowers sprouting from cats, angels playing immense organs and cellos, voluptuous nude women, one bearing a vast house of cards, another blowing a trumpet looking more like a huge flower. They were joyous and exuberant.
Jack thought him a genius, so, of course, I did, too.
The whole Museum was given over to Reder, the biggest one-person exhibition the Museum had attempted since the move uptown. Special ramps allowed visitors to view the sculptures from all angles, in keeping with Reder’s principles of “volumetricity.” As Jack wrote, this was “the functioning of forms in the round — no frontality, no dominant views, but an organization equally meaningful from every angle and every elevation. … To Reder, this is more than an aesthetic credo. It is a principle of life and a touchstone of morality. It is the embodiment of coherence, from which any departure is a step toward chaos. By projection it is the harmony of love and the meaning of religion.” His words reveal not only the essence of Reder, but, even more, the essence of Jack.
Armed with a brand new tape recorder, I went along to record Jack’s interviews with Reder for the catalogue. To my horror, I later discovered I had pressed the wrong button and the whole tape was blank. It’s a measure of Jack’s tolerance that, with hardly a reproach, he gave me a second chance. Luckily, I did it right.
All this time, the Reders were becoming fast friends with me and my family, spending weekends with us in Connecticut and storing three big sculptures by our pond. In my photo album, our children perch within them. Gutza Reder, “Benga’s” wife, explained that he started every day with “three soldiers”: a radish, a scallion, and a carrot. He ate with the same gusto with which he lived his life, and he delighted our children with his stories and games. At one point he said, “Paper! Quick!” Inspiration was upon him and it couldn’t wait. On a sheet of newsprint, he drew an angel with large breasts descending from heaven onto a horse; then he made a small clay sculpture, which he planned to enlarge to monumental size. Alas, he died before he could complete it.
Doris Palca, a marvelous presence at the Whitney for many years, whose ability and commitment brilliantly guided the Whitney’s publishing program, recalls finding forty boxes, each filled with thirty unsold Reder catalogues, when she arrived at the Whitney in the ’60s. Her assistant labeled them “Reder’s Naders”! I imagine they are still in a corner of the Museum’s storage space, dusty reminders of unfulfilled expectations.
Jack’s influence, both on the Museum and on me, was strong. So were his opinions about art. Philip Evergood was one of his favorites, as were Charles Burchfield, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Ben Shahn, and such disparate sculptors as Doris Caesar, Louise Nevelson, David Smith, Elie Nadelman, and Jacques Lipchitz. The list included some abstract artists — Jackson Pollock, Conrad Marca-Relli, Jules Olitski, Stuart Davis, Joan Mitchell, and Jack Tworkov, to name just a few. I think the artists he responded to most shared certain traits: a joy in texture and material, pleasure in the craft involved; a feeling for nature; often, a strong social content or statement. I well recall “Nature in Abstraction,” a show of abstract paintings evoking the landscapes, mountains, rivers, and sea Jack loved.
A favorite image from a few days they spent with us in the Adirondacks: Jack and Louisa, utterly happy, paddling in a canoe through water clear as glass, the dawn light rosy, loons calling crazily through the still air.
Until an administrator joined the staff in the late ’60s, Jack took care of most day-to-day responsibilities. The collection at this time was very much as it had been in my grandmother’s time. The critic, Henry McBride, described it then in “Hail and Farewell,” a piece published in the New York Sun after Gertrude’s death:
“It is not an exaggeration to say that there is not a contemporary artist of note in America who has not been helped by her. Her collection contains something by all of them, and it is constantly growing. Although I was probably its most jealous critic, due to my high ambitions for it, I never detected any arbitrary leanings on Mrs. Whitney’s part, toward any special schools. She was completely liberal, completely open-minded and never demanding. Life to her, apparently, was an uncharted stream, and the artist-explorers upon it who returned with what John Masefield called ‘cargoes’ were gratefully received ‘and no questions asked.’
“When her collection finally crystallized into the Whitney Museum of American Art it was definitely felt in all our art circles that at last we were on our own, that we had cut loose from the apron-strings of Europe and become adult.”
Lloyd and Jack continued the policy of broad collecting — something of everything — but as the number of serious artists proliferated, this procedure became more complicated. I can see, with today’s perspective, that a kind of triage was necessary. Despite a new acquisitions committee providing both knowledge and money, the Whitney often made conservative choices, missing out on some of the early work of artists emerging in the ’50s and ’60s — most obviously, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Frank Stella, but others as well.
Jack’s theme exhibitions, such as “Nature in Abstraction,” “Business Buys American Art,” “Between the Fairs: 25 Years of American Art,” illuminated the collection and included other contemporary art. Concurring with my grandmother’s and Juliana Force’s preference for realism, the most prevalent American style of their time, Jack continued to emphasize it, but with the help and encouragement of new friends of the Museum he also started to exhibit and to buy more “advanced” abstract works. And he also stressed the importance of the word: catalogues must be well written, designed, and illustrated. As educational tools, enduring documents, and historic evidence of the Museum’s exhibitions, these catalogues must be literate, cogent, and illuminating. That they were not thicker and better illustrated came from a lack of money, not ambition. Until the ’60s, the Whitney had never tried to raise money for any purpose but acquisitions, and that, only since 1956.
On January 30, 1958 — the year of the first credit cards and computers, of Eisenhower and Pope John XXIII — I was elected, at twenty-nine, to the Museum’s board of trustees. Also on the board, besides my parents, were Walter G. “Watt” Dunnington, my parents’ lawyer, who had succeeded my grandmother’s lawyer, Frank Crocker; my aunt, Barbara Whitney Headley; and my uncle, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. Neither my aunt nor my uncle ever showed up for a meeting. (They resigned, respectively, in 1962 and 1971.)
At first, I had protested. “I really don’t have the time,” I told my mother. “The children …”
But she was adamant. “It’s the right moment. You can come in once a week, or even once every two weeks.”
“I don’t know enough,” I went on, assuming a thorough grounding in art to be the most necessary attribute for trusteeship. (One of many assumptions I had later to rethink.)
Lloyd Goodrich, about to become the new director, answered that one. “Look,” he told me. He was standing in front of Jackson Pollock’s Number 27, 1950. I’d first seen Pollock’s work in a Whitney Annual on Eighth Street, in 1946, and had been intrigued, drawn to it, but mystified too. “Just look and keep on looking. You’ll have plenty of time later to read and to listen to others and to learn, but the essential thing is to look. Your eye will develop. You’ll start to see.”
And, as I did, a dance, a rhythm, started to appear in the swirling colors.
Michelle and Duncan, ten and seven, were in school. Cully, three, and Fiona, three months, were still at home.
Michelle, born in 1948, was a perfect baby. Her skin looked and felt like rose petals, she smiled with joy when she saw not only her Mummy and Daddy but any friendly human. She took her first steps in the garden of my grandmother’s — then my mother’s — studio in Paris, where my parents had invited us to stay in 1949 while Mike was in architectural school and had summers off. I still have blurry home movies of her wobbling around on the pebbles, and some of pushing her in a stroller with a blue polka-dot sunshade through the Luxembourg Gardens and the Bois de Boulogne. I ascribe the ease with which she learned to speak the language and her affinity for all that is French to that early exposure! As Miche grew, her creativity delighted us: she loved painting, dancing, music, reading. And animals — especially those upon which she could ride. First, she rode our black Labrador retriever; then a donkey, “Shaggy”; and then a number of ponies and horses, who often escaped. We’d get calls at five in the morning: “Your piebald pony is waiting to be picked up at the gas station on Route One-twenty-three.” Because New Canaan was a fairly small town, everyone knew the parentage of not only children but horses, dogs, and cats. That was nice. But there were negative aspects of New Canaan. A conservative, Republican stronghold, its makeup was mostly Protestant and lily-white. The good public schools that had drawn us there reflected this lack of diversity, and we opted for an excellent private school with a broad scholarship program.
Another of Michelle’s qualities showed in the eager welcome she extended, at three, to her baby brother Duncan. After several miscarriages, we had moved into my parents’ house in Long Island so I could stay in bed for weeks and hang on to Dunc. I still have a giant horse pill my doctor, a family friend, gave me as a joke with a card, “All the pills in one.” Born in 1951 on Easter Day, we called our baby “Bunny” for a while in recognition that he symbolized the Easter “newness of life.” Right away, he and Miche were so very close, jealousy was never an issue. When Dunc went off to nursery school at four, his first friend was Ralph Salomon, who now, more than forty years later, is still one of his best friends — a measure of Dune’s loyalty and constancy. Later, the “D team”: Duncan, David, and Dickie, camped out in our woods, cooking hot dogs, winding dough on sticks, and holding them over hot coals to make bread. Later still, with added members, they formed a band, and often practiced in our house, which resounded with “Turn, Turn, Turn,” or “Mr. Tambourine Man” in the Byrds’ style. At school, Dunc played lacrosse, ice hockey, and other team sports with skill and enthusiasm.
After more miscarriages — was I rushing about too much or was it genetic? — in 1955 we had another beautiful boy: Macculloch Miller Irving, named for my father, born without a doctor (who’d fallen back to sleep after my call!). I remember a couple of panicked student nurses saying fruitlessly, “Stop! Stop! You can’t have the baby yet!” Cully was immediately alert, and smiled at us at only two weeks. He and Duncan bonded immediately and forever. Cully had a phenomenal memory, learned to read early, and was a voracious reader. He loved certain movies and songs — he could sing the whole score of “The Music Man,” for instance, or “Oliver,” after playing them only a few times on the record player. Like his brother, he had many friends and a band, this one including a drummer with a huge drum set — the sound when they practiced was quite astonishing. A natural at sports, Cully was an especially good ice hockey player, excelled at lacrosse, and became a long-distance runner.
When Fiona came along, in 1957, the doctor said “Flora, you’d better stop here. Each one gets smaller, and four and a half pounds is going too far.” Fi had to stay in the hospital for a couple of weeks; when I visited, caring nuns were feeding her in a rocking chair and tying an orange ribbon in her bit of hair for Halloween. Cully took her under his wing and was marvelously protective, but at the same time he was involved with his own big brother — and Miche, then ten, was soon to become an adolescent whose pressing concerns didn’t include a baby sister tagging along! (Later the two sisters became extremely close, and remain so today.) So Fiona became independent and savvy early on, developing her own interests and talents. Figure skating (she went to skating camps in odd places, took national tests, and became an expert ice dancer), ballet, riding, sailing, a wide variety of friends — she seemed to know how to parcel out her time, and to enjoy life a lot.
As I look back, I remember, most of all, the happiness. Time has blurred the inevitable mistakes I made from immaturity, frustration, or anger; the sorrows, squabbles, illnesses, worries, and near-disasters. My perpetual exhaustion, during the years of never enough sleep, when babies would awaken for bottles, or nightmares would bring small bodies to our bed. “Mom, I forgot my homework at school!” and off we’d go for a twenty-minute drive there and another twenty back. Once Cully’s friend John Sargent, running through our hallway, crashed through a plate-glass window and I had to rush him, streaming blood, to the hospital. I’d tied his wounds up, who knows why, in the silk scarves my mother had brought me from Paris, and had nearly thrown poor Fiona at my kind neighbor to keep. (John was terrified but OK after many stitches.) Another time, the house we were staying in while skiing in Vermont, an old inn that belonged to my cousin Douglas Burden, burned down on New Year’s Eve with all of us and my sister-in-law and her children asleep inside. We barely escaped, some of us jumping out second-story windows into a blizzard in our night clothes. A really dreadful experience — but even that has faded, today, like an old photograph whose colors are muted and soft. The pain of childbirth, the children’s and my emotional roller coasters, while still in my memory, are outweighed by past joys and overlaid today by the actualities of grandchildren.
But then it was very different. With our house, our garden, an assortment of dogs, cats, guinea pigs, hamsters, chickens, a goat, even a pony, and with very little help, I was needed at home. And I wanted to be there.
I had grown up in a world where everything was done for me: I’d never entered the kitchen, unless invited by the chef (which was rare) or at four in the morning after a debutante ball, when Mum would cook scrambled eggs while we told her all the juicy details of the evening. I couldn’t cook, sew, clean, or do laundry. Had no idea how to manage a house and absolutely no knowledge of babies. Changing a diaper was further from my experience than looking at a painting. And I had no idea at all about money! So I was pleased with my progress. I’d learned many of the skills necessary to be just what I’d wanted to be: an “ordinary” housewife. Now I could cook pretty well, sew, do laundry. Our children were wonderful, I could adhere — sort of — to a budget. I felt wanted, needed, loved, by my husband and our children.
In 1958, when I decided to become a trustee, to do some work at the Museum, I worried. Would my absence from home, even that little bit, cause all kinds of problems? Was I jeopardizing our children’s sense of security, of self-confidence — the very thing I had tried to avoid? Would they fail in school? In life? And all because I had this urge to explore another world? Was I being inconsiderate? Selfish?
Despite all these concerns, I couldn’t help but see the trusteeship as a big step in my life, and I was honored to be thought ready and worthy. The prospect of this new work filled me with excitement.
I accepted.
I could hardly wait to begin.
I don’t remember asking anyone what they’d expect of me, beyond attending meetings. Surely not money, since I had little to spare and had no idea how to raise any. Surely not great knowledge about art or the art world. I see now that I was supposed to follow my mother’s ways, representing the family, being supportive, learning the traditions I’d uphold. These I absorbed quickly as the character of the Museum emerged: it was inclusive, flexible, enthusiastic, playful, responsive to current art, and adventuresome up to a point. But there were differences between my mother and me.
Mum had money to give. She continued to make up the deficit, every year, as long as she could. Could I consider that money a family gift, and feel it was partly mine? When I knew it wasn’t true?
Our personalities were different, too. She was charming, beloved by all. Despite her modesty, she projected a queenly, aristocratic image. I was of another generation — idealistic, unaccepting of the status quo, eager to work, hoping even then to have an impact on the Museum in some significant way.
Meantime, within me, there was luminosity. Just going in the door was magic. The building smelled wonderfully of plaster, paint, and clay, sounds of hammering and sawing in the basement were intriguing, and I sometimes couldn’t resist running my fingers over a marble or bronze sculpture, the better to absorb it, or going so close to a painting I’d feel my nose right up against it. Art and people were enchanting. For the lover, the beloved is perfect. And this glorious institution yielded to me, becoming intimate and tender, without, it seemed, the dangers of a forbidden liaison. In the glow of a good cause, with the imprimatur of all my family, I felt a part of the Whitney’s radiance.
Trustees meetings in 1958 were extremely informal. We’d listen to a few reports and discuss forthcoming exhibitions. After these meetings, Lloyd and my mother and father would drink martinis on the sofa behind the big table we’d just left, laughing and smoking as they recalled the old days on Eighth Street. Oh, those parties, when Juliana Force would tap her favorites on the shoulder, the secret sign to go upstairs to her private apartment, that Victorian wonderland where Shaker chairs met pleated lampshades, where folk art and fine art hung in harmony, where talk, music, dancing, and drinking went on till dawn! Whenever my mother and father and Lloyd reminisced, they brought those days to life for me.
Lloyd, a bundle of energy, drank a lot, loved to talk, seemed to be everywhere; the most important things in his life were art and the Whitney. He was fun to be with, and he gave me confidence in my future role, saying I was like my grandmother, that I’d be a good leader for the Museum. Garrett McCoy described Lloyd’s “great hooded eyes and great prow of a nose … the rumble of that confident, gruff baritone …” He was the first person I knew who’d been psychoanalyzed. Awed, I imagined this explained the ease with which Lloyd could express emotions, strange to me then but appealing. (Maybe it was the martinis, too!) Devoted to Ryder, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins, for years he was the outstanding authority on their work, lecturing and writing major books on them. But always he emphasized the primacy of the eye. Look, look, and look again, he maintained. “Lloyd was a lover first, who became a scholar later,” I said in my tribute to him at the Whitney after his death in 1987.
Much of Lloyd’s time was spent on the American Art Research Council, an organization he’d founded in 1948 at the Whitney to deal with problems of authenticity in American art. He was also involved in those government agencies that dealt with art policy; sometimes he assumed leadership, for example, on the Council on Arts and Government, predecessor organization of the National Endowment for the Arts. In lectures and articles, Lloyd articulated the Museum’s philosophy — Gertrude’s philosophy — in stirring phrases: “This pluralistic art of ours is the appropriate expression of a democratic society, free and fluid, allowing wide scope to individualism.”
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.