Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

Bob had designed a beautiful pendant for me — a gold image of the Whitney, with a ruby as the window on Madison Avenue, his thanks for my collaboration. I treasured it and wore it often until, a few years later, it was stolen or lost. I miss it still.

The Times was on strike and so we couldn’t expect the book to be reviewed there. Other publications, though, either did review it or wrote articles about Bob and me. Depending on what we read, we went from euphoria to depression. Here are a few excerpts, first, from a prepublication squib in Publisher’s Weekly:

Friedman, with the able research collaboration of Whitney’s granddaughter, Flora Miller Irving, has recreated a woman’s life and an era in this long, rich, full biography. Whitney left journals that record the tensions through which she lived, detail the burdens and privileges of wealth, the conflict between public and private worlds, between the ideal and the real. The authors have brought this remarkable woman to life again as they follow her through the years of girlhood, marriage and after, reveal bit by bit (often in her own words) what she made of herself and her circumstances, her searchings through love and sculpture, and describe her finest achievement as patron of contemporary American art.

This first review arrived together with a note from my cousin Nancy Tuckerman at Doubleday, who had been immensely helpful and encouraging during the publication process.

“I really became very emotional myself when I read the review as I saw in front of my eyes that all the caring and devotion you put into the book … has come to light and now your grandmother will be read about as she really was. …”

Frances Taliaferro’s article in Harper’s typified the numerous criticisms of the mass of detail in the book, although she also wrote that Gertrude’s journals and correspondence provided remarkable documentation, and found her story “fascinating.”

Although private celebratory events generally weren’t permitted, Tom decided, considering the book’s subject and its authors, to have the book party at the Museum.

Fiona helped me find the perfect dress. It was simply designed, like a robe. Silk, striated in black and purple. Elegant. At 5:30, the Friedmans picked me up in a cab.

The fourth floor of the Museum was a visual paean to my grandmother. We had reproduced on the cover of our book Robert Henri’s vivid portrait of her, stretched out on a sofa in peacock blue, green, and chartreuse silk pyjamas. Now, as we emerged from the blue-carpeted elevator, we saw the painting itself. About twenty of Gertrude’s World War I sketches were mounted on either side of it. Two blown-up photographs, the rather severe 1930 portrait taken by Steichen when the Whitney opened and the one of Gertrude working on her last big commission, To the Morrow, for the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing, bracketed her sculptures. In front, flowers cascaded from her 1913 fountain with caryatids. On two nearby walls a continuous slide show of photographs played, some from the book, others by Tom of her studio in Long Island, and others still of works from the Whitney’s collection acquired in her time. There was a piano player. There were small tables and chairs and drinks and hors d’oeuvres. The whole fourth floor looked like a wonderful café.

Abby, Bob Friedman’s wife, and I took off our high-heeled party shoes and walked comfortably barefoot around the transformed space gawking at all of it, until suddenly, as we hastily put on our shoes, people began to flow in, more and more until the biggest floor in the Museum was filled. People hugged, ate, drank, talked, looked. Bob and I tried to speak with everyone, those from the art world, book world, friends, family. People waited in line to speak with Mum, sparkling in black sequins, as she sat at a table like a queen. My grandson Anthony, who’d come from California with my daughter Michelle, ran all around the floor in his blue velvet “rock” jacket with diamond buttons and a fresh carnation, helping the caterers and delighting everyone. When questioned about his beautiful jacket, he said proudly, “My mom made it, have you heard of her?” Among the guests were the Christos, Diana Vreeland, John Fairchild, Cleve and Francine du Plessis Gray, Brendan Gill, and even Hilton Kramer, who stayed for two hours.

Why had we given five years of our lives to do this task, this gargantuan sorting-out of reams of paper? What, now, did it mean?

Well, the book definitely said something. It held 668 pages of information, documentation, photographs, and analysis, and a lot of good writing. Bob had the satisfaction of having written a fine biography, the only serious one about Gertrude and the Whitney, to date.

For me, those five years had been transforming. I had discovered a different kind of fulfillment in a new kind of accomplishment. I was good at research! And I enjoyed doing it.

Also in those years, I did well in college. All this was surprising and fulfilling. I came to realize that exploring Gertrude’s life had unearthed not only her roots, her character, her faults, her virtues, but also my own. I ruminated on the process in a letter to Clare Forster:

I was moved by Gertrude’s intense struggle to be herself, to free herself from the constricting traditions she grew up with, to become an artist, and a friend to different kinds of people … we all have to do this, but I felt she had further to go than most with less support from others and less of a clear idea of where to go or how to get there. In some ways, the money, name, etc. made it easier — but in most I think it was a handicap. … I have learned so much about myself from all this. … So many of the characteristics of my mother, my aunt and uncle, my own cousins and siblings, myself, have become clearer. Our hangups, our unwillingness to confront problems, our anxiety for approval or to be loved, our attempts to be creative, our tendencies to alcoholism or other addictions, our extremes of emotions, moods, and much more, can be explained to some extent in the context of Gertrude and Harry. But it’s dangerous to generalize too much. …

Gertrude became so alive to both of us, as we discovered her, that I really think of her as a very good friend now — someone whose work I am trying to carry on, in some way or other, yet, although I’m devoted to her, I’m also independent of her. Oddly, the book freed me of my last remaining fetters to the past — not its positive aspects, just the stultifying, fearsome, binding ones. I feel free. It’s great, but sometimes scary, too — it has led me to new friends, new work, and a whole other way of life. I don’t know what will come of it all. …

Both Bob and I had identified closely with Gertrude. When she received a commission, when she successfully completed a sculpture, we rejoiced. When she wrote desperate, unmailed letters to her husband, Harry, we longed so fervently for her to mail them, or to talk to him directly, that our stomachs knotted. When she was sick, we sometimes fell ill, too. I remember suffering a violent toothache for which my dentist could find no physical cause, at the time in the writing that Gertrude, toward the end of her life, became very ill with, among other things, a bad tooth infection.

Although my work with the book was over, the knowledge and understanding I’d gained during these years made my efforts to maintain Gertrude’s most enduring accomplishment seem all the more important. At last, I felt able to make a real contribution to this end. Through the book, through college, through new friends and associates, and through day-to-day work at the Whitney, my confidence grew. Eager to test it, I plunged even more deeply into my “Museum” life. Leaving — and perhaps hurting — some old friends in my rush toward the new, I was as stubborn as any of my ancestors, determined that nothing would deflect me from my course.

Nineteen