Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

Tom’s extraordinary foresight told him what the Whitney might become, although he couldn’t always communicate it clearly. So, all at the same time, he searched and dreamed and directed, while others sometimes found his behavior oblique, his purposes mysterious.

Tom was a visionary, often way ahead of the rest of us. He deserved a board that matched his own faith in the Museum, in himself. Perhaps this was too much to expect from a large group made up in part of cautious businessmen who expected more hard facts and details than they received from Tom. And more accountability.

I’ve described Tom. Did I say he wore bow ties? Plain, polka-dotted, or striped; occasionally gaudy, splashy; for very special occasions, huge floppy caricatures of themselves, sometimes concealing flashing lights. His signature black-framed glasses intensified his gaze, accentuating the intense concentration he brought to bear — if he was interested — on whomever he was facing, whether a person, a work of art, an idea, or a project. With his lack of pretension and his humor he could lull the unwary into thinking he lacked intelligence, but that would be foolish, indeed.

Paintings and sculptures borrowed from the Whitney filled Tom and Bunty’s beautiful apartment, used again and again for Museum affairs. The Armstrongs gave spiffy seated dinners or amusing parties with lively music for the young Lobby Gallery Associates, and always a big Christmas party, with shepherd’s pie, mostly for artists. That party became a beloved and much talked-of tradition in the art world. Tom’s tall tree was beautifully decorated, and glazed cookies made by an artist in special shapes (a work of art, a building, a book) were piled near the door as parting favors. Sometimes, the Armstrongs would also invite a few trustees, leaving out, and thus offending, other big supporters.

He often made turkey soup, and walked it in a big pot the few blocks from his home to the Museum, to share with his staff. Someone named it “Tom’s Terrific Tasty Turkey Soup,” and it was.

Tom loves gardens. He thought the terrace outside his office looked perfect for growing something, but what? One year, big tubs of flowers; the next, a competition with Jennifer Russell, to see who could grow the best tomatoes. Those half barrels produced so many fat, ripe tomatoes that Tom took to selling them on the street on Thursdays for the benefit of the Annual Fund. I still smile to think of Tom’s big balding head turning pink in the August sun, at his tomato stand. And the art world came from far and near — from Soho, from New Jersey, from Brooklyn, from Harlem — to gather around that little stand right on Madison and Seventy-fifth Street.

Most trustees loved it. Some, though, found it demeaning. Their director, the Whitney Museum’s director, out on the street selling tomatoes??

Tom loves to drink vodka, straight, on ice. Sometimes this led him into deep waters. Once he had a long and bibulous lunch with a trustee just before a major executive committee meeting. The two of them enjoyed the meeting a lot more than some other members, who took offense at Tom’s giddiness, especially when, criticized for overspending, he responded from the depth of his heart, “We wouldn’t have such a big deficit if trustees gave more money. That’s what you’re here for!”

Trustees, especially those he’d had in mind, didn’t hesitate to complain to me. But I knew that Tom had been trying, at that lunch, to establish a friendship with this trustee, which would allow him to ask for a major gift to the building we were then planning, that Tom had decided this was the way to do it. When the gift indeed materialized, years later, I wished I could have pointed out the value of that lunch to the doubters — but it was too late.

Tom’s private life was private. Never did he bring it to the office. I didn’t bring mine, either. And we respected each other’s privacy. Our relationship was close, in the most professional sense. Occasionally, we’d have lunch alone together and talk a little about our families — about his four children and my four, about his beloved mother, about our childhood summers when we’d each worked on a farm, about Tom’s striving at Cornell, long ago, to become an artist — and I would realize again how little most of us really knew about him. The understanding and love of art and artists fueling his energy often remained hidden, while one or another trustee would question his big plans, and criticize his ambition, and pick away at his style.

Tom never got sick — that always impressed me. He seemed absolutely impervious to ordinary ailments, to flu, colds, backaches, and any other miseries. He had too much to do to let illness interfere. Once, arriving to meet him, I found him feverish, flushed, and sweating. Jennifer and I finally persuaded him to go home only after he’d finished the most important business of the day. We later heard he’d had a temperature of 104.

In his social dealings, many trustees thought him a snob. For the Museum, he certainly tried to find and befriend everyone he could. Expecting exclusive generosity from those who’d committed themselves to the Whitney, he resented any whiff of disloyalty. He and Bunty had a wide range of friends, from Andy Warhol, to CEOs of banks and businesses, to an intellectual, artistic, and social elite. The Armstrongs made a herculean effort to keep themselves available. They were out every night; people enjoyed them as hosts or guests. Especially if they were on Tom’s wavelength. Some of our trustees were not. I remember seeing Patsy, a Museum guard, dancing with Tom at a staff Christmas party; I also remember the tears in her eyes when Tom left for good. His “snobbery,” if it existed at all, wasn’t about class or ethnicity or wealth, it was about human quality.

Roughly, Tom’s work, and also our work together, covered three primary areas: art, artists, and the permanent collection; physical expansion; attracting patrons to support the first two.

We also paid attention to the many other aspects of running the Museum, including exhibitions, education, publications, conservation, and the shop. But these were mainly in Tom’s bailiwick; he and I worked most consistently and intensively together on those primary fields, although each, at one time or another, encompassed the others. He and I agreed perfectly on these main goals.

The first, of course, was the most important. Everything else was based on art, artists, and the permanent collection, the heart and soul of the Museum. It was that first consideration that gave us the most joy and confidence, that made the others worthwhile. Although Tom and his staff made all decisions having to do with artistic matters, trustees could also participate in a number of ways, which we tried to improve and increase, thinking this would bring them pleasure, too. So we held discussions of specific shows at meetings; openings and parties where trustees could meet artists; seminars and classes where trustees could learn more about the Museum’s wide variety of art, ranging from eighteenth and nineteenth-century paintings to the new forms emerging in the ’80s. We planned trips for trustees all over the country and the world, so they could visit museums and galleries. We did everything we could think of to pique trustees’ interest and advance their knowledge. We also invited each trustee to join a programmatic committee, apart from any financially oriented committee on which he or she might be serving.

In the beginning of our partnership, Tom and I evaluated our non-standing committees and found them deficient. To redefine them, to make them work better for the Museum, we decided to change our hit-or-miss process of inviting anyone we found knowledgeable and caring about art to join, and then hoping for the best. In other words, we thought they’d want to contribute money or art. And sometimes, they did.

More and more often, they didn’t. This was terrible. Worst of all, there was again no money in the budget for acquiring art. So we decided to form new committees to support each department: painting and sculpture, drawings, prints, library, film and video, education. For each committee, we’d ask members for a specific minimum contribution, giving that department, then, a minimum budget. Of course, we hoped members would give more.

This was a brand new idea, then, and controversial — one member was outraged. When he resigned, he told me that at another museum they never asked him for anything, they valued him just for his knowledge.

The time staff members spent preparing for committee meetings would become worthwhile, because more significant works of art could be bought for the permanent collection.

Tom felt that, even if we both did the preparatory work, it was up to me as a trustee to do the actual asking for money. Although I still found asking directly for money difficult, it was getting easier all the time. In fact, I found that most people were understanding and even pleased to know exactly what the Museum expected.

We soon put this system to work when we asked people to join the board, making exceptions for those whom we’d asked for other reasons — like scholars, community leaders, and more. And we “grandfathered” current members who couldn’t pay. Meetings varied. With connoisseurs at the drawings committee, discussions were intellectual, impassioned, and the votes reflected these qualities.

The print committee was similar, but had a national flavor, since its members came from all over the country, and would usually arrange to have a festive dinner with the curator and a few artists after its meetings.

At the painting and sculpture committee meetings, discussions tended to be more diffuse, mirroring the current explosion of forms and styles. Curators often brought older pieces along with the new, hoping to add established masterpieces to the collection, but members, often new collectors of new art, preferred to spend their money where their interests lay. Unsure of the work they were sometimes seeing for the first time, they were likely to be inclined toward artists they already knew or collected. Since the “dues” were high — $25,000 a year for this committee — this group was disparate, with members new to us and to the Museum. Some wanted to be educated, while others wanted to educate us.

Although this committee acquired the most important works for the collection, it was more problematic than the others. Once, after voting down a piece the curators felt strongly about, the Museum found other sources of funds and bought it anyway. All hell broke loose. I received angry phone calls from committee members, outraged to find their decision had been bypassed. One member resigned. Another, a generous man with big foundation money, threatened to withdraw his funds, unable to believe the Museum wouldn’t abide by the committee’s vote. This led to endless discussions and changes in policy.

Staff autonomy versus those who give the money is always the issue. As my daughter, Fiona, said of troublesome committee members, while recounting a meeting I had missed, “But they aren’t curators!” Another problem: some committee members, seeing others but not themselves become trustees, resented this slight. Not that I blame them — $25,000 was a very large contribution to make to the Whitney, and they knew it. But every member could not be on the board. We picked those we most wanted for reasons of personality or potential.

I was very upset with a member of our acquisitions committee for questioning Philip Guston’s integrity due to a change in his painting style. Guston’s best known work had been abstract, but he was now making work related to his earlier figurative mode, and this committee member thought his reversal indicated an unacceptable vacillation, a moral weakness. Ridiculous! At the same meeting, Patterson Sims presented Merfrog and Her Pet Fish, by Gilhooley, a marvelously baroque green figure with purple fish twined around her breasts, another crawling up her arm, a large bunch of flowers on her shoulders, and a blissful smile on her face. Lengthy arguments about art versus craft followed, but we did purchase Merfrog. She’s about four feet long and four feet high, a powerful presence. Other ceramic sculptures were on view that afternoon, and the trustees’ room looked like a glistening aqueous cavern. I loved it.

Besides Patterson, many other curators were part of these meetings. Lisa Phillips, for instance, who started as a student in the Museum’s Independent Study Program, and was a curator until the spring of 1999, when she left to become director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Soho. Like a lean and lovely thoroughbred filly, she rushes energetically from New York to Los Angeles, where she and her husband, film director Leon Falk, have a house. She’s everywhere at once, it seems, and — as with all Whitney curators — spends much time in artists’ studios, absorbing the world through their work. She’s introduced us to many artists who’ve become friends, including Terry Winters and his wife, art historian Hendel Teicher. Terry’s vibrant abstractions never seem to lose a human, organic connection; their beauty draws us to search ever deeper. Terry epitomizes the artist who’s as committed, even-tempered, delightful, generous, and good as anyone can be. This I say, knowing that a stereotype exists of the artist as temperamental, moody, and difficult — as true, and untrue, as any other stereotype!

Other curators left the Museum for one reason or another. Like Richard Armstrong, now director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Tall and skinny, his Midwestern farming background and values have mingled with city art-world sophistication, yielding a kindly Richard with a bite. He knows all that’s happening in his world, enjoys a lot of it, and is as charming as anyone could be. A strong presence at our meetings, he created some memorable shows during his many years at the Whitney, and I miss him still. Sometimes, he brought his Jack Russell terrier to work. I got to borrow her once and take her home for a visit. I can still picture Clover carrying in her mouth a small steel wool piece, Brillo by Richard Artschwager, while Richard Armstrong was installing an exhibition. Through Richard, we met Vija Celmins, now a close friend, whose paintings we love so, whose life intersected with ours in New Mexico as well as in New York.

Since trustees have all the financial responsibility, power is ultimately in their hands. The staff, it seems, has all the fun of dealing with art and artists. Not too surprising that trustees want to deal with programs, especially if they are new to museums or knowledgeable about art. But no matter how much a trustee admires a particular artist, it remains crucial for staff to have the decision-making power in artistic matters. Part-time volunteers’ interest may be educated and wise, but they are not professionals. They don’t have the whole picture. And the museum suffers if it is perceived as yielding to pressures from outside.

The tenuous balance between staff and volunteers only exists through understanding, good will, and sensitivity. Not on written definitions or rules — although they can certainly help. Thus, the makeup of a board and its leadership are vital to its survival and health. There must be some who genuinely understand and love the Museum to maintain its integrity.

Deaccessioning is a thorny issue. Arriving a minute late at the new permanent collection review committee, I found I’d been made its chairman, presiding over a debate between Howard Lipman and Jules Prown of far-reaching importance to the Museum. What, if anything, should we get rid of? So much of the collection was never seen. So much seemed of inferior quality, stemming, Howard felt, from my grandmother’s generous impulse to buy work the artist couldn’t sell, thus leaving him a better chance to sell his best work. Wanting more money for purchases, certain that buying contemporary art was the Museum’s basic mission, Howard wanted to review the collection with a view to selective deaccessioning. Only work by artists no longer living would be considered.

Jules, however, opposed this. We didn’t have enough perspective or judgment yet, he said. We would be destroying our history, by far the most complete and most interesting history of early-twentieth-century American art in existence. Store it less expensively outside the city, make long-term loans, but don’t deaccession. Besides, he pointed out, what Howard wanted to deaccession was worth little on the market. Jules’s view prevailed, I’m glad to say.

In 1981, however, we decided to sell the Museum’s valuable pre-twentieth-century works, which we hardly ever exhibited. Other institutions would make these works more available to the public. Feeling that the Museum should keep its masterpieces, whatever the period, Leonard Lauder opposed this view. Jules and Howard led frequent, provocative discussions on these issues. Howard believed most in quality, a concept more easily definable then than now, and believed with Leonard that we should sell only lesser works but keep the finest. Howard was a formal modernist. Jules saw art as a part of culture. He believed in context, in crossing boundaries, in diversity, and in the political nature of art, and thought we should keep all the pre-twentieth-century collection or sell it all.

After that first meeting, at supper with the artists in the new Biennial, I felt a surge of joy. Fourteen trustees, a record high, showed up for Tom’s inspired menu of hot dogs and chicken à la king with artists like Chuck Close, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Arneson, and H. C. “Cliff” Westerman, the quirky sculptor whose wood pieces combine extraordinary craft with extraordinary inventiveness. In his introduction to the Whitney’s one-person exhibition of Westerman’s work, Tom wrote: “As a creative spirit, he is a distinct individual among those of us motivated by conformity. His art and his impressions of the world are filled with compassion for things disappearing, lost, or triumphant.” Cliff charmed me. He refused solid food, saying he “only drinks and dances,” which he’d already done for two hours at the Carlyle before coming to the Whitney. We had a fine and acrobatic dance. I saw us like his wonderful drawing of him and a lithe lady twirling.

In 1980, the Whitney opened Cy Twombly’s retrospective. I discovered both his work and the fact that we were cousins — distant, perhaps, but kissing cousins for sure. We haven’t tracked down the exact relationship, but my great-great-aunt, Florence Adele Vanderbilt, married in 1877 a relative of Cy’s, Hamilton McKown Twombly. And from that day, I developed a deep friendship with Cy. I wrote about the opening in my journal:

Whitney Circle tour of Twombly exhibition with Tom Armstrong. It looks superb. Like walking through roomfuls of visual poetry. Isabel Bishop came, spoke to the group very movingly about the exh, about T’s work meaning much to her — surprising and nice. Raced home, changed to new gray dress, Charles [Simon] picked me up in limo … Don [the caterer] had called earlier in fear the place was too cold, asked me to turn the heat up!! The things I am asked to do! Sat between Cy T. and Henry Geldzahler, fear I was rude to the latter simply by not lavishing all my attention on him. Was captivated by Cy — he is charming, open, not uptight, happy with the exh, and the evening — esp because Bob Rauschenberg came. … He talked of poetry — says he reads 4–5 hours a day, doesn’t paint enough, has gotten lazy. NYC gives you energy; Rome drains you of energy, he says. Says he’ll come to Florence for a couple of days when I’m there, will show me some things. Wow. [I was planning my first trip to Italy, a 50th birthday present to myself.]

The exhibition was extraordinary, but alas, it was badly reviewed in the Times and very few people came to see it. I remember going with my present husband, Sydney Biddle, and spending at least an hour in just one room with beautiful paintings suffused with color, inspired by the ancient cultures of Europe and America, Dionysian rites, and Greek pastoral poetry. Who could imagine that paint laid so poetically on a flat surface could encompass emotion, time, history?

My friendship with Cy and his wife, Tatia, grew, and I was reminded how many friendships with certain artists changed the way I think about art, and therefore the way I perceive the Whitney. I did indeed stay with Cy and his wife Tatia, herself a fine artist, in Italy, in the summer of 1980.

It was my first trip to Italy, my first trip alone anywhere. Leo Castelli had arranged for me to visit Count Giuseppe Panza to see the minimalist and light art he had installed in his house and stables in Varese. Panza, after driving me through the green hills and treating me to my first Italian omelet, introduced me to the work of James Turrell, Sol Lewitt, Robert Irwin — and Maria Nordness, whose piece was in a horse stall. I’ll never forget sitting on a bale of hay there, in total darkness, waiting, waiting, for many minutes, until a faint sliver of light shone. As it brightened, I felt I was experiencing the dawn of the world.

Just before my trip Brendan Gill had agreed to become a trustee. At lunch at the Algonquin, he’d advised me to follow Emerson’s words: “Give all to love! / When the half-gods go / The gods arrive.”

I fell in love with Italy. Staying mostly in Florence, I visited and revisited my favorites, sometimes with artist Dorothea Rockburne, through whose clear blue eyes I saw her beloved Brancacci Chapel with Masaccio’s frescoes, and the glories of Siena.

Stopping at Cy and Tatia’s palazzo in Bassano in Teverino, I slept in a four-poster with deep blue curtains all around, placed in the middle of a white cube of a room with a painted wooden ceiling and seventeenth-century Flemish tapestries on the walls. A suit of armor sat artlessly on an ancient brocaded chair. From my windows I looked down at the medieval part of Bassano, a tiny walled town mostly in ruins, with a glorious view beyond over the plains and mountains of Tuscany.

Rooms opened off a grassy sward in the middle of this glorious palazzo, stone stairways led to one studio up high and another down below, and an arched space on the very top looked over the world, with swallows flying through and a breeze scented with acacias and jasmine blowing sweetly in the soft Italian light. Ancient objects were everywhere — an Etruscan sarcophagus, a fifth-century B.C. Greek helmet, old watering troughs, a beautiful pale green stone object, thin, pierced in a design around the edges. And Cy’s paintings. One with Shelley’s words from his lament for Keats: “Weep for Adonis — he is dead!” I especially liked two of his god-drawings, one of Apollo, one of Venus.

Those days helped me sense the true life of an artist, the dedication as well as the playfulness. Cy and Tatia deepened my belief that art is essential to life.

Coming back from Italy marked, for me, both an ending and a new beginning. I kept my tender feelings for Mike, but my new life and emotions were pulling us apart, and in the summer of 1979 we separated. We both remained close to our children, sharing their joys and concerns, conferring often about them and their lives. Mike in Rowayton, Connecticut, continued to practice architecture, while I lived full-time in New York. Before long, Mike met his present wife, Patricia, and they were married in 1981.

Despite being on this earth a whole half century, a surge of energy surprised me with its intensity. I loved New York City and sometimes, at night, drove around its clamorous streets just for pleasure, absorbing the sounds and sights, the flashing lights, and the varied people. Other times, I walked for miles, or jogged in Central Park with a new friend, Sydney Biddle. I realize now that the feelings growing between Sydney and me were linked to the passion for life I felt then. They were embodied in this relationship that, of all these new experiences and emotions, was to last the longest.

Elegant and good-looking, Sydney has a high domed forehead that makes him look a bit like an “egg-head,” strong well-defined features, and often, an intense, inquiring expression. His essential kindness is sometimes masked by his sharp sense of reality and a conscious wish to be forthright and honest. Sydney’s life had been lonely and difficult — he grew up without the presence of his parents, who existed in their own separate worlds. I find it extraordinary that, despite this virtual abandonment, he has been able to become such a whole human being. A splendid companion, imaginative, highly intelligent, and eager for new ideas and experiences, he loves to read, to converse, to listen to classical music and jazz, to visit museums and castles and temples. Together, we have traveled to exotic places — we decided, for instance, to get married in Hungary, on the banks of the Danube! Sydney is extremely understanding and supportive of my life and goals. We share household tasks, like today’s younger generation — Sydney shops for many of our groceries and other quotidian needs, from toothpaste to vitamins. And he is never boring!

When we met, Sydney was at a turning point in his life and career; he had worked for years in the insurance business, but it was nearly time for him to retire. He hoped to return to the painting he’d done seriously in the ’50s at the Art Students’ League of New York, when he’d won the Macdowell Prize, enabling him to spend a year in Italy. I greatly admired his large abstract paintings that I’d seen in his apartment on Central Park West. Now, he also followed his heart. We whirled through the city like children, we danced and laughed and talked in every free moment we could find. Even a five-minute meeting on a street corner was precious. No problems, then, seemed insoluble.

Beginning in Taos, in the ’90s, and continuing in New York, Sydney works most days in his studio, creating vibrant abstract paintings in exceptional colors and forms. They appeal to me enormously, as they do to many artists who have visited his studios. Agnes Martin, for example, and George and Betty Woodman are enthusiastic about them. These works seem to spring directly from Sydney’s mind and emotions unhampered by influence or hesitation. Enigmatic but appealing dark shapes float or fly over fields of yellow, blue, or green; red motes scatter like flocks of birds in a pale sky; delicate white lines tangle on black paper. Ribbons of blue or gray roll and billow over canvas like clouds or waves on some unknown planet. Unearthly, mysterious, these paintings and drawings are beautiful. I take great pleasure in them. I see them as young, exuberant, and joyous.

During the Whitney’s birthday year of 1980, an opportunity suddenly arose — not only to acquire a masterwork, but to affirm our desire and capacity for so doing to the whole world.

The Whitney was only considered a minor force in the art world. We hadn’t ever made the kind of purchases the media featured, our openings didn’t hit society pages, and our public relations seemed woefully lacking to those experienced in such matters, such as Leonard Lauder and Gilbert Maurer, a trustee who was then the head of Hearst Magazines, and later, in the ’90s, would serve a term as the Whitney’s president. If we were to raise big money, we had to improve.

Tom thought of one way to do that, and to benefit the Museum’s collection as well. Collectors Emily and Burton Tremaine had recently transferred their interest in art to a concern for overpopulation, and, through the Pace Gallery, were selling works they’d collected, including Jasper Johns’s Three Flags. What a splendid acquisition it would be for the Whitney! Its subject, the American flag, made it particularly appropriate for the Whitney Museum of American Art. This painting’s layers of paint and other materials, mirroring levels of meaning, satisfied anyone who cared to delve deeper. David Sylvester wrote lyrically about Johns’s use of the flag image in Art in America (April, 1997):

“It was in one of the earliest versions, White Flag, 1955, that the metaphorical implications of simultaneously clarifying and obscuring were most richly realized: forming and melting, tightening and loosening, appearing and disappearing, flowering and decaying, brightness falling from the air. All participles but for one noun, and that an ethereal one. In other words, I see the work as being about process, not about matter. I don’t see the surface as signifying, say, skin or wood, but as paint that composes an objective correlative for change. The change has two speeds. In the stars it’s allegro vivace, agitated movement, flickering and exploding. In the stripes it’s andante.”

The price: $1 million. Then the highest price ever for a work by a living artist.

Leonard was eager to get Three Flags. He helped Tom to obtain pledges from four friends of the Museum, Sondra and Charles Gilman, national committee members Alfred Taubman and Laura Lee Woods (anonymous at the time, by her request).

Tom informed Leo Castelli of our wanting the work. Leo had originally sold Three Flags to the Tremaines in 1958 for a pittance, and he was convinced that the Whitney could not raise so much money. “No, no, I’m sure it’s going to a Japanese buyer,” he said, exemplifying the contemporary attitude.

At the executive committee meeting of September 17, 1980, Tom announced that we’d purchased the painting. Howard Lipman was concerned. Since $250,000 had not yet been pledged, the Museum’s endowment funds were being put at risk.

Later, while on a trip to North Carolina with Tom and Brendan to cement relationships with national committee members, we heard that Grace Glueck, art critic for the Times, was about to announce the purchase. This was nearly two weeks before the acquisition would be presented to the full board of trustees. We rushed back to New York and contacted everyone we could, so, when the news hit the front page of the Times on September 27, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to our trustees.

There was lots of publicity. Three Flags, shown in a special installation for several months, was much admired. Many people came to the Museum especially to see it. Those of us, including me, who loved the painting were grateful to those whose confidence and generosity had made it possible for the Whitney to own such a seminal work.

On the other hand, we lost a board member. Arthur Altschul, one of the original nonfamily trustees, had never really trusted Tom’s ability. And, for Arthur, Three Flags was the last straw. He said it was too much money for any contemporary painting. He didn’t like the Museum any more; our exhibitions, purchases, and policies were trendy and money-ridden. He wanted out.

Even more serious, perhaps, was the rift between Tom and Leonard, widened when Leonard obtained a gift from Ed Downe, a wealthy friend of Leonard’s, Tom’s, and the Museum’s. Tom had decided to list on the Three Flags wall label all donors of $50,000 or more. While Leonard had asked Ed for $50,000, he only gave $25,000. Leonard sent the check to the Whitney, along with a note asking Tom and me to write proper “thank-yous,” as Ed had abandoned another museum when these hadn’t been forthcoming.

I wrote a long appreciative letter to Ed, with copies to Leonard and Tom. After reading it, Tom decided an additional letter from him was unnecessary. But fireworks over the omission from both Ed and Leonard followed. To add to Tom’s perceived “insult” to Ed, having already announced the “wall label” policy, Tom felt he couldn’t add Ed’s name to it with the $25,000 donation.

Furious, Leonard lost interest in raising or giving the missing funds. I was saddened because I had really counted on him — and I felt caught in the middle of a little war, unable to find a solution.

It is extremely difficult to raise money for a fait accompli, I found out. We never did raise the final $175,000. It came from the Whitney’s already inadequate endowment.

The painting, Three Flags, however, remains a cornerstone of the collection. A magnificent painting. Emblematic of Tom’s high standards as director.

Jasper’s work affects my senses, through its rich surfaces, colors, layers, and patterns. My mind is affected as well, because I want to make connections — between play and work, for instance, or love and hate, or good and bad. Life and death, even. Between his pictorial symbols of agony and those of creativity and change. Looking at a Johns exhibition is mysteriously unifying. It’s like reading Eliot’s Four Quartets or Proust.

One of the very nicest evenings I can remember at the Museum took place on November 17, 1982, in the Lobby Gallery, where seventeen Savarin monotypes by Jasper Johns were installed. They fit perfectly in that space and looked wonderful. Jasper had made these in January; they were based on Savarin, a lithograph depicting a familiar image in his iconography: a Savarin coffee can filled with paintbrushes.

A small group of Jasper’s friends gathered to celebrate, at tables right in the midst of these vibrant works. Sitting next to Jasper, I could imagine no better Museum moment. There was a unity of feeling in that room: everyone loved the Whitney, the art, and each other. Collectors Victor and Sally Ganz, Philip Johnson, and, from Baltimore, Bob and Jane Meyerhoff epitomized long-term commitment to Jasper’s work and affection for the artist. Judith Goldman had written about Johns with insight. Leo Castelli, dean of New York dealers, had represented him ever since he first began showing his work. John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Jasper had worked together on dances and performances, and were old and dear friends.

Tom and I persisted in our wish for expansion. We kept discussing our wish lists of art for the permanent collection galleries. Jasper Johns, of all the living artists woefully underrepresented in the collection, headed both Tom’s list and mine. But we were facing our same problem: the Museum couldn’t afford to buy his past works, and could only afford the new very rarely. What could we do?

Hoping Jasper would make the Whitney the ultimate home for those works he himself still owned, we decided to talk to him about it. Had we not shown our commitment by having his retrospective exhibition, by buying as much of his work as we could, and by our purchase of Three Flags, the most expensive painting by a living artist at that time? Surely he knew how much we believed in him and his work. And our trustee Victor Ganz, after all, was his earliest and biggest collector! His friend! On July 8, 1982, Tom, Victor, Jasper, and I met for lunch at the Knickerbocker Club, an appropriate ambiance for an important talk. We had a fine time, but it was difficult for us to broach the subject. After all, when asking for a bequest, one speaks of mortality. We were awkward, I’m sure, but we asked — and Jasper, as always, was gracious. He said he’d think about it.

It was many years later before the subject arose again, this time with an entirely different cast of characters. Victor had died. Tom was no longer director. I was no longer president or chairman. In 1994, trustee chairman Leonard Lauder and I visited Jasper in his house on Sixty-third Street. Leonard did the talking, this time, offering a large gallery just for Jasper’s work on the Whitney’s soon-to-be-remodeled fifth floor. Asking to see the plans, Jasper looked carefully at a model of the proposed space.

We’re still hoping. After all, though, great artists probably want to be remembered in a wider context than the Whitney, with its focus on American art, can provide. Would want their work to be seen with that of other great artists of all time and all cultures, at the Metropolitan Museum or the National Gallery, perhaps. The Whitney can’t offer that, no matter how much space we provide.

The opening of Andy Warhol’s Portraits of the ’70s in November 1979 was a gala benefit for the Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition Fund, our way of raising money so we wouldn’t have a 1980 budget deficit. We went all out to get trustees and friends to give dinners for everybody who’d bought tickets. Tom and I realized we’d forgotten to put our own names down for a dinner, so we decided to give our own. But where? Tom’s inspired choice, the little Greek diner next to the Whitney.

We arranged for a red carpet and searchlights, just like those in front of the Whitney that night. The family who owned the restaurant promised all kinds of special Greek treats and were excited to have been picked for the gala. In honor of the great occasion, they decided to do a huge clean-up, so thorough that Tom remembers the place smelling “like the mens’ room in an Esso service station!” Sitting at plastic booths in our best black tie outfits, we had a wonderful time, finding the event and the place very Warhol. Collector Henry McElhenny’s sister, Bonnie Wintersteen, an old friend of Tom’s from Philadelphia, got right into the spirit of the evening, roaring with laughter, in her diamonds and white mink. Leo Castelli was there, as was Marion Javits, and Jerry Zipkin, known as “The Social Moth,” elegant and sharp-tongued escort for glamorous ladies whose husbands preferred to skip social events. And of course Andy dropped by with his gang and his little dachshund, very much approving of the dinner his friend Tom had arranged.

In February 1980, the Whitney held a birthday party at the Museum for Isamu Noguchi during his show, “The Sculpture of Spaces.” During the Museum’s fiftieth anniversary year, we wanted to honor the living artists most often shown at the Whitney, and Noguchi was one: he had been in the Museum’s inaugural exhibition in 1931, his work had been included in eighteen annuals and biennials, and he’d had a major retrospective in 1968. Eleven of his pieces, dating from 1929 to 1965, were in the permanent collection. Because Noguchi’s eloquent sense of space had been expressed with special clarity in the performing arts — he had collaborated with composers, choreographers, and dancers — the focus of this show was on these collaborations. Noguchi himself wrote the catalogue, saying, on the first page, “space itself gives validity to sculpture — beyond objects there is always the situation, the time, the performer and the spectator. …”

In 1981, in our continual effort to exhibit distinguished American artists, we were struggling to have a big Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective. Lloyd Goodrich had done a show at the Whitney in 1970, but this one would be more comprehensive. O’Keeffe was in New York for a rare visit from her home in New Mexico with her young companion, artist Juan Hamilton, when he was having his first New York show of sculpture. We arranged a lunch. At ninety, elegant in a simple black dress with a snow white collar, she looked, as Sydney described her, like a “Hungarian nun.” He’d stayed with her in Abiquiu, years before, while traveling with a friend who was her cousin. He’d given me impressions: Georgia beating egg yolks for a delicious zabaglione; the rocks and bones she’d lovingly arranged in her rooms; the spareness and austere beauty of her house; the desert, where she’d showed them her favorite places, had walked and talked with them.

At this time, though, Georgia was nearly blind, and since I was seated next to her in the restaurant, it fell to me to feed her, an intimate procedure allowing me, despite my awe, to have a real conversation with her. Looking deep into her eyes, I couldn’t believe she wasn’t looking back at me. Her intelligence and intensity still shone in that darkness. I was awkward putting her chicken and rice into her mouth, thinking she’d mind, but not at all — she seemed happy to be fed, and to recall the past. Her memory was stunning. She talked to me about the times she and artist Max Weber used to have Chinese lunches in Greenwich Village — he seemed to be one of the few artists she recalled with pleasure. She spoke of her then-husband, Alfred Stieglitz, who had showed her work and photographed her so often — but now she remembered her impatience with Stieglitz. Life with him had been too busy, too full of people, and she’d needed tranquillity in order to paint. She’d been especially frustrated during their summers at Lake George. Hearing her still-impassioned tales made me think that her new relationship with Hamilton was somewhere between that of grandmother/grandson and two lovers. The teasing between them had a flirtatious ambivalence.

We never did the show. Georgia and Juan wanted too much autonomy. Since curators need to be responsible for the choices, the installation, and the catalogue, they would have been dissatisfied. Thanks to our new friendly relationship, however, O’Keeffe made paintings available to the Whitney, which we then found patrons to buy and promise to the museum. Each year, they would give a percentage to the Whitney until the gift was completed and the work entered the permanent collection. We arranged, for example, for my cousin Sandra Payson, then a Museum trustee, to visit O’Keeffe in Abiquiu, and she returned with an abstraction that Sandra has now given to the Whitney. Calvin Klein, in the same way, bought Summer Days and has completed his gift to the Museum of that masterpiece.

We were longing, too, for an Agnes Martin show in the early ’80s, and Tom traveled to Galisteo, New Mexico, in a vain effort to persuade this artist to agree. It just wasn’t the right time, though, and wasn’t until 1993, when Barbara Haskell curated the Agnes Martin show that traveled around the world. By then, Sydney and I were living in Taos and were Agnes’s neighbors. Today, thanks to Agnes herself and other generous donors, especially Leonard Lauder, the Whitney has a superb collection of her paintings.

Most of the parties we gave for the Museum had specific agendas. There is no question but that if they were enjoyable, they were nonetheless work-related. One in 1982, however, was about pure pleasure. After a small opening at the Museum of John Cage’s scores and prints, Sydney and I gave a dinner in the garage under our carriage house apartment where we and members of our family kept their cars. Money was always an issue, so when I discovered a large bolt of red cotton in a budget store, red became the motif for our party. We draped it as scrims over the cars, painted the floor red, scattered seashells and pretty stones we’d gathered from a Long Island beach on the long, narrow red-covered table, and lit it with candles anchored in sand. Place cards had names on their backs for a change of seats halfway through the meal. Chef Lauren Berdy and I had lengthy discussions about the menu. John and Merce were on serious macrobiotic diets, and they’d agreed not to bring their own dinner, as they usually did, when I’d promised them to provide the right food. We’d learned we couldn’t have tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, or potatoes (the nightshade family of plants) or sugar, or dairy products. So we started with sushi, buckwheat noodles, and seaweed, continued with fish baked in broth, very long Chinese green beans, and brown rice with vegetables. For dessert, dried figs stuffed with nuts, papayas, kiwi fruit. John and Merce Cunningham said it was the first time in eight years they hadn’t brought their own food, and it tasted good, even to less macrobiotically oriented guests. We had our piano tuned, hoping John might play. Instead, Bob Rauschenberg, after many drinks, decided to do a performance piece, and sat down at the piano for about ten minutes without touching the keys, a parody of an old piece of Cage’s that we feared would be upsetting to John, but his lovely smile remained despite the bad joke. But the party was fun and lively and a big success — and no wonder, considering that John Cage had chosen the guests, including William Anastasi and Dove Bradshaw, Jasper Johns, Mark Lancaster, Porter McCray, Robert Rauschenberg and Terry van Brunt, Louise Nevelson and Diana Mackown, Teeny Duchamp and Dorothea Tanning, Cy and Tatia Twombly, Kathan Brown and Margarete Roeder, Tom and Bunty, curator Patterson Sims with writer Honor Moore (who was writing her book, The White Blackbird, about her artist grandmother), Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, originator of the show, and her curator husband Joe Rishel.

Should we have added a few trustees? Probably. But the party was full of fun and in many ways seemed perfect as it was, and we all felt relaxed and comfortable as we might not have if … well, if it were a party-with-an-agenda.

Monday, April 12, 1982. A Times headline announced “WHITNEY COULD LOSE CALDER ‘CIRCUS.’ ”

In the Whitney’s lobby, a photograph of Calder installing his Circus in 1976, the year of his retrospective, illustrated the ensuing long article. The French government had empowered cultural officials to take Circus for the Beaubourg in lieu of a cash tax settlement. By now, though, Circus was a Whitney icon, with its full troupe of miniature circus performers and animals, and a nearby videotape playing a film of Calder, maneuvering the figures he’d created and talking them through their paces while his wife Louisa played circus music in the background.

In his book, Alexander Calder, James Johnson Sweeney remembered, in 1951, the way it had been.

At the beginning, the circus was merely a few ingenious figures which Calder had made for his own amusement. There was nothing elaborate about them: bits of articulated wire for arms and legs and a wooden body — a spool, or a cork. Still their creator could make them perform some most remarkable feats. Gradually the troupe increased. Word got around Montparnasse. A casual turn or two to amuse a friend soon became a full-length performance.

The circus was given in Calder’s narrow room; the guests would crowd onto the low studio bed; the performance would take place on the floor in front of them. A bit of green carpet was unrolled; a ring was laid out; poles were erected to support the trapeze for the aerial act and wing indicators of the “big top”; a spotlight was thrown on the ring; an appropriate record placed on a small portable phonograph; “Mesdames et Messieurs, je vous presente —,” and the performance began. There were acrobats, tumblers, trained dogs, slack-wire acts à la Japonaise; a lion-tamer; a sword-swallower; Rigoulet, the strong-man; the Sultan of Senegambia who hurled knives and axes; Don Rodriguez Kolynos who risked a death-defying slide down a tight wire; “living statues”; a trapeze act; a chariot race: every classic feature of the tan-bark program.

For the most part these toys were of a simplified marionette character. Yet they were astonishing in their condensed resemblance achieved almost entirely through movement.

Museum visitors of all ages loved Circus. The Whitney had the best collection of Calder’s work anywhere, and this was the centerpiece, emblematic of the artist’s career. As Jean Lipman, major collector with her husband, Howard, of Calder’s work, wrote in the catalogue, “The circus esthetic — a combination of suspense, surprise, spontaneity, humor, gaiety, playfulness — has always been the basis of Calder’s work.”

The Calder estate had given us a first option, until May 31, to buy this work for $1.25 million. A staggering sum, for us. And higher offers reportedly had been received from European museums. So we knew we couldn’t bargain, although as Harold Daitch, their lawyer, reassured us, “The family would like to see it stay with the Whitney.”

An all-out, countrywide campaign to “Save the Calder Circus” was decided on. Buttons everywhere, printed in red, white, and blue; clowns from Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, now owned by Irvin Feld and his son, Kenneth, collecting money all over the city; school children, even circus children, helping. Newsday announced “THE BIG CIRCUS TRIES TO HELP THE LITTLE ONE STAY IN U.S.,” showing the Felds at the Whitney kicking off a drive for $1.25 million, and illustrated by a photograph of Targa the elephant hoisting me high above Madison Avenue, in front of the Museum, both of us laughing. Clowns, showgirls in sequined costumes, acrobats, and hordes of children crowded around, cheering, collecting small donations. All traffic on Madison Avenue stopped. I’d invited a Whitney patron who seemed interested, and when I spotted him in the crowd, I yelled from my perch, “Hello Seymour, great you’re here!” He’s smiling in the corner of that photograph, next to the Felds. I called him later to ask if he’d contribute, and he suggested a visit.

Meanwhile, trustees and others rushed to help, especially Leonard Lauder and Howard Lipman, each pledging $100,000. Howard declared that “Calder and the Whitney are one and the same. The Calder circus is the heart of Calder’s youth and it must remain at the Whitney Museum.”

The Robert Lehman Foundation, thanks to financier/writer Michael Thomas, gave $125,000.

You could hardly move in the city without becoming aware of our Circus. And newspaper articles appeared all over the United States, many with photographs of Circus, of the clowns, of Targa, and me.

On April 29, Tom and I showed up at the law offices of Shea and Gould. Seymour Klein was waiting. Before we were really into our request, Seymour let us know he’d already decided what to give us. “The foundation will contribute five hundred thousand dollars,” he said. He’d already checked it out with the Johnson trust (the Robert Wood Johnson Charitable Trust, of which Seymour was a board member), and he’d like it announced to the press immediately. I was about to leap from my chair to hug Seymour, but Tom answered quickly: it was a wonderful offer, could we consider it overnight? When I found out why he’d been so cautious, I realized he was right. We needed more time to raise the rest of the money, and it would be difficult if not impossible if such a big gift were known. The next day, we called and asked Seymour to give half the necessary funds, and to give us three weeks to raise the rest before announcing the gift. Seymour understood our reasons, and pledged the $625,000. Now I could hug our generous patron!

With over five hundred recognized donors, not counting the thousands who remained anonymous, we were able to more than match the Johnson trust’s extraordinary gift. In only twenty days! Editorials and articles in newspapers and magazines across the country rejoiced along with us. Mayor Koch came to our press conference on May 5, along with Seymour and the circus people, who had by now become our dear friends. Standing in the lobby, Tom announced: “The Calder circus has been saved and will remain in the United States at the Whitney!”

The scheduled May 20 benefit of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus would now be a celebration, with contributors invited to a gala performance. And what a celebration it was. A cocktail party to meet the performers, a tour backstage. I remember “The Mighty Michu, Titan of Tinyness, Sultan of Smallness, The Smallest Man in the World,” drinking a whole celebratory glass of red wine with awesome effects. Since he was so small it affected him powerfully, he said, and he almost couldn’t go on. Best of all, the clowns invited Tom and me to join them. Tammy Parish and Wayne Sidley, who went through sixteen changes of identity during a performance, made us up, generously lending us not only their “faces” but their costumes. The Times:

“ ‘They decided I was the street tramp type,’ Mr. Armstrong said with an uncertain smile as he greeted guests wearing his grayish makeup, pink cheeks, a plastic red nose and a patched clown jacket, which only partly covered his preppy bow tie.

“Mrs. Biddle, in white face, manic red hair and tablecloth checked overalls, … and Mr. Armstrong appeared, center ring, in the clowns’ Wash-the-Fierce-Dog act.”

We also marched in the opening parade with the clowns, playing trumpet and tuba, clowning along with the rest, enjoying ourselves immensely.

The Whitney put out a newspaper celebrating this joyous moment. Among many tributes to Calder and his circus, I like John Updike’s poem:

In the little movie

at the Whitney

you can see them

at the center of the spell

of wire and metal:

a clumsy man’s hands,

square and mitten-thick,

that do everything

without pause:

unroll a tiny rug

with a flick,

tug a doll’s arm up,

separate threads.

These hands now dead

never doubted, never rested.

Artist and writer Robert Osborn, Alexander Calder’s friend, occupies a whole page of that newspaper. Across the top, over Osborn’s drawing of Calder-as-mountain, smiling and recumbent, a poetic tribute in his flowing cursive:

We can’t compress Sandy into a few words./ Too much of him. … too large … and his qualities are too varied & contradictory. Engineer-Artist./ Capricious yet totally logical. A serious Santa Claus./ Mobile as a dream … Stabile as the very earth, & sometimes both./ A lover of fun, full of wit & play, but confronted by things evil he is as grim a battler as one could ask for. He is that rare combination of delight & powers with which he has blessed us all.

Thus was Circus saved.

Tom’s dream for the permanent collection was evoked in an exhibition he curated in 1981 for the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The trustees and national committee members who went to the opening saw a group of extraordinary paintings. Tom had had his eye on them for some time, hoping their owners would give them to the Whitney. Viewers seemed impressed by the entire show and by Tom’s tour de force in assembling all the various paintings. He had arranged them thematically rather than chronologically, with interesting juxtapositions: a Wyeth looked surprisingly abstract next to an Avery and a Hartley. The Germans crowded around those they most liked, especially the “individual expressions” section: Ivan Albright, Richard Lindner, Jim Nutt, Peter Saul. I remember noticing the many young Germans looking as funky as young Americans.

This show had reinforced our awareness of the tremendous interest in American art that exists in Europe, and back in New York, I reported this to the other trustees. We had seen hundreds of fine works by American artists of the ’40s through the ’70s, installed in museums that, in several instances, were created solely for the display of these works. Since these European museums and collections were generally supported by governments or government agencies, I was all the more grateful for, and impressed by, the extent of private patronage in our country — especially at our own Museum. In that year’s Bulletin I wrote, “The United States today is on a par with the ‘old countries’ in abundance, quality, and geographical dispersion of cultural institutions of all kinds — and yet, we are comparative newcomers, regarded until recently as not only upstarts but philistines!”

At that time, once again, we felt impelled to grow, to build, so that Americans would not have to go to Europe to see their own twentieth-century art. We wanted to fulfill our mission to “increase public awareness of the significance of American civilization of the twentieth century.” We wanted to have the best Museum for the best art of our century right here in New York City.

To give a hint of what we could do, with funding from the Alcoa Foundation, whose visionary CEO, Krome George, was a good friend of Tom’s, we installed the first long-term exhibition of masterworks from the permanent collection. For five years! On the whole third floor! This was a response to the long range planning committee report, which recommended, in part, that “Examples from the permanent collection will, when possible, have first exhibition priority; a program to achieve this will be initiated.”

One important result of the exhibition was its demonstration of the Whitney’s need for more space. From six hundred works in 1930, the permanent collection had grown to more than six thousand works in 1981. In that third floor installation, we could only show seventy-three. To again quote the planning committee’s report:

“Space in the present building is inadequate for the ideal needs of the Museum. While the building is currently manageable and enjoyable, it is too small to function as the major center for the permanent exhibition of American art of the twentieth century, as a showcase for temporary exhibitions, and as an educational center.”

This introduces our second goal, physical expansion. Over the next decade, it would occupy most of our time and cause most of our troubles.

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