I

He was set down as belonging to that odious category of outsiders who hung loosely on the fringes of college life: odd persons going about alone, or in little knots, looking intellectual, or looking dissipated. They were likely to be Jews or radicals or to take drugs; to be musical, theatrical, or religious; sallow or bloated, or imperfectly washed; either too shabby or too well dressed. The tribe of these undesirables was always numerous at Harvard.

—George Santayana, The Last Puritan¹

Boston in 1928 had little use for modern art. The latest developments in painting were deemed immoral and vulgar. People viewed them as anarchistic, an affront to sanity and God. Pictures, sculpture, and building styles should be a buffer against the present, not an exaltation of it. Most people longed for the comforts of tradition, the familiar look of tried-and-true styles. There had been such an uproar after the venerable Boston Art Club showed some Picasso drawings and other contemporary European art that all but one member of its Art Committee had been forced to resign in September. The club issued a public statement that it had “purged itself of modernism.”² A new and more conservative art committee took the helm. Its chairman, Mr. H. Dudley Murphy, understood the tenor of the times far better than his predecessor had. “We have had an exploitation of modernist art at the club,” he told a reporter from the New York World. “You know what I mean, that crazy stuff.… We believe that people are rather tired of this sort of thing.” Murphy gave assurance that people could expect “a definite swing away from extreme modernism to the safer realms of conservatism and ‘sanity in art.’ ”³

The first show under the aegis of Murphy’s committee opened the new art season that October. The Evening Transcript reported that the members had the wisdom to redecorate the galleries with a “mouse-colored velvet” that, unlike the “glaring white barn-like walls” previously in place, made “a background suitable to receive the paintings.”⁴ Most of those paintings were pleasant if tame exemplars of second-generation American Impressionism. They depicted moonlit pools, bunches of dahlias, and ladies holding parasols. On Joy Street, on Beacon Hill, there was an institution with the promising name of the Twentieth Century Club, but only its name suggested anything streamlined or futuristic. Its exhibitions featured representational canvases of ramshackle New England homesteads, academic sculpture, and maps of Boston alongside sketches of city landmarks. In the commercial galleries one could count on more of the same, or English sporting scenes. Occasionally, a work from the School of Paris might go on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, but John Singer Sargent was considered the master to beat them all. The big shows that November were of Sargent’s drawings and of work by the society portraitist Anders Zorn.

Things were not much more advanced on the other side of the Charles River. In Cambridge at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, one might from time to time see a work on paper or a reproduction of an oil by Cézanne or Van Gogh, even by Picasso, but no such thing would enter the permanent collection. Edward Waldo Forbes, the director of the Fogg, had in 1911 made a decree that was still largely in effect: “The difficulty is, first, that all modern art is not good, and we wish to maintain a high standard. In having exhibitions of the work of living men we may subject ourselves to various embarrassments.”⁵

There were, however, three Harvard undergraduates who actually relished such embarrassments. Late in 1928, Lincoln Kirstein, Edward M. M. Warburg, and John Walker HI launched an organization “to exhibit to the public works of living contemporary art whose qualities are still frankly debatable.”⁶ The three college juniors officially founded their Harvard Society for Contemporary Art at a dinner meeting held on December 12 at Shady Hill, the impressive neo-Classical mansion that had belonged to Harvard’s president, Charles Eliot Norton. Since 1915, Shady Hill had been the residence of Paul Joseph Sachs, who that year had become Edward Forbes’s assistant director at the Fogg, and was now his associate director. Sachs had ascended to a full professorship at Harvard in 1927, and the three young men were all under his guidance.

Both Sachs and Forbes liked the idea of the students supplementing the work being done by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Fogg by mounting exhibitions of various aspects of modern art and design. The creation of the new organization helped take the pressure off the Fogg’s directors to put their necks in the same noose as the management of the Boston Art Club. Sachs and Forbes agreed to serve on the board of the Harvard Society. They volunteered the services of the Fogg staff to help with the more difficult packing and shipping and to defray some of the insurance costs. The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art was the first organization in the country to devote itself to an ongoing program of changing exhibitions of recent art in all its diversity. The latest photography, Bauhaus design, Mexican realism, and German Expressionism could be seen in bits and pieces elsewhere, but nowhere else was there a conscious effort to present in succession such a range of contemporary expressions. Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker, three privileged college students, managed it all while doing their homework on their laps as they performed guard duty.

John Walker III, Lincoln Kirstein, and Edward M. M. Warburg, the founders of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. (Photo Credit 1.1)

Statement of Purpose and Membership form of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, 1928. (Photo Credit 1.2)

Shortly after their dinner meeting at Shady Hill, the trio set out to find space for their organization. They rented two rooms on the second floor of the Harvard Cooperative Building at 1400 Massachusetts Avenue. The main floor housed the Harvard Coop, the local emporium for almost anything students might want to buy. The Coop was directly on Harvard Square. Even in those days Harvard Square was a busy urban intersection with noisy bus and subway stops and taxi stands. Although only a five-minute walk across stately Harvard Yard from the Fogg, the location was a step away from the sanctity of the yard and of the quiet lawns at Shady Hill—and into the ordinary, current, urban world.

Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker wanted the setting to be as stark as possible, a statement of newness and now. There was to be no mousy velvet. The idea was to search in directions where others had not looked before, and to stop imitating the past. They painted the walls white and silvered the ceiling with squares of tea paper. For a table they found a massive block of monel—an alloy of nickel and copper—which they rested on four free-standing marble columns that they had picked up in a defunct ice-cream shop. The chairs were the latest streamlined specimens in tubular steel.

They announced plans to mount an exhibition of recent American art and design in a tradition more native than European. To contemplate such a thing in their industrial-looking space was a radical move. A year earlier, Lewis Mumford, in an article on “American Taste” for Harper’s, had described the prevalent disdain for any notion of a new or indigenous national style:

The modern American house can tritely be described as a house that is neither modern nor American. A gallery that today exhibited American taste would be a miscellany of antiquities. The pictures we put on our walls, our cretonnes and brocades and wall papers, our china, our silverware, our furniture, are all copies or close adaptations of things we have found on their historic sites in Europe and America, or, at one remove, in the museums. Meanwhile the art and workmanship of our own day remain unappreciated because they have not yet aged sufficiently to be embraced by the museum.

Mumford asserted that no

period has ever exhibited so much spurious taste as the present one; that is, so much taste derived from hearsay, from imitation, and from the desire to make it appear that mechanical industry has no part in our lives and that we are all blessed with heirlooms testifying to a long and prosperous ancestry in the Old World. Our taste, to put it brutally, is the taste of parvenus.⁷

The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art would prove the exception.

The founders issued a brochure announcing their plan to show art not yet tested by time, reiterating their seminal notion of exhibiting living art of “frankly debatable” value. Their symbol, in the style of Greek Black Figure vase painting, was a naked, agile, and muscular man appearing euphoric atop a rearing stallion, with another man adjusting the horse’s bridle and bit. This image of high adventure would appear on virtually every invitation and exhibition flyer for the next couple of years. With no explanation or identification beyond the minuscule initials “R.K.,” its authorship and symbolism may have been known to the inner circle, but to the larger audience were ambiguous. “R.K.” stood for Rockwell Kent. Kent, one of Lincoln Kirstein’s favorite designers and book illustrators, had helped boost the new organization by agreeing to do the logo for a nominal fee. The precise meaning of his design was hazy, but its general effect was to suggest action and drama tempered by classic grace. The implications are clear: that the revival of ancient forms and established styles is okay, even desirable, so long as the tone is fresh and the spirit lively.

The brochure included a membership application form. It announced three categories: one for Harvard and Radcliffe students, with annual dues of $2; “contributing” (“$10 or more”), and “sustaining” (“$50 or more”). Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker were listed as members of the “Executive Committee.” There was also an impressive roster of trustees. Besides Edward Waldo Forbes and Paul J. Sachs this included John Nicholas Brown, a wealthy collector of drawings and scion of an old Providence family; Philip Hofer, a bibliophile and collector; Arthur Pope, a distinguished professor of art history; Arthur Sachs, a financier and Paul’s brother; and Felix M. Warburg—Edward’s father, and the only trustee who had not been graduated from Harvard.⁸ It was a coup for their pioneering undertaking to gain such prominent figures, personally not the least bit inclined toward contemporary art. But here the three students had teamed beautifully. Kirstein was good at formulating ideas, Warburg at communicating them to people who might not have otherwise supported them, Walker at knowing who was who.

The Harvard Society was Kirstein’s invention, and he supplied most of the exhibition themes as well as the rationales behind them. “Impetuous … knowledgeable … overflowing with vitality …”⁹ is how one of his friends described him. “Brilliant, seductive, violent … but isolated and lonely at the same time”¹⁰ is the characterization of another. The tall, broad-shouldered Kirstein was imaginative and articulate, but frequently prickly. With the bearing of a soldier, he generally had a serious and puzzled look on his face. He used his social graces only when the mood suited. He was often cranky and made no effort to mask it. He needed Eddie Warburg and John Walker to deal with the world. The students were promulgating a new gospel, and it took charm to spread it. Eddie Warburg, like Kirstein, also felt great conviction and talked as directly as possible, but he tempered the straight-shooting with a light touch and humor. The dapper, animated Warburg—exotically handsome with his bold features—considered audience response. Kirstein might face his listeners with a misanthropic stare, while Warburg would always come up with a joke. Kirstein had daunting intelligence, but he might ascend a speaker’s platform with the glowering look of a voracious, nasty eagle and then proceed to knock down his glass of water; Eddie Warburg had polish, and a deep, broad smile. His connections helped too. The world of philanthropy and patronage is full of tit for tat, and it was hard to turn down one of the banking Warburgs if he asked you to be a trustee or, later on, to lend artworks. Moreover, Eddie or his father could always cover any deficit the new society might incur. And John Walker could help in his special way. Particularly attuned to the Social Register set, looking every bit the well-bred American aristocrat, Walker had the sort of friendships that enabled him to build up the list of sustaining members. Kirstein and Warburg were not really his typical companions; he specialized more in “a number of rich, hard-drinking, bridge-playing friends”¹¹—exactly the sort of people one needed to provide funds for a fledgling arts organization.¹² On his own, none of these three young men had what it would take to get a conservative community to consider and support radical art, but as a team they could pull it off.

Lincoln Kirstein had started early as an artistic adventurer. Born in 1906, he was eight when he created “Tea for Three,” a dramatics club in which he, his brother George, and their neighbor William Koshland were the members. Even then, he was a systematic organizer. There would be two performances at the Kirsteins’ house on Commonwealth Avenue, followed by one at the Koshlands’ on nearby Beacon Street; then the pattern would be repeated. For costumes, the boys pulled things out of their parents’ closets. Lincoln produced, wrote, and starred in all their plays. They were his obsession; when he and Koshland played baseball at school, and were invariably in the outfield, Lincoln was generally too busy planning the next production to notice when the ball came.

Even before Lincoln Kirstein entered Harvard at the age of twenty, he knew his way around the worlds of art, dance, and literature. When he was fifteen, he published a play—set in Tibet—in the Phillips Exeter Monthly. In 1922, when he was sixteen, he made his first art acquisition—an Ashanti moon-fan figure of tulipwood, carved at the Wembley Empire Exhibition. That same year, he and George spent their summer holidays in London in the house their older sister Mina shared with Henrietta Bingham, of the Louisville publishing family. The boys were asleep after a performance of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes when they were roused from their beds and told to put on Mina’s orange-and-yellow silk pajamas to dance a pas de trois improvised for them by the brilliant soubrette Lydia Lopokova. Lytton Strachey was among those who viewed the Kirstein brothers’ carrying-on. Lopokova was there with her fiancé, Maynard Keynes. A few days later, Keynes took Lincoln to a Gauguin exhibition that Lincoln found unforgettable. He relished these new ways to look at life, and the pioneering styles in which to write, dance, or paint.

Like the setting Lincoln had helped to create for the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, Mina’s London life was a far cry from the environment in which they had grown up. Their father, Louis Kirstein, was a high-ranking executive—eventually chairman—of Filene’s Department Store. The Kirsteins’ house was very much the sort of thing Lewis Mumford excoriated in Harper’s. The foyer was hung in green corded silk. Empire Period torchères, and a marble bust of Louis XIV’s finance and culture minister, Colbert, sat on its green marble mantels. The rooms upstairs emulated Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Italianate palazzo, Fenway Court. There was a Chinese bedroom completely done with scarlet slipper-satin and black lacquered furniture, niches stuffed with neo-Classical art, and a library decorated with electrotypes of Pompeiian bronzes. A tailor’s daughter, Rose Stein Kirstein liked to have as much lace around as possible. The largest painting was a full-size copy of Titian’s Bacchus & Ariadne. Everything referred to some other place and some time past. This was equally true in the Boston Public Library, of which Louis Kirstein was president. Lincoln regularly visited his father there, crossing inlaid floors under the grand barrel vault with its ornate ceiling reliefs and abundance of marble columns. What Lincoln Kirstein was used to were embellished surfaces and grandiose manifestations of the stages of history.

From left to right: Lincoln, Louis, and George Kirstein in 1910. (Photo Credit 1.3)

Lincoln Kirstein, photographed by Walker Evans, c. 1927. (Photo Credit 1.4)

Cover of The Hound & Horn, Spring 1928.

Lincoln’s own tastes went in many directions. When he was twelve his mother had taken him and Mina to Chartres. There he developed such a strong passion for the windows that between high school and college he worked for a year in a stained-glass factory. This fulfilled his father’s wish that he learn what an honest day’s work meant, and also brought him closer to the craftsmanship that was his heritage, since his paternal grandfather had been a lens grinder in the German city of Jena. Early on his mother had given him two large volumes of masterpieces of world art, and he had been overwhelmed by a Dürer. On summer vacations he looked long and hard at paintings in northern European museums, and made drawings of classical sculpture in the Louvre. At home in Boston he studied decorated books and bought volumes illustrated by Gustave Doré, Aubrey Beardsley, and Arthur Rackham, of whose work the best collection was in the public library. Lincoln also greatly admired the large allegorical murals there: Puvis de Chavannes’s The Muses of Inspiration, Edwin Austin Abbey’s The Quest and Achievement of the Holy Grail, and John Singer Sargent’s Judaism and Christianity. He often met his father in the boardroom, where Sargent’s panel of the prophets looked down on them; it moved him greatly.

Alfred H. Barr, Jr., photographed by Jay Leyda, New York, 1931–33. Gelatin silver print, 4¾ × 3⅝″. (Photo Credit 1.6)

In his first year of college, Lincoln Kirstein went with his mother to the auction of the American collector John Quinn and bought an eight-inch-high statue of a mother and son made in the Belgian Congo. The piece had been found by Paul Guillaume—the Paris-based dealer in African art—and it was Picasso who had advised Guillaume to offer it to Quinn. There was little that Kirstein wouldn’t consider so long as it reflected passion and competence. At Harvard he did quite a bit of painting himself, most of it in a rather traditional figurative style. He had heard the painter Leon Kroll say that if a painter had not done a thousand life drawings by the age of twenty, he should forget it. Kirstein did more, in the traditional style one might expect from an artist whose artistic heroes included Antonello da Messina, Antonio Moro, and Anthony Van Dyck. Above all he painted portraits, which by his own description were in the manner of artists ranging from Holbein to Cézanne.

The one rule was that whatever Kirstein cared about, he cared about vehemently. His freshman year at Harvard he and some associates started an undergraduate magazine called The Hound & Horn, the first issue of which came out in the fall of 1927. Deeming Harvard’s official literary magazine inadequate, this new publication was modeled on the Criterion, an English review edited by T. S. Eliot. Like everything Kirstein was to be involved in from that point on, it did not flaunt his name—which appeared only in small type in the list of editors—but the periodical was his idea, and bore the mark of his very strong sense of judgment.

Kirstein selected authors for The Hound & Horn who at that time were little known. They were mostly young and unproven. In general their styles were streamlined, their messages candid to a fault. They were bound by no remnants of Victorianism or other old-fashioned forms of acceptability. Independence marked whatever arenas the magazine entered: literature, architecture, painting, photography, music. The first issue had an article called “The Decline of Architecture” by the young architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock, along with photographs of recent building design by a young man named Jere Abbott. Abbott was a graduate student at Harvard under Paul Sachs, as was the person with whom he shared an apartment on Brattle Street, Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr. Both Barr and Abbott were Kirstein’s advisers.

Abbott’s photos showed the New England Confection Company factory in Cambridge. That Necco building today looks like a straightforward industrial structure, but its inclusion as a triumph of design was startling in 1927. To extol the beauty of unornamented, machined, and coolly functional form was a major step, and a challenge to the usual way of doing things. In advocating this radical aesthetic through The Hound & Horn, Kirstein was reflecting Alfred Barr’s taste. Besides studying at Harvard, Barr was teaching a course in modern art at Wellesley College. In it, he applauded the Necco factory and assigned his students to visit it. Barr had also written the wall labels for a show of facsimiles of modern paintings at the Fogg. The artists he championed included Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso. By the standards of the times they were not quite as offbeat and shocking as many of the artists the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art would show, but they evinced Barr’s commitment to some fairly adventurous art.

The Hound & Horn issues of the next several years included short stories by Conrad Aiken, Katherine Anne Porter, Kay Boyle, Erskine Caldwell, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein, all of whom were new writers at the time. There were excerpts from a novel by John Dos Passos. A story called “Bock Beer and Bermuda Onions” was by the twenty-year-old Jon [sic] Cheever. There were essays by Paul Valéry, Sergei Eisenstein, and T. S. Eliot, as well as an Eliot bibliography prepared by the Harvard student Varian Fry and an essay about Eliot by R. P. Blackmur, who contributed frequently. The poetry was by Malcolm Cowley, William Carlos Williams, Conrad Aiken, e. e. cummings, Horace Gregory, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound. There was also one poem by Captain Paul Horgan, identified as a teacher of English at a military school in the Southwest. Roger Sessions contributed “Notes on Music,” and Hyatt Mayor wrote a piece on Picasso’s method. There were occasional reproductions of paintings—mostly easygoing watercolors—by A. Everett Austin, the very young Fairfield Porter, and Charles Burchfield. Richly printed black-and-white photographs were by Charles Sheeler and Walker Evans. The latter was represented by, among other images, his striking portrait of a fur-clad black woman on Sixth Avenue in New York, and Wash Day, a shot of laundry hanging on lines.

The back of each issue contained book reviews. When they were both freshmen, Kirstein had asked John Walker to write some of these reviews. Kirstein had initially set out to meet Walker after hearing that his room was covered with reproductions of paintings by Duncan Grant, John Marin, Picasso, and Vlaminck. This must have made it seem like home territory to Kirstein, since in 1924 Duncan Grant had done a portrait of Mina; it was also like a sign on the door saying “interested in modern art and other unusual things.” Sensing that here he would find a soul mate, one day Kirstein had walked in and introduced himself. Their rapport on The Hound & Horn had led Kirstein to ask Walker to join him in the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art.

John Walker’s fondness for art had been the result of a calamity. In 1919, when he was thirteen years old and interested only in football and skiing, he had been struck with infantile paralysis. His family lived in Pittsburgh, but his mother took him to New York so that he could get the best medical treatment. For two years they lived at the Biltmore Hotel. She would regularly wheel John, who was dressed in his pajamas, up and down Fifth Avenue in an open barouche. When his health improved to the extent that he could get into clothes, she sought places accessible by wheelchair, and the easiest was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its street-level side entrance, and elevator. At the Met Mrs. Walker saw her son smile with a pleasure she hadn’t seen on his face since before he had taken sick. He spent endless hours in the ancient and classical collections, and then discovered the galleries of Dutch and Flemish art of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, where he liked to park his wheelchair for prolonged viewings. In little time he knew that he wanted to be a curator.

John Walker III and his parents in Palm Beach, c. 1912.

John Walker III, Harvard College Class Album photograph, 1930. (Photo Credit 1.8)

When Walker and his mother moved back to Pittsburgh, he began to attend the International Exhibitions at the Carnegie Institute. These annual shows were among the few venues in America for modern European art. Walker loathed the pictures his family owned—canvases by chic minor painters like Fritz Thaolow and Aston Knight—but admired much on the contemporary scene. At his country day school he helped form a group of half a dozen boys in which the members took turns reading one another papers on the history of art. When it came time for college Walker chose Harvard because he knew that this was to be his field and people like Sachs and Forbes were there. The family fought hard—everyone else had gone to Princeton or Yale—but he knew what he wanted.

On a visit home during his freshman year, Walker made his first art acquisition—a painting by John Kane called Old Clinton Furnace. The asking price at the Carnegie International was fifteen hundred dollars; he offered seventy-five. The saleswoman at the catalog desk laughed in his face, but the next day she telephoned him, chagrined, and said his offer had been accepted. Walker knew Kane slightly; the artist’s wife had been his grandmother’s cook. He also was well acquainted with the subject of the canvas; it was the blast furnace in central Pittsburgh that his grandfather owned. But to buy a rather primitive rendering of smokestacks and an industrial landscape was a bold move. Walker, however, had long valued what others deemed grim. As much as he enjoyed the galleries at the Met, he had also come to prize the sights of downtown Pittsburgh. As a teenager he spent hours watching work at that blast furnace. He found a bizarre beauty in the flying sparks and workmen sweating away in the hot light. When on one occasion the furnace collapsed and molten iron flowed down a main street of Pittsburgh, he could not take his eyes off this glorious “avenue of glowing pig iron.”¹³ When Lincoln Kirstein entered Walker’s room to tap him for contemporary, experimental ventures that required an original outlook, he had picked the right person.

Not that Walker had had any more exposure to contemporary style at home than Kirstein had. The rooms in which he had spent most of his time as a child—in his maternal grandparents’ house in Pittsburgh—resembled an elegant English men’s club. They were paneled in mahogany, oak, and walnut. There was chintz everywhere, windows draped in dark brown or dark red velvet, elaborately stuccoed ceilings, massive silver lamps, and leaded glass doors in front of bookcases crammed with leatherbound volumes that had been bought by the yard. Walker’s paternal grandparents’ house was decorated with William Morris wallpaper and furniture, and Tiffany lamps and chandeliers. Like Kirstein, Walker had grown up in an atmosphere redolent of the widespread American reverence for established traditions. What made a style legitimate was that it had already flourished in Europe for centuries.

Lincoln Kirstein’s and Eddie Warburg’s families had tried to get the two young men together long before they actually met. Louis Kirstein was a friend of Eddie’s brother-in-law, Walter Rothschild. Rothschild was married to the oldest of the five Warburg children—the only girl, Carola. He was sixteen years older than Eddie and one of the top people at Abraham & Straus. A prominent figure in Jewish philanthropy in Boston, Louis Kirstein also admired Eddie’s father, who headed many New York charities in keeping with the tradition established by Eddie’s maternal grandfather, the wealthy financier Jacob Schiff. From Louis Kirstein’s and Walter Rothschild’s points of view it made perfect sense for the two students to be friends, because of what they shared both in their backgrounds and in their unusual interest in art. But like most family efforts to create friendships, their initial attempts had backfired. Lincoln and Eddie had carefully avoided each other for almost all of freshman year. By the end of the year, however, the two students discovered that in spite of their families’ intentions, and Warburg’s being two years younger, they had a lot in common. Well before the time that Kirstein was concocting the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, they had become fast friends. Warburg had a lot of money and was inclined to be generous with it, which contributed significantly to Kirstein’s feeling that he could make the new organization a reality.

Felix Warburg had advised his son to choose distinguished friends who would give sound advice. He warned Eddie against “the money-mad crowd” and mere country clubbers. In spite of his own fondness for “cheerful hours of sport,” one had to avoid friends who were good at nothing else. He counseled his son to find “one right companion” instead.¹⁴ For Eddie, Lincoln Kirstein was just the sort of intelligent and inspiring companion his father had in mind, even if he wasn’t “right” in the sense that Eddie’s older brothers would have considered “right.” Although Kirstein had spent a year at Phillips Exeter and two at Berkshire Academy, he had previously gone to public schools and wasn’t part of the prep school set. He was the opposite of the easygoing jocks and party boys whom the other three Warburg boys counted as friends. Kirstein cared about books, paintings, and the dance, not about sports and socializing. He could be abrasive in defense of his passions. He was as vituperative as he was imaginative. But he had a sensitivity and awareness that gave Eddie rare ease, and a boundless knowledge and energy that nourished Eddie more deeply than anything on the Harvard curriculum could. Moreover, by recognizing the infectious power of Eddie’s wit and kindness, Kirstein enabled the baby of the Warburg household to be effective and useful. To help Kirstein implement his ideas gave Eddie a sense of his own worth.

The art that Eddie Warburg knew best before college was what he could find by walking downstairs in his parents’ house. This was a neo-Gothic François Premier-style mansion overlooking the Central Park Reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Ninety-second Street (today it is the Jewish Museum). Designed by C. P. H. Gilbert, the house had painted beam ceilings, elaborately paneled walls covered with tapestries or other collections, ornate wrought-iron lamps and chandeliers lighting the heavy English furniture and the ceremonial silver with which Jacob Schiff had filled his daughter’s household to assure proper Sabbath celebrations. Everywhere there were layers over layers, which is what life itself was like. The entrance vestibule had double doors made of glass panels framed with ornate bronze mullions and covered with Belgian lace.

Eddie’s father devoted two rooms to a comprehensive collection of early German and Italian woodcuts and Rembrandt etchings that he had built up under the tutelage of William Ivins, a close family friend and a protégé of Paul Sachs; Sachs had recommended Ivins to his position as the curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum. In the red room Frieda and Felix Warburg kept the paintings they would bring back as souvenirs of trips to Rome, among them four predellas (base panels), attributed to Pesellino, that had originally belonged in a large altarpiece completed by Fra Filippo Lippi after Pesellino’s death. In the conservatory adjacent to the red room there was a so-called Botticelli, in front of which stood on a stand a so-called Wittenberg Bible with a so-called inscription by Martin Luther. In time it would fall upon young Edward to find out the truth about the authenticity of these works. When he was a teenager it was often his task to give visitors the tour of all of these objects when his father had to take a phone call from “downtown”—the offices of the investment banking firm Kuhn, Loeb, where he was a partner—or was off raising money for one of the many charities he supported. Of the five children, Eddie had always been the one to show an interest in art; while his brothers were on the fifth-floor balcony leaning over the elaborate oak balustrade having a spitting contest into the marble amphora in the hall below, he was listening to his father and visiting art historians or other curious onlookers in the two print rooms. As they went through the collection covering the walls, encased in double glass on rotating pedestals (this to allow the viewing of both recto and verso of two-sided images), or stored in black boxes on a billiard table, he carefully noted every scholarly observation as well as all the more prosaic remarks he would store away into his repertoire as a mimic. His parents encouraged his interest in art through a practice then known as “bratting”—akin to tutoring, but less formal—in which an older boy is hired to encourage another in a given field. Eddie’s coach was Jo Mielziner, the painter and set designer, who gave him instruction during summer holidays in Aunt Eda Loeb’s Seal Harbor home. Eddie also was tutored in music—by Arthur Schwartz, the composer who later wrote “Dancing in the Dark” and other Broadway hits. Schwartz regularly took his young protégé on strolls through Central Park, where he would teach him new tunes.

Edward M. M. Warburg, c. 1927. (Photo Credit 1.9)

The Warburg brothers in Hamburg, c. 1925. From the left: Paul, Felix, Max, Fritz, and Aby, whose hands are held in a gesture of supplication to signify the financial arrangement with his brothers.

Felix Warburg’s brother Aby had established a precedent in the family for devoting one’s life to art. The oldest of the five brothers of whom Felix was the youngest, he was, according to family tradition, entitled to be a senior partner in the Hamburg banking firm M. M. Warburg & Company; like some sort of royal status, such positions were reserved for the oldest two sons. Aby agreed, however, to abdicate—on the condition that his younger siblings would guarantee lifelong support of his research in the field of iconography. Ensconced in his book-filled house in Hamburg, he pursued the consistent use of certain motifs and images in diverse cultures. He opened his library to people like the psychoanalyst Ernst Kris; Erwin Panofsky, whose writings on iconography pioneered the interpretation of symbolism; and E. H. Gombrich, who in time would write The Story of Art. (Years later, after Nazism forced the removal of Aby Warburg’s library from Hamburg to London in a dramatic nighttime exodus by boat, Gombrich would head the Warburg Institute at the University of London and write Aby Warburg, An Intellectual Biography.)

The Warburg house at 1109 Fifth Avenue, c. 1920. (Photo Credit 1.11)

But what appealed to young Edward more than the scholarship of his uncle or the collecting of his parents was the idea of public service. Art was not just something to be studied in libraries or enjoyed in the privacy of one’s home. Consider what happened to the Pesellino predellas. Just at the point when Eddie was getting to know them well, they were packed up and sent off on loan to the National Gallery in London. For many years the altarpiece of which they had originally been part—The Trinity with Saints—had been disassembled. The National Gallery had purchased one part of it in 1863, and received another by bequest and purchased a third in 1917. Then, in 1929, a fourth panel, formerly in the Royal Collection, had been presented thanks to Lord Duveen. All that was needed to complete the work was for Felix Warburg to lend the four predellas. A couple of months after sending them, Felix stopped by to see them in London. To his shock he found that not only had the altarpiece been reconstructed, but his panels had been fitted into its base as if they had always been there. Moreover, the predellas were now attributed to the studio of Fra Filippo Lippi. Naturally Felix was pressed both to accept the change of authorship and to turn the loan into a gift. He agreed only after negotiating the terms, which consisted of an agreement that Parliament change existing laws in order to permit loans of British-owned paintings outside England, a deregulation from which the larger world still reaps the benefits.

This concern for public need was typical of Felix Warburg. In 1914 he had become the first treasurer of Jacob Schiff’s creation known as the JDC—the Joint Distribution Committee of American Funds for the Relief of Jewish War Sufferers—which he then chaired for eighteen years. He also headed the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, organized the Federation of Jewish Charities and became its first president, and was a leading figure in the American Jewish Committee, the Refugee Economic Corporation, the American Arbitration Association, the Philharmonic-Symphony Society, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, many of which he had helped to start. Felix used to liken himself to Heinz’s pickles; in his office at Kuhn, Loeb he had had a special screen built with fifty-seven panels in it, each of which opened to a file case with material concerning one of the boards or committees on which he served. By supporting the sort of art too advanced for museums, Eddie had stepped far from the family orbit, but the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art was also a new and original form of public service, and as such it was very much in the family tradition.

II

Paul Sachs had started out in the German-Jewish banking circle in New York; he had for a number of years been a partner in his family’s firm, Goldman, Sachs. But as an investment banker, whenever he earned commission money he immediately used it to buy art, which was his true passion. A graduate of Harvard College, Sachs had been asked onto the Visiting Committee of the Fogg in 1911; it was four years later that he realized that art had to be his profession rather than his hobby, moved to Cambridge, and changed careers. But he still had his hand in the closely allied society from which he came. He persuaded Felix Warburg and other old New York friends to take an active role in the Fogg by joining various committees, and to support the museum with generous gifts. By studying with Sachs, Eddie Warburg was playing a part in his father’s grand life scheme. Felix Warburg had helped Sachs immeasurably in building up the Fogg. To advise Edward was Sachs’s way of repaying the kindness and Felix’s way of directly reaping the benefits of his largesse.

For Eddie Warburg, however, Sachs was “a humorless little cannonball of energy” who flaunted his Phi Beta Kappa key and cried a lot.¹⁵ His rages were frequent, especially toward those who weren’t lucky enough to be his social inferior. Sachs was a reverse snob, and found it hard to accept others of his background as serious academics. To be a truly diligent art historian who could recognize authorship and pinpoint iconography, you had to know what it was to work hard to get to where you were. Except for himself, there were to be no gentlemen scholars. It was all right for Sachs to have gone from being an investment banker in the family firm to being an art collector, and from there to being professor and codirector at the Fogg while living in one of the finest houses in the region, but this sort of easy route would not do for anyone else. For that reason Sachs generally treated Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker with the disdain that the rich reserve only for their fellow rich. He resented the three young connoisseurs the way that people who fancy themselves an elite, with exclusive claim to their cultural discoveries and position, resent those who threaten their monopoly on taste and their privileged status as pioneers.

Faculty of Harvard University Fine Arts Department, Fogg Art Museum courtyard, 1927. Seated in front are Paul Sachs (far left) and Edward Forbes (second from right). (Photo Credit 1.12)

Lincoln Kirstein considers Sachs to have been “a small and nervous man, who hated being a Jew”¹⁶—and who mainly was very impressed with himself because he lived in Charles Eliot Norton’s homestead. From Kirstein’s point of view, the extent of Sachs’s support of the Harvard Society was that he indulged it; “it was nice if little boys played.” He was willing to go that far because the society got him off the hook about the most modern art, a subject with which he was basically uncomfortable. But he was afraid that the new project would get out of hand, and his support was always tentative. As far as John Walker was concerned, Sachs was above all “a stocky, strutting little man” who never could remember who Walker was—“a disheartening experience for a student who had come to Harvard especially to sit at his feet.”¹⁷

The general take on Sachs, however, is that he was a talented navigator in the ways of the world. His “museum course” was the training ground for many of America’s future museum directors. Sachs placed scores of people in their jobs; he knew which museum trustee to call in which city. He also kept track of collectors everywhere, thus enabling students to study their holdings, and to secure loans later on when they were working at museums. But much as Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker benefited from Sachs’s letters of introduction to get into the collections in Boston, New York, and Washington where they might see some of the latest art, they often found negotiations with their professor to be torturous.

Edward Waldo Forbes, on the other hand, backed the Harvard Society completely, whatever the limitations of his understanding of contemporary art. A grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Forbes was an easygoing Bostonian gentleman of the old school. He had his misgivings about modern art at the Fogg, but he sanctioned it at the Coop. Even Forbes, however, could not keep peace between the Harvard Society’s founders and Paul Sachs. To deal with Sachs—which was essential if their organization was to take off—the students needed a devoted intermediary. Time and again they brought on Sachs’s ire. Warburg’s problem was that he was outspoken and funny at any cost; Kirstein’s that one moment he might be friendly and gracious, in another he could turn painfully awkward or nasty. Walker was too smooth and upper-class confident. But in Sachs’s assistant, Agnes Mongan, they had the perfect diplomat to run interference between them and the man to whom they ultimately had to answer for their new vehicle for modern art. They also had a fellow believer. Even more than the three young men, Mongan had come to view artworks as emblems of human life lived deeply and as gateways to peerless emotional adventure.

At a younger age than any of the founders of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, Mongan had recognized her own passion for paintings and objects. Born in 1905, she was twelve years old when her father asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up. Dr. Mongan—trained as an obstetrician/gynecologist, but now a family doctor with a general practice—had just come in from his hospital rounds when he posed the question. He and Agnes were alone at breakfast in the family house in Somerville, a town that neighbors Cambridge. The young girl did not know the term “curator” or “art historian,” but she pointed to a Persian rug—of which her parents had bought a number at auctions—and replied, “I’d like to know something about that.” There was an eighteenth-century reflector on the wall. It had a convex mirror topped by an eagle, and she adored it. Directing her finger from the rug to the reflector, she then said, “I’d like to know something about that, too.”

“And that,” she added, indicating some silver on the mantelpiece.¹⁸ Her father replied that in that case she should have the best possible liberal arts education a girl could have, which meant Bryn Mawr. Having settled the matter, Dr. Mongan started to leave the room, but he stopped at the door and came back. He told his daughter that her time at Bryn Mawr should be followed by a year in Europe. Dr. Mongan believed that one had to have a taste of the larger world; not only did he never let a day go by without picking up his New York Times at a Cambridge newsstand, but he also received the Manchester Guardian and Le Monde by post. Having himself spent a year abroad after Harvard Medical School, he felt that each of his children should have the same opportunity. Unlike Kirstein’s and Warburg’s parents, he would not leave his children a fortune. They would need to support themselves. But what he could provide were optimal opportunities for learning.

From the start, the senior Mongans had stressed the acquisition of knowledge for their children. Before her marriage, Agnes’s mother, like her many siblings, had been a schoolteacher. She read the classics to her two sons and two daughters for an hour each night, and saw to it that Agnes and her sister Elizabeth learned to play the piano. During successive summer holidays in Maine, the children were taught one year to identify all the local species of wildflowers; the next, mushrooms; and the following, trees. When Agnes’s father settled on the idea of her going to Bryn Mawr, he and her mother studied the college catalog. They decided to switch her from Somerville High School to the Cambridge School for Girls so that she could learn Latin, French, and a bit of Italian, and strengthen her background in mythology and literature. It was the sort of discipline from which art historians are made.

As a young girl, Mongan had won a prize for a piece in the St. Nicholas Magazine. She liked to write as well as to learn about artworks. At Bryn Mawr she majored jointly in English and history of art. Mongan’s main interest was clearly in the latter, however; what her study of English provided above all was a better command of language with which to describe the art objects that held her captive.

At Bryn Mawr there were only three teachers of art history: George Rowley for Oriental art, Edward Stauffer King for northern Renaissance art, and Georgiana Goddard King (no relation to Edward) for everything else. Professor Georgiana King, who had started as a teacher of English, had created the art history department at the college and turned it into one of the best in the country. She had opened the field to women by making Bryn Mawr the first women’s college in America to offer a Ph.D. in the subject. On her clearly defined course of becoming a professional art historian, Agnes Mongan could have chosen no better mentor. King was not only immensely knowledgeable, but she was passionate and colorful; everything about her suggested that to follow her way of life would be fulfilling and amusing.

The Mongan family, c. 1915: Agnes and her brother Charles in the background, their parents in the middle, her brother John and sister Betty in the foreground. (Photo Credit 1.13)

Agnes Mongan sitting on running board of Nancy Williams’s car, c. 1928.

As the head of a department in which men held subordinate positions, King demonstrated that here was a line of work in which a woman might attain the highest stature. In 1914 Bernard Berenson, the renowned connoisseur and scholar, had called King “the best equipped student of Italian art in the United States or in England.”¹⁹ Berenson, who had moved to Italy but remained deeply immersed in American collecting and the academic scene, had praised King to the president of Bryn Mawr by saying that only two years after she had founded the art history department there she had created the finest photograph and slide collection anywhere. “B.B.” went so far as to ask “G.G.”—this is how both were known—to work for him. But, with an institutional loyalty that also became a model for Mongan, G.G. was too attached to the college to leave it. She had attended Bryn Mawr as a student. By the mid-1920s, when Mongan studied with her, she had been there for twenty years, and she would remain for another ten. The venerable institution offered a secure base for a life of adventure and wandering. G.G. went to Europe regularly, often exploring unknown and inaccessible regions of Spain in her search for medieval and earlier artworks. She periodically traveled with Gertrude and Leo Stein, who admired her as a literary critic and a poet; she had struck up a close friendship with Gertrude in 1902 and on visits to Paris became acquainted with many of the artists and writers in Gertrude’s life. G.G. was a scholar of Oriental philosophy and of ancient Greek, Latin, and Arabic—in addition to the subjects and languages more directly related to art history. But she always returned to her teaching, enjoying it on her own terms as a campus eccentric. For thirty years G.G. wore the same frayed academic gown as she moved about the Bryn Mawr campus. At dinner she dressed as a Spanish doña, generally in a fitted black suit, often with black lace on her head. The short, stocky woman, with her lively green eyes and her gray hair in its bun, was known for her intolerance of mediocrity and dull people. She was often deliberately contentious. She was so fanatical about grammar and correctness that in her early teaching years she had written The Bryn Mawr Spelling Book, more than one hundred pages of words frequently misspelled. In Agnes Mongan, who was one of her best students, she met her match for enthusiasm as well as for accuracy of language. G.G. had also found her equal in tenacity; Mongan was frail and prone to severe bouts of grippe, so much so that at one point King declared her not strong enough to continue in fine arts and sent her home, only to have Mongan promptly return with an opinion from her father that they had underestimated her.

Georgiana Goddard King. (Photo Credit 1.15)

For Mongan, King was a model not only for factual rectitude, but for a belief in art as a spiritual presence. G.G.’s teaching emphasized original observation more than the accumulation of information. In her courses on medieval art, Italian Renaissance painting, and modern art—about which she learned firsthand from the Steins—she lectured spontaneously, rarely glancing at notes. She deliberately eschewed syllabuses or course outlines. The lecture room was totally dark except for the lights of the slide projector, so that students could scarcely take notes. Rather, the young women were to immerse themselves in the visual organization of the paintings and the emotions at play.

Agnes Mongan reveled in what she called “King’s capacity to arouse, to electrify, to instruct, and to inspire.” On many levels, her teacher became her ideal. She admired King’s power to leave her students “inoculated with ideas which leave marks on all their later lives.” Here was “a scholar of profound and original research” who went well beyond the realm of scholarship. For Mongan it was impressive that King pursued knowledge and information tenaciously, but what mattered more was that to her other attributes “were added a poet’s sensitivity and an unfailing human sympathy. Against this background the work of art was contemplated and judged. Never was it considered as an isolated object remote from life.”²⁰

Intense aliveness was what Agnes Mongan craved; artworks and their study were vehicles toward it. Not only did Georgiana King recognize the power of paintings and sculpture, but in researching, writing, and teaching about art, she lived richly. King was alert to everything. She charged every moment, not just for herself, but for those who came into her wake. G.G. had the power to heighten experience, and to unveil new extremes of vitality—for which Mongan had enormous appetite. When Mongan characterized the experience of King’s students, she described not only her own spiritual adventure, but also her own aspirations for the effect she too would like to have on others:

They know … that adventure lurks at every cross-road.… For them saints have awakened from stone to living spirit, and sightless eyes have looked beyond the boundaries of this world. The symbol has been made significant. Legend and liturgy have uncovered their riches. They have been moved by the beauty of pure line and stirred by the majesty of form.… From the Far East to Santiago, from the wall paintings of Altamira to Picasso, they know that “it is always the spirit which moves man to the creation of lasting beauty.”²¹

At Bryn Mawr, Mongan came to feel the intoxication with visual riches that would determine her life’s work. She would never lose her regard for precise knowledge and accurate identification she had acquired on those summer nature walks in New England, but the word “magic” also entered her vocabulary and assumed an importance it never would have for more traditionally Germanic, iconography-minded art historians. For one of King’s courses Mongan wrote a paper on El Greco in which, in her neat schoolgirl script on lined paper, she evinced the intense emotional engagement, both visual and psychological, that would inspire more than sixty years of work. At the same time she reached—if not with quite the success that she would later attain—for the writing style that would seal her success. She also manifested her originality:

Anyone who has seen an El Greco canvas is not likely to forget it. His colors are weird—chalky and often livid. His canvases are packed, even the landscapes are so thickly packed that one could not move through their heavy air. But more striking than any of these is the look in the eyes of his people. They seem, without any of the feline and sinister quality of Mona Lisa, to look beyond this world to another.

At that point in her life, Mongan had traveled no farther than the eastern seaboard of the United States, but this did not prevent her from grappling nobly with the milieu in which these paintings had been made. She imbued El Greco’s Spain with profound drama, about which she wrote with an ardent voice that seems intended for far more than the one-person audience who would be reading this paper:

All who really know Spain know her to be a land of violent and constant contrasts—and in these contrasts lies her fascination. On her plains the dry and scorching heat, which beats down with merciless intensity, suddenly gives way to icy winter winds which whistle across the same plains just as mercilessly. In her people profligate voluptuousness is gone in a night and in its place there is an opposite extreme of austere ascetism [sic]. Passionate devotion to the Virgin exists, with no sense of incongruity, side by side with a love of bull fights. Beauty and ugliness are close and good neighbors, beauty lending the ugliness strangeness, and ugliness lending beauty strength—an arid, barren plain and in its midst a city of fairytale splendor, a cathedral gorgeous with the accumulated treasures of centuries and in their midst a skeleton; the Infanta and her dwarf, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote.

In juxtaposing the simultaneous devotion to Catholicism with more earthbound pleasures, Mongan may have been confronting her own personal dilemmas as well as the background for El Greco. But whatever the conflicts, it was her Romantic vision that won out. She wrote of her subject, “He could paint the human figure with all its rounded contours—but chose to paint the human soul.” The conclusion to her paper is, “In El Greco there is positive magic.”²²

After graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1927, it was time for the year in Europe. Dr. Mongan hoped it would be in Oxford or Cambridge and that Agnes would become a writer; her choice was Florence, so that she might study Italian art. She joined a master’s degree program organized by Smith College. Led by two professors, Mongan and four other students, all women, spent five months in Florence and the surrounding Tuscan cities. By daylight they viewed art in galleries and churches and private collections. During classes each evening from 5 to 7 and 9 to 11 p.m., they would review everything they had seen. After Florence, the program continued for three months in Paris. On Mondays, when the Louvre was closed, they studied paintings in its galleries through a binocular microscope, from stepladders, and with automobile headlights—while the guards stood around snickering about silly American girls. They went to Berlin, Dresden, Munich, Prague, Vienna, and Venice before returning to Florence, where they had exams in July. Five Italian professors posed the questions in Italian; the women answered in English. There were three hours of oral exams, six hours of written ones. Since a thesis was also required for the Smith M.A., Mongan wrote one on Italian art in the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. Rich young men like Kirstein, Walker, and Warburg might be able to pursue their love for art on their own terms; a woman of no great affluence had to go the straight and tough academic route. But whatever the struggles, Mongan thrived. Slight to begin with, she lost twenty-five pounds that year, but considered it all part of a nourishing experience.

She had not done enough by the standards of Smith College, however. When Mongan got back to her parents’ house in Somerville and found out that she had passed her exams, she wrote the college to ask that they forward her M. A. Word came back that there were further requirements to fulfill; she needed to take a drawing or painting class. Since she did not want to go to Northampton for this purpose, she signed up at Harvard for Arthur Pope’s course in the theory of design. But her troubles were not over. Three weeks into the course, she got word that she should present herself at the registrar’s office. There she was asked if she was working toward a Ph.D. To her answer that she only wished to complete her M. A., the registrar pointed to the catalog listing where Pope’s course was marked with double daggers. “That means the course has men in it. No woman may take a double-daggered course unless she is working on a Ph.D. President Lowell once discovered a young woman in one of those courses whose serious intent of mind he doubted. He made a rule: No woman may take a double-daggered course unless she is a Ph.D. candidate. Young woman, if you have a quarrel, it is with the president of Harvard University. Good morning.”²³

On her way out of the registrar’s office, Mongan ran into the college dean, who came up with a solution. He asked if the same course were offered at Smith, and when she replied that it was, he inquired if the professor there had been trained by Arthur Pope. Again the answer was yes. The dean suggested that Mongan sit in on Pope’s classes, but send her papers to Smith to be graded. By this contrivance, a woman who was not a Ph.D. candidate managed to take a double-daggered course at Harvard and thereby complete her M.A. degree.

That same semester, in the fall of 1928, as a Fogg Museum Special Student, Mongan took Paul Sachs’s museum course. She also took a course that was routine for Harvard art historians—Edward Waldo Forbes’s history of technique, nicknamed “egg and plaster.” Mongan, however, was used to doing more than simply studying three subjects. She approached Edward Forbes about part-time employment, but he replied that part-time rarely worked out. She then suggested volunteer work, which he considered equally fruitless. But three weeks after the semester started, she learned that a friend of hers was giving up her position cataloging the Fogg’s drawing collection under Paul Sachs. She went straight to Shady Hill to ask if she could fill the spot, and Sachs agreed. She ended up as Sachs’s assistant the same semester that the three young men were launching the Harvard Society. Already a great admirer of The Hound & the Horn, Mongan liked the sound of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art from the moment she heard about it. Not only were the exhibition ideas exciting, but the gentlemen proposing them—especially Eddie Warburg—were irresistible.

Kirstein and Warburg, more than Walker, were responsible for the daily planning of the Harvard Society. Mongan met them almost daily for lunch at the local Schrafft’s as they plotted their course of action and made plans to exhibit the latest painting and sculpture from America and abroad. She was in an ideal position not only to be the Harvard juniors’ confidante and friend, but also their aide-decamp by occasionally presenting or defending their proposals to Sachs, or approaching him on other issues. She had great diplomatic tact. When Frieda Warburg badgered Eddie to find out why, considering all that Felix had done for the Fogg, Harvard had never given him an honorary degree, it was Mongan to whom Eddie could put such an awkward point. She could bring up this sort of issue to Sachs without raising the professor’s hackles. In the case of Felix’s doctorate the answer was no, but Mongan had managed to ask without provoking a storm.

Kirstein and Sachs had violent tempers, while Mongan never gave voice to anger. She knew both how to explain and how to avoid Sachs’s invective. From her employer’s point of view, she was easier than the young men. If Sachs wanted to be the only rich Wall Street type to make inroads in the art world at Harvard, Mongan offered no competition. Sachs treated Mongan far more gently than he did Kirstein or Warburg. A consummate scholar, she provided Sachs a major service by meticulously researching the Fogg’s holdings for his catalog, and he was grateful to her.

From Mongan’s vantage point, not only was Sachs dynamic and knowledgeable, but he had the added appeal that he prized drawings. This was not the norm; although a handful of connoisseurs had always esteemed graphic art, most collectors and museum people cared more for oils. Paintings were easier to display, and made a strong first impression. For Agnes Mongan, Sachs’s elevation of works on paper to the status of high art led to unimagined pleasures. Drawings had a unique freshness. For her they offered the honesty and immediacy that bizarre constructions in wire and cardboard, and other expressions of modernism, provided for Kirstein and Warburg. Art that held a charge of emotion could awaken and enliven these three young people with an intensity they had scarcely felt before.

In many ways, Kirstein, Warburg, and Mongan made a likely threesome. In a milieu where reticence was as much a part of the social code as was a firm handshake, they were violently purposeful. Unlike most of her contemporaries, Mongan wished to spend her time looking at art, traveling, and writing—not planning her trousseau; unlike their peers, Kirstein and Warburg preferred to plan startling art exhibitions than toss a football or worry about how to make more money when they got out of college. But it was not just their ardor that made them among Santayana’s “outsiders … on the fringes of college life.” For one thing, there was the matter of background. Ever since primary school, Agnes Mongan had felt the onus of being Catholic and of Irish descent in Boston. One day a classmate in an early grade had precipitately run her fingers over Mongan’s forehead; when Mongan asked why, the girl explained that her parents had told her Catholics were all devils, and so she was checking for Mongan’s horns.²⁴ It was still the era when employment ads might say “Irish need not apply.” During a vacation from Bryn Mawr when she visited a fashionable classmate in Jamaica Plain, near Boston, she learned that she was the first Catholic and person of Irish descent ever to go up the front stairs of the house; previously they had all used the servants’ staircase. Not that this sort of thing shocked her parents when she reported it back home; Mongan’s mother’s family, the O’Briens, could not be educated in England because they were Catholics, and so had gone to Salamanca.

As Jews, Warburg and Kirstein also felt one step away from the center of things. Even as enlightened a man as Dr. Mongan looked at them askance. Agnes was living back in her parents’ house in Somerville where Eddie called with some frequency. When Eddie told Agnes he was wondering whether her father would ask what his intentions were, she replied, “If you have any intentions at all, he won’t let you in the door.” There were also the clubs that would not consider Jews, the parties at which they would not be welcome.

It was an era when ethnic and religious prejudices were publicly permissible and widespread. For some people there was, in fact, the expectation that Jews should come up with a notion like the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. Jews were known to be adventurous art patrons. No one disapproved when the art dealer Valentine Dudensing—one of the main people on whom the Harvard Society would depend for loans—was quoted to that effect in a 1927 magazine article. Nor did anyone fault the title of the article: “The Jew and Modernism.” Its claim was that

It is especially to the Jews that we owe the advance in artistic appreciation that has been made in the last decade. The Jews are forward-looking, they are not afraid of doing things unconventionally, differently, individually. Intellectually and artistically they have made great achievements.²⁵

To be viewed a certain way because of one’s religion was an inescapable reality. Having such clear sense of the boundaries of their existence may have contributed to people like Warburg wanting to shatter restrictions in the aesthetic realm.

But being Jewish was not the only determining factor for Kirstein and Warburg. Warburg’s three older brothers, after all, were every bit as Jewish as he was; they simply chose to ignore the fact as best they could. Wishing to assimilate into American upper-class life, Fred, Piggy (as Paul was called), and Gerry easily succeeded. Eddie, on the other hand, had the mixed blessing of being more conscious of everything: his background, his feeling of being the mama’s boy who wasn’t really one of the guys, his relentless sensitivity to his and other people’s feelings. And Lincoln Kirstein had even more of a nonstop mind and inability to screen. In conversation or writing, then as now, he touched on everything and masked little. He has always been blunt about the intensity of both his passions and his dislikes. His religious obsessions range from sharp awareness of his Jewish background, to devotion to the mystic Gurdjieff, to Catholicism. He has been keenly aware of his own difference from most everyone else. This underlies his later depiction of the run-of-the-mill, easygoing undergraduates who were mostly his opposites but who fascinated him:

My school days and college years were gilded by a steady succession of enthusiasms for boys and men whose sweaty brilliance and appetite for hard liquor during Prohibition seemed to liberate them into a princely criminal ambiance. Dynastic breeding, well-nourished muscle resulted in a general arrest of psychic development. They were, for the most part, uninterested in ideas, presupposed cash, and resembled expensive sleepwalkers in a luxurious dream. No hindrance or tragedy touched them, and I was excited by their assurance of command over their immediate situation, even if it led nowhere but to the countinghouses of State and Wall Streets or big city law firms.²⁶

Kirstein may have been enchanted, but it was not his lot in life to follow their course. He and his closer comrades would never entirely fit in with the larger group. They were not good enough athletes. They did not adhere to the same social boundaries. Those who were Jewish were unwilling to try to disguise the fact. To be an outsider was part of their identities.

Kirstein and Warburg were dissimilar in many ways, but both felt apart from the mainstream. One way of coping with their otherness was to cultivate it. If most of their peers regarded them as different, they might as well have a good time and be as outrageous as they wanted. Kirstein and Warburg embraced modernism in part because, knowing that they were out of the mainstream anyway, they elected to foster rather than mitigate their sense of being different.

III

The Harvard Society’s exhibition of work by living American artists ran from February 19 to March 15, 1929. Although these people’s art has since been assembled in countless exhibitions and books, the joint showing in the two rooms above the Coop was one of the first times it was conceived as part of a general movement. A two-page flyer for the show set the tone and announced its purpose. The abundance of clean white space was as striking as the text. A few succinct, no-nonsense paragraphs in bold sans-serif type contained Kirstein’s description of the exhibition as “an assertion of the importance of American art. It represents the work of men no longer young who have helped to create a national tradition in emergence, stemming from Europe but nationally independent.” The artists for the most part fell into two groups. One consisted of “lyrists” who maintained the “tradition of visual poetry” of Albert Pinkham Ryder. These included Thomas Hart Benton, Arthur B. Davies, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Rockwell Kent, and Maurice Sterne—painters whose work is full of undulating, exotic curves. Their work shares a rough intensity, a look of caring desperately about something. What it distinctly lacks is the “good taste” of pictures by the able but comparatively limp artists whose work was then proliferating in the Boston galleries and arts organizations. The uncouth bravura of the lyrists offered the Harvard Society founders a welcome relief from the excessive politeness that annoyed them in the more fashionable art of the day. Then there were the “realists” akin to Thomas Eakins: George Bellows, Charles Burchfield, Charles Hopkinson, Boardman Robinson, John Sloan, Eugene Speicher, and Edward Hopper. Their canvases in the Harvard show were above all a candid grappling with the realities of contemporary American life. What these paintings depicted were hardly the everyday sights of people like the Kirsteins, Warburgs, and Walkers. Rather, this was the underside of the current national scene—its low-wage earners like Robinson’s doleful-eyed window washers and Speicher’s Quarryman and Miller’s Reapers, and its everyday sights of ferryboats, dock life, and slums. In his frontal, glamourless depiction of tenement housing, Williamsburg Bridge, Hopper encapsulated some of the objectives of these painters, as well as of the students who put them on view: to gloss over nothing, to reveal what was unique to one culture rather than imitative of another, to dwell on the shadows as much as the sunlight.

The exaltation of natural beauty was equally important, however. There was an airy, euphoric watercolor of Mount Chocorua by John Marin, and a Georgia O’Keeffe of a lily. Kirstein’s paragraphs explained that Marin and O’Keeffe fell into neither of the major groups and hence proved the “uselessness of all categories.” (O’Keeffe’s presence also proved the inaccuracy of Kirstein’s reference to the artists as “men.”) To suggest categories and then debunk that notion was typical of the Harvard Society. Its founders were both ardent and humble. They pointed out that while their selection was a vanguard group with traits in common, these were not the only worthwhile contemporary artists in America.

In addition to oils and watercolors, the opening Harvard Society how also presented sculpture by Gaston Lachaise, Archipenko, and Robert Laurent. From the founders’ point of view, Lachaise’s robust, ladorned, and uniquely bold bronze woman was the most important single object of the whole show. In addition, there were design objects. These included an “ash and cocktail tray” by Donald Deskey (lent by the artist), plates by Henry Varnum Poor, a vase by Robert Locher, and contemporary glass, textiles, and pewter. The Harvard Society was not unique in linking art and craft, but to show an ashtray next to an oil painting in an “art show”—and to give them equal billing in the catalog—was a brave step. From the start, there seemed to be very little that these three founders would not consider, and no end to the efforts they would take. For this opening show they borrowed works from near and far: from Helen Frick and the Carnegie Institute in Walker’s native Pittsburgh; from Duncan Phillips, whose collection Kirstein had gotten to know on visits to Washington; from Samuel Lewisohn, one of Eddie Warburg’s New York relatives; and from local sources like Paul Sachs.

The public was happy with the results of their pains. Twenty-five hundred people visited the rooms above the Coop during those first three weeks. A reviewer in the February 20, 1929, Harvard Crimson thought the new gallery was off to a good start: “The informal opening yesterday of the first exhibit by the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art showed a restraint which should do much to ensure the success of the new project. By avoiding the sort of sensationalism which shrieks like a spoiled child for attention, those in charge have ensured a tolerant attitude from the more conservative of their patrons without jeopardizing the interest of the more advanced.” The Boston papers concurred. They gave extensive space to the show and reproduced some of the paintings—with the largest photos given to the Rockwell Kent.

One of the critics who applauded the American exhibition with the most enthusiasm was Alfred Barr. In the April issue of Arts magazine, Barr treated what Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker were doing as a sort of miracle. After discussing the paucity of recent art in the Boston area—and pointing out that “The Museum of Fine Arts has been no more encouraging to the modern than has her sister museum in New York”—he praised the Harvard students and a number of the individual works on view.

Barr also pointed out that not everyone agreed with such an evaluation. The Boston Evening Transcript’s Albert Franz Cochrane may not have lacerated the entire exhibition, but of the Hopper he wrote, “By what pretense can such buildings have a claim on art, which, theoretically at least, is synonymous with beauty? Why then dignify them by making them the subject of a painted canvas?” What mattered to Barr was that in spite of such controversy “eleven hundred people visited the gallery during its first week.” Here was proof that there was a place in the world for a public exhibition space devoted above all to contemporary art even if it might not be to everyone’s liking and had not yet been put to the test of time.

Cover of the exhibition brochure from “An Exhibition of the School of Paris 1910–1928.” The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, 1929. (Photo Credit 1.16)

Kirstein was disappointed that the opening exhibition had engendered so little controversy. He had hoped for a scandal, to create a “salon des refusés”—anything but the curse of mainstream acceptance in Boston’s conservative newspapers. To get Alfred Barr’s approval was one thing, but to be praised in bastions of tradition like the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe—where the show was applauded—felt like an insult. The effect of the second exhibition, however, was more satisfying. Called “School of Paris 1910–1928,” it drew in hordes—some thirty-five hundred people visited during its March 20-April 12 stint—but the critics responded as if they were engaged in a contest in which the goal was to be as degrading as possible.

The artworks that invoked such wrath in the Boston newspapers violated prevailing American standards of restraint and decency. They were too sensuous, and indulged in an unacceptable emphasis on personal pleasure. Consider the paintings lent by the avant-garde collector Frank Crowninshield, editor in chief of Vanity Fair. Crowninshield had provided a Braque Still Life, nudes by Moise Kisling and Frans Masereel, de Segonzac’s Spring Landscape, and two pieces of sculpture—Despiau’s Diana and Maillol’s Standing Nude. All of these works openly displayed the sort of earthly delights most of their Cambridge visitors either shunned or did not discuss. The Braque still life was probably even more startling than the various nudes. Its dense profusion of ripe quince and pears bulging with life made the simple act of eating fruit almost erotic. The abundance must have seemed like something out of a dream to those accustomed to college dining halls and Harvard’s eating clubs. Looking at the rich, lyrical arrangement of exotic forms, viewers could momentarily bask in far greater luxuriance and ease than was their usual ken.

The painting suggested the lushness that France represented for many Americans at the time. Here was a palpable slice of the Paris that had lured A. J. Liebling, Henry Miller, Waverley Root, and others. For those used to Puritan leanness or the well-organized fruit bowls of American Primitive painting, this small canvas offered life on top of more life: pears at implausible angles, a floating goblet set in a sea of fabric patterns and furniture scrollwork. Stabilizing the composition was a thick green bottle of ruby red wine. Still full enough to suggest plenty, but with at least a glassful of wine gone, that bottle wasn’t merely an object, but implied present delights. Those who weren’t too intimidated to be put off by the new hazy vocabulary of this painting must have had difficulty looking at it and then returning to the dormitory or libraries. One would have longed for the shabbiest Parisian garret instead.

Even more foreign to the Cambridge viewers was de Chirico’s Twin Steeds, lent by Frederick Clay Bartlett of Chicago. For a population whose idea of horses was of well-groomed creatures kept in neat, English-style wooden barns, here was a plumed white horse in front of the Ionic columns of a Greek portico, with broken temple fragments in the foreground and a rushing sea behind. Both horses’ manes blew in the wind so that they resembled flames. To look at such a painting was to be forced to imagine and interpret, either to accept confusion or to consider the incomprehensible and unexpected. That stretch of the mind, of course, was just what Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker were hoping for.

The new art was not just different in style and subject matter. What distinguished it above all was its candor. That candor was about materials, about artistic technique, and about the human psyche. Crowninshield’s Despiau bronze sculpture Diana was reproduced in Town & Country magazine in March 1929, precisely when it was being shown in the exhibition being held in Rooms 207 and 208 of the Harvard Cooperative Society Building. There was a brief text under the illustration. The piece was described as “unaffected and straightforward”—odd values for Town & Country, perhaps, but essential to the goals of the three young men at Harvard. The strength of Despiau’s bronze was in its stripping away of artifice and getting to the underpinnings of existence without bothering with the periphery. The sculptor was quoted as referring to the need for “building a wall before decorating it” and as having said, “I do not attempt to do well … I attempt to do what I wish to do.” To give such primacy to personal yearnings rather than outside judgments of quality was a radical and pioneering statement.

These Harvard students knew which private collections and commercial New York galleries to visit to find recent French art. The sources were limited, but offered good pickings. They borrowed major works by, in addition to the artists already cited, Bonnard, Raoul Dufy, Gris, Laurencin, Man Ray, Miró, Modigliani, Pascin, Rouault, Soutine, Vlaminck, and Brancusi. They also arranged an array of objects: Raoul Dufy ceramics and textiles, Lalique ashtrays, leather wallets and cigarette cases bearing the trademarks of Camel and Lucky Strike, a Lenoscier metal vase lent by John Nicholas Brown, and jewelry and silver from Saks. But even though this work was available, its appreciation was not widespread. The Brancusi and Miró elicited reference in the March 28, 1929, Radcliffe Daily to “the so-called ‘Golden Bird,’ an indeterminate brass shape which might have been called anything else just as well” and an “Abstraction Picture” of which the critic said, “You can have the same pleasure from wall paper or children’s blocks.” The March 22 Boston Globe announced that “it is certainly interesting to see what has come out of a movement which was started about 25 years ago in the spirit of a joke by Picasso in Paris,” and proceeded to analyze the joke intended by each work. “Take that picture by Pierre Bonnard entitled ‘Interior with a Boy.’ Now, is that a boy or is it a girl? Perhaps that’s the joke in the picture. Of course it may be an androgynous figure. Who knows?” The standards of the Globe’s critic, A. J. Philpott, were the standards that Kirstein, Walker, and Warburg were up against daily—from their classmates and family members as well as the press. Philpott’s sum total of observations on the Modigliani—“All of Amedeo Modigliani’s women seem to have exceptionally long necks and noses”—was exactly the sort of crack Eddie Warburg’s older brothers would have made less politely.

Constantin Brancusi’s “indeterminate brass shape” or “misshapened vase”—as the Saturday Evening Transcript called it—was a polished bronze that had resulted from a meticulousness and eye for detail beyond the Boston critics’ wildest imaginings. But its language was incomprehensible to the larger audience of 1929. Even worldly Harvard students and knowing professors could scarcely be expected to know what to make of this object. A photograph of Golden Bird in The Hound & Horn suggests how disturbing and alien a sight it must have been. In unprecedented form, the sculpture exerts ferocious intensity. Adding insult to injury, it is shown directly in front of the disarming Miró, the sculpture’s bizarre profile centered against the canvas hanging a few feet behind it. Even to the most sophisticated observers, Miró’s painting yields unclear meaning. Its forms relate to stars and spermatozoa—vaguely playful and organic, certainly joyous and high-spirited, but ambiguous. Seen together, the Miró and the Brancusi compound the assault. The Boston and Harvard audience in 1929 was used to frequent cushioning and softening of the edges, to doilies and service plates. Now forthright and startling forms were being shown to them, and in a way that, rather than mitigate their effect, hammered it in. The Miró has only simple wooden strips around it—the equivalent of no frame at all to eyes accustomed to gilded gesso and linen liners. It hangs from two chains. The Brancusi is on a three-part wooden base made of truncated pyramids with a bold sawtooth effect. The “bird” itself is a compact, utterly minimal, undulating ovoid.

But to those who could grasp it, this monumental and confrontational form was supremely gentle. The piece has a dazzling elegance. It represents the ultimate reductionism, a clear statement of how much can be said by how little. Almost thirty-eight inches high, it swells from a base circumference of three and three-quarter inches to one of twenty-one inches about two-thirds of the way up. Even to viewers sixty years later, accustomed to more radically unconventional modern sculpture, it is amazing that everything else rests on, and seems to grow from, that slim bit of tapered bronze underneath the mass. This is, in inert material, the same miracle as birds’ legs.

The top of the “bird” is almost as slender as its foot, and there the undulating organic form has been incised, and a right-angled chunk removed. This very simple articulation suggests an open mouth. Either it is chirping rapturously or is about to swallow a worm. The image gains strength because we don’t know precisely which of these activities it is. What matters is that the creature is doing something that is emphatically, joyously alive. And while the erect and regal shape does in fact suggest some sort of noble bird, it is of deliberately indeterminate species. Details matter less than essences. Golden Bird may refer to an owl or a falcon, but is simple and free-flowing.

Brancusi had photographed this same Golden Bird in his Paris studio. In his picture, the piece shines like a beacon or a miniature sun; the photographic light, reflected head-on in the broadest part of the torso, bounces the beams back almost blindingly. Below that light the piece presents a highly distorted reflection of the room. The mirroring—bright, dark, shadowy—is so intense that the overall form of the sculpture is illegible and becomes secondary to the process of reflection. The result is that Golden Bird has the look of the future or of something mythic. By being so simplified yet so complex, it was the essence of the new art and way of thinking. As such it might either instill terror or exhilarate. Kirstein, Walker, and Warburg were exhilarated.

Left: Diana by Despiau, from Town & Country magazine, 1929. Right: Brancusi, Golden Bird, photograph by Brancusi. (Photo Credit 1.17)

A symbolic viewing of the Golden Bird is in keeping with the artist’s intentions. Brancusi had been nurtured on the magical golden birds of Romanian folklore—kin to the Russian firebird—bright enough to light fires at midnight and able to cure illness or restore sight to the blind. With their glorious songs, they might even resurrect the dead. The golden bird is, physically and spiritually, a giver of light. To assure that effect, Brancusi had polished his bronze first with a series of gradated files, then with emery paper, and finally with buffing powder and jeweler’s rouge—until all traces of his hand disappeared and the sheen took on maximal gloss. This left the bird as weightless and immaterial as it is solid. Rising as if from nothing, the sculpture is not just a guidepost, but a deity. Noble and majestic—yet at the same time able to reflect and hence welcome the surrounding universe—it embodied the healing magic that art might offer.

Lincoln Kirstein does not remember precisely how, as a junior at college, he got the idea of including the Brancusi in the Harvard Society show, but there are a couple of distinct possibilities. For one thing, it had belonged to John Quinn, the New York collector whose auction Kirstein had attended with his mother and who was one of his cultural heroes. Quinn had been a lively patron of both the literature and art of his time: a close friend of the Yeats family, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, André Derain, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Brancusi. He owned work by all of them, ranging from the manuscript for Ulysses to this and other casts of Golden Bird. Quinn had bought the piece directly from Brancusi in 1920, shortly after it had been made. He paid $960. Its buyer after Quinn’s death was the Brummer Gallery, a major supporter of Brancusi in New York at that time, who in turn sold it in January 1927 to the Arts Club of Chicago. It was the Arts Club of Chicago that lent it to the Harvard Society. Since this was the only loan of the work from the time of its acquisition until 1934, the piece obviously was not in heavy demand.

It may have been Kirstein’s interest in Quinn and his holdings that led him to track the work down. Kirstein had also most likely seen the two plates that reproduced the work in Ezra Pound’s essay on Brancusi in the autumn 1921 issue of The Little Review. Kirstein, a great Pound enthusiast, included his work in The Hound & Horn, and probably read whatever he could find.

Ezra Pound’s evaluation of the Golden Bird and of Brancusi’s related work encompasses many of the abiding concerns, both conscious and unconscious, of the founders of the Harvard Society. For Pound this sculpture exemplified many of the key tenets of contemporary art. He saw it as demonstrating that “Every concept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid consciousness in some primary form.” “Vivid consciousness”—a waking up—was central to Kirstein’s and Warburg’s search, if perhaps less to Walker’s. They wanted to see reality and grapple with truth. Aesthetic and emotional frankness, whether in the form of diatribes or of humor, became their cause célèbre. Pound pointed out that “works of art attract by a resembling unlikeness.” That break from traditional imitations of reality—and the striving for a new language that might get to the heart of the subject—were among the young men’s imperatives.

Pound wrote that

Brancusi’s revolt against the rhetorical and the colossal has carried him into revolt against the monumental, or at least what appears to be, for the instant, a revolt against one sort of solidity.²⁷

What Brancusi represented for Pound is on some levels what Brancusi represented for the Harvard Society founders; they too wanted to see notions of monumentality overturned. The Golden Bird provided clarification and Tightness that offered an antidote to the hierarchies and morass—both visual and psychological—of the world they knew. For centuries sculpture had been statuary—representational whatever the style, and often allegorical. By proving that form alone could be beautiful to the point of being seductive, Golden Bird redefined the concept.

Ezra Pound also discussed what it meant to be part of Brancusi’s audience:

 … the author of this imperfect exposure is compelled to move about in a world full of junk-shops, a world full of more than idiotic ornamentations, a world where pictures are made for museums, where no man has a front-door that he can bear to look at, let alone one he can contemplate with reasonable pleasure, where the average house is each year made more hideous, and where the sense of form which ought to be as general as the sense of refreshment after a bath, or the pleasure of liquid in time of drouth or any other clear animal pleasure, is the rare possession of an “intellectual” (heaven help us) “aristocracy.”

The young Harvard gentlemen were, whether they liked it or not, members of such an aristocracy—privy to pleasures unavailable to most people. Yet like Pound they deplored that position as part of an elite, and hoped that the forms of beauty to which they were fortunate enough to be receptive would, through their exhibitions and the ensuing reaction, penetrate to the lives of those surrounded by Pound’s “idiotic ornamentations.” Whatever the ambience of their childhoods, they willingly joined this battle against monumentality in both architecture and language. They too deplored rhetoric. Their challenge was to everything traditional. They would reconsider not just aesthetics, but everyday conduct, and issues like the choice of a profession. The Harvard Society shows were only the beginning of their relentless support of unprecedented, and often painfully unpopular, notions of beauty.

IV

At the end of the 1920s, it was normal and predictable for modern art to inspire ire. The Boston journalists represented and reinforced the prevalent disapproval of avant-garde painting and sculpture. To the public at large, art was supposed to represent good breeding, and hence be refined, pretty, and psychologically unthreatening. This wasn’t a class issue. As Lewis Mumford had observed, most everyone believed that paintings and decoration had to conjure European civilization at its apogee, reached centuries earlier. If rich people—like Kirstein’s, Warburg’s, and Walker’s families—surrounded themselves with the original artifacts of previous eras, the majority of Americans could achieve a similar aesthetic with reproductions. The pervasive preference was to see one’s own reflection in Chippendale mirrors, look at paintings of mythological scenes, and dine off plates that provided a link, however tangential, with eighteenth-century French royalty.

Not that modernism hadn’t already made its wicked appearance here and there. Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker were promulgating a taste that—while repugnant to the public at large—had already made slight inroads. In 1905, Alfred Stieglitz had opened the first of his several New York galleries where he showed John Marin, Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and other contemporary painters. Their work represented an unprecedented antihistorical way of looking at things. So did the photography that Stieglitz advanced, with its dependence on current subject matter and technology. Most of the major critics attacked Stieglitz’s efforts, but he had his supporters. Then, in 1913, the gates to modern European painting and sculpture had been further opened to Americans with the “International Exhibition of Modern Art” held at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory in New York. The crowds flocked in to see work by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rousseau, Maillol, Bonnard, Vuillard, Laurencin, Derain, Matisse, Rouault, Picasso, Braque, Delaunay, Léger, Munch, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Lehmbruck, Brancusi, and Duchamp. Two hundred thirty-five paintings were sold; the new vision definitely had its proponents.

But what had drawn in the one hundred thousand visitors to the Armory Show was, above all, the venom of the press. The invective proved irresistible. What the influential painter and critic Kenyon Cox called an “insurrection against all custom and tradition” was something that people wanted to see. Even someone as erudite as the Washington collector and critic Duncan Phillips wrote at the end of 1913, “The cubists are simply ridiculous. Matisse is also poisonous.”²⁸ What most people expected of art was the faithful and precise representation of nature. They demanded evidence of ancient standards for technical competence, and of traditional training. The new art was called insane, immoral, ugly, vulgar, destructive, incompetent, egoistic, violent, foreign, and bolshevistic. The Armory Show was parodied in New York with “The Freak Post-Impressionist” exhibition, in which well-known academic painters made paintings for various categories like “psychopathetic,” “paretic,” “neurotic,” and “nutty.” In Hartford, Connecticut, the Arts and Crafts Club mounted a “fake” Cubist and Futurist show. When the Armory Show went to Chicago, Matisse, Brancusi, and Walter Pach were burned in effigy. Boston scarcely deigned to give it any reaction at all for its third and final showing. The venue of the Armory Show at the Museum of Fine Arts was the only one to lose money; most of the public was too indifferent to bother to attend.

American taste had not altered significantly in the fifteen years between the Armory Show and the opening of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. The show had made its ripples, however. In 1915 the Modern Gallery, backed by the collector Walter Arensberg, opened in New York with an exhibition of Picabia, Picasso, and Braque. The Carnegie Institute began to mount its annual international exhibitions of the type that meant so much to John Walker when he was growing up. By the 1920s there were, periodically, exhibitions of modern art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Commercial galleries for new European painting also began to sprout.

In the two decades preceding the Depression, a few daring collectors—often guided by painters—bought recent European painting. The Americans who patronized modernism while living abroad—Gertrude and Leo Stein, and the Cone sisters—at first had little effect in their native land, but others did. It was to some of these people that Kirstein, Walker, and Warburg were able to turn for loans.

Duncan Phillips was among those who lent work to many of the Harvard Society shows. He had been converted to the new art about ten years after the Armory Show; Phillips had done a complete turnaround on Cézanne and Van Gogh, and had modified his stance on Matisse. In the 1927 edition of his 1914 book, The Enchantment of Art, he revised, or totally changed, many of his original pronouncements. In 1921 Phillips and his wife Marjorie, a painter, had opened for the public two rooms of their large house in Washington near Dupont Circle. At first their collection mainly consisted of art from the same periods represented at the Fogg and the Boston Museum—major pieces by Chardin, Monet, Sisley, Renoir, Daumier, and Cézanne among the Europeans; Ryder, Whistler, Twachtman, and Hassam among the Americans. But by the end of the 1920s they also owned some more avant-garde paintings of the type that interested the Harvard Society, and were able to augment the shows above the Coop with key works like the “androgynous” Bonnard.

Then there was Samuel Lewisohn. In his house on Fifth Avenue in New York, Sam’s father, Adolph, had filled the vast gallery with paintings by Courbet, Degas, Delacroix, Monet, and Renoir. Then, in the early 1920s, Sam and his wife—the former Margaret Seligman—moved in. Sam wanted the paintings to be part of everyday life, not just objects on exhibition. He had his favorite canvases taken upstairs to the dining room, which Margaret decorated in the latest style, with its walls covered in green metallic wallpaper. The family had made its fortune in copper mining, and Sam was able to expand and modernize the collection. At first he was puzzled by more recent art, but in little time he acquired some major Cézannes and Gauguins, Van Gogh’s L’Arlésienne, two Picassos, a large Rousseau, and a major early version of Seurat’s La Grande Jatte. He added the most current work by Braque, Derain, Matisse, Rouault, and Soutine.

It was easy for the Harvard Society founders to get in to see these things. The Lewisohns and Paul Sachs were all part of the same German-Jewish circle. Sachs’s parents and Margaret’s parents had large Victorian summer villas near each other in Elberon—“the Jewish Newport”—on the New Jersey coast. Moreover, Eddie Warburg was related to Margaret Lewisohn in two different ways. Margaret’s aunt (her mother’s sister), Nina Loeb Warburg, was married to Eddie’s uncle, Paul Warburg, and was also the half sister of Eddie’s maternal grandmother. In a world where family links counted considerably, this guaranteed the Harvard threesome not just entrée, but special consideration.

The Lewisohns’ and the Warburgs’ country houses in Westchester were near each other, and Margaret had been fascinated with Eddie when he would come over to play tennis. Unlike his siblings and parents, he was eager to look at paintings done more recently than the Renaissance. The Lewisohns not only had works by the major names of modernism, but also supported such interesting, little-known contemporaries as Maurice Sterne, who was like a court artist to their family. When Eddie Warburg and his friends asked the Lewisohns if they could borrow several Sternes and an O’Keeffe for the first show, and an important Derain portrait for one they put on a few months later, the loans were instantly forthcoming. That sort of small-world camaraderie is to a large degree what made their exhibitions possible.

In spite of what he owned, Sam Lewisohn was hardly an inspiration for Warburg. As a relative, he was an embarrassment—the cousin who makes you cringe when your friends meet him. He might have a few modern paintings, and one room in the latest style, but for the most part he was cut in the nineteenth-century robber baron style. Lewisohn was gruff and demanding, and imperious with the help. He treated gallery owners on Fifty-seventh Street like riffraff. His art hung in rooms darkened by wood paneling and velvets and brocades, and cluttered with baronial furniture. Lewisohn was physically unattractive: overweight and toadlike. Younger members of his family typically pictured him humorlessly having the butler pull off a glass jar in which he had gotten his plump hand stuck while trying to extract a peach. Everyone was much more taken with Margaret, a vivacious beauty with dazzling, huge, pale blue eyes, ever chic in her Valentinas. A brilliant hostess and loyal friend, she was so engaging and socially adept that Henry Luce, Walter Lippmann, and Arturo Toscanini would regularly pour their hearts out to her.

Margaret Lewisohn, c. 1925. (Photo Credit 1.18)

Even if Sam Lewisohn was socially uncouth, as a collector and later as a founding trustee at the Museum of Modern Art, he applied the same deep morality with which he and his father had developed a parole system for prisons. There was a story that on one occasion, after he had loudly lambasted a prominent New York dealer for his current show, Lewisohn insisted on paying a thousand dollars for a canvas that the dealer had in his back room—a work by the then unknown Jack Levine—even though the dealer was only asking seventy-five dollars for it. Lewisohn explained that it was far better than the work on exhibition, which was priced at the higher figure, and that the unknown artist needed the money more than the commercially successful one did. In a roman-à-clef written by Lewisohn’s daughter Joan, the Lewisohn figure is quoted as saying, “There’s more subtle politics and finagling in the art world than there is in Washington. Machiavelli’s heirs in America have taken to the arts.”²⁹ Sam Lewisohn and Maurice Sterne would discuss the nuances of Giorgione’s style for hours. Lewisohn was always trying to develop his eye further. He wrote extensively, with original viewpoints, about the artists he believed in, ranging from Renoir to Rouault and the then recent Mexicans. He probed the issue of an American style. But he was too coarse, and cocksure, for most people to pay close attention. To most of his associates, he made the idea of the art of people like Rouault and Picasso seem all the more the domain of oddballs. When he bought Cézanne’s Uncle Dominique, it seemed fitting to most of his acquaintances that this crazy character would be attracted to such muddy working of the palette knife. The passions of someone like Sam Lewisohn would not easily enter the mainstream.

Frank Crowninshield, on the other hand, scarcely could have been more polished or at ease with people. Of the established supporters of modern art in the generation preceding theirs, he was the one with whom the Harvard Society founders could most easily have a close and friendly dialogue. Occasionally Crowninshield took Lincoln Kirstein’s advice about what to buy; he regularly lent artworks for the shows above the Coop; and, through his collection, he provided ideas for future exhibitions. Like other wealthy people of the era, the Vanity Fair editor dressed in style and surrounded himself with the best of everything, but—unlike many of his cohorts—he believed that “best” meant current, not antiquated. For that reason he greatly admired the pluck of the three students.

Known as Crownie, Francis Welch Crowninshield was part of the circle in which Eddie Warburg’s brothers moved, and a favorite extra man at their New York dinner parties. Because Natica Nast—the daughter of Crowninshield’s publisher, Condé Nast—was married to Eddie’s brother Gerry, the Warburgs were like family to Crowninshield. But it was not only because of the social connections that he could be counted on to be sympathetic to what the Harvard Society was doing. For one thing, painting was in his blood; his father had been president of the Federation of American Painters. Moreover, unlike his father, he was deeply interested in the avant-garde, and eager to advance their cause. He had visited Picasso’s Paris studio as early as 1907. He had been one of the organizers of the Armory Show. In his New York penthouse he had eighteen paintings by Segonzac, five Modiglianis, seven Pascins, thirty-six Despiau sculptures, something by virtually every other School of Paris painter, and large holdings of African art. In Vanity Fair he reproduced, often in first-rate color, paintings by Matisse, Picasso, Gauguin, Rouault, Braque, Modigliani, Rockwell Kent, and George Bellows, and photographs by Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton.

Both at Vanity Fair and in his art collecting, Crowninshield followed the maxim with which he opened the rule book of the Coffee House, a club he had founded with Robert Benchley: “The first rule is that there are no rules.” Fifteen years before the Harvard Society Executive Committee came knocking on his door, Crowninshield had written that one of his new magazine’s main purposes was to wean writers “from their still unyielding ways and make them … a trifle more fluent, fantastic, or even absurd.” Barriers were to be broken: “For women we intend to do something in a new and missionary spirit.… We dare to believe that they are, in their best moments, creatures of some cerebral activity; we even make bold to believe that it is they who are contributing what is most original, stimulating, and highly magnetized to the literature of our day, and we hereby announce ourselves as determined and bigoted feminists.” True to this dictum, in 1917 he had published Gertrude Stein’s Cubist poem “Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled,” and he had lured the copywriter Dorothy Rothschild (later Parker) from Vogue; her first caption for him, annotating six photographs of underwear, was “Brevity is the soul of lingerie, as the Petticoat said to the Chemise.” He empathized with the Harvard students’ wish to support unknown talent; in 1921 he had paid Noël Coward his first dollars for an essay, “Memoirs of Court Favourites,” and he had also helped discover or bring to an American readership Max Beerbohm, André Gide, D. H. Lawrence, e. e. cummings, P. G. Wodehouse, Aldous Huxley, Sherwood Anderson, and Colette. He was one of those people who traveled extensively, knew people who knew people, and always had his receptors open to the latest ideas.

Even when Crowninshield turned people down, he was the quintessential gentleman, with manners of the type the well-brought-up Harvard students greatly admired. Returning a manuscript to Paul Gallico, he wrote, “My dear boy, this is superb! A little masterpiece! What color! What life! How beautifully you have phrased it all! A veritable gem!—Why don’t you take it around to Harper’s Bazaar?”³⁰ But he appears never to have turned down the Harvard Society’s Executive Committee—for loans that today would be unthinkable without an armed guard. Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker had the sort of style and flair Crowninshield always championed.

Coached by Walt Kuhn that modern art was worth looking at and was a good investment, John Quinn had built up remarkable holdings, and by realizing $700,000 the 1926–27 Quinn auctions had demonstrated to a number of people besides collectors like Lewisohn and Crowninshield that this new art had some merits after all. By collecting Augustus John, Jack Yeats, Cézanne, Seurat, Picasso, Rousseau, and the American modernists, Quinn had started a trend. By the late 1920s, America had a small and serious group of collectors of modern art, and however bizarre the larger public may have considered them, many were willing to make their holdings available to the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. At that time, after all, these paintings were not blue-chip commodities; they were still risky statements in need of approval. Others who frequently lent were Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Hoyt Wiborg of New York, John T. Spaulding of Boston, Frederick Clay Bartlett of Chicago, and Chester Dale of Washington. So did Paul Sachs, as well as the most adventurous New York galleries.

Beyond those with whom Kirstein, Walker, and Warburg had established connections, there were other significant collectors interested in advancing public awareness of modernism. Under the tutelage of the artist William Glackens, the Philadelphia inventor Albert Barnes was acquiring work by Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso. In 1925 Dr. Barnes had formed a foundation—albeit one to which access at first was virtually impossible—for his collection. Another organization promoting the cause of modern painting was A. E. Gallatin’s Gallery of Living Art at the Manhattan branch of New York University on the first floor of One Hundred Washington Square East. Gallatin, a descendant of Thomas Jefferson’s secretary of the treasury, was a lawyer by training who had turned himself over to art. Not only did he collect, but he painted, wrote about art, and took excellent studio portrait photographs of contemporary French painters. His Gallery of Living Art was open free of charge at hours that today would boggle any museum director’s imagination: Monday to Friday 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., and Saturdays 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. What it showed was Gallatin’s own collection: a fine Arp relief, important Cubist Braques and still lifes from the 1920s, a Brancusi drawing of Mme. Pogany, two Cézanne watercolors, a Derain portrait of Matisse, and paintings by de Chirico, Juan Gris, Hélion, Klee, Matisse, Soutine, Utrillo, Vlaminck, and—among the Americans—Demuth, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Charles Sheeler. It really was living art. Major Légers exalted the industrial world. Two free-flowing André Massons suggested the unconscious. Miró’s 1926 Dog Baying at the Moon seemed like a beautiful dream awaiting Freudian analysis—with its fiery semicosmic creature, magical moon, and ambiguous ladder set dramatically against a handsome earthy brown and midnight black. There was an abstract Mondrian, and six important Picasso oils along with numerous works on paper covering a range of his phases from 1906 to 1930.

But although Gallatin’s institution was technically for the public and was meant to serve a real role, and although he had marvelous paintings, he lacked the essential ability to communicate their merits to those not so fortunate in their ability to see. He did not reach the general audience with his gallery, in large part because the only way in which he varied the exhibition was by buying another picture. It would take the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art to go beyond one collector’s vision and reveal the scope of the current scene.

Another key proponent of some elements of contemporary art was Katherine Sophie Dreier. She was an autocratic evangelist of modernism who crusaded for the new painting much as she championed women’s suffrage and their labor laws and trade unionism. Born in 1877, Dreier was one of the great cultural pioneers of her generation. Having started out as both a painter and a social reformer—she was an early director of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls and one of the founders of the Little Italy Settlement House—she had then turned her sights primarily to painting. In 1911 she married the painter Edward Trumbull-Smith, although the match was short-lived once it was discovered that he already had a wife and children. By that time she had gotten to know Gertrude and Leo Stein in Paris, and John Singer Sargent in London. Then, in 1913, came the Armory Show, in which one of Dreier’s still lifes was exhibited. Her commitment to modern art was clinched. In 1914 she founded the Cooperative Mural Workshops, and in 1916 she helped create, along with Walter Arensberg, the Society of Independent Artists, an organization that sponsored large annual exhibitions and through which she met Marcel Duchamp, whose Nude Descending a Staircase had caused such a stir at the Armory Show. Duchamp became Dreier’s great friend and adviser, and she began to acquire his work. With Duchamp and Man Ray, she established the Société Anonyme, Inc.: Museum of Modern Art 1920. (Having inadvertently borrowed part of that name, the institution now known as the Museum of Modern Art had to issue her a major apology ten years later.) Dreier was the Société Anonyme’s main voice. She gave its lectures, organized its exhibitions, and acquired its collection. This sent her to the Bauhaus, where she had a particular admiration for Kandinsky. It also led her to establish a major collection of art that included—in addition to Duchamp’s, Man Ray’s, and Kandinsky’s work—key pieces by Franz Marc, Klee, Naum Gabo, Mondrian, Léger, Brancusi, and Miró, and to finance major exhibitions of the new art. The first Société Anonyme show opened in 1921 at the Worcester Art Museum; from then on, the collection traveled a great deal. But it was primarily a single person’s collection, not a program to reveal a full range of new artistic developments.

Katherine Dreier, 1922. (Photo Credit 1.19)

What distinguished the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art from all these other forays into recent art was that it was concerned with the diverse strains of modernism, not just with one individual’s taste, and it had nothing to do with a private collection. Dreier, Phillips, Barnes, and Gallatin were wealthy individuals who had made the acquisition of art virtually their profession. Their wish to share their holdings and awaken the larger public had grown out of their assuming the roles of modern Medicis. Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker, on the other hand, may have come from moneyed families and on occasion bought this or that object, but they were above all college students operating a modern art exhibition program on a shoestring budget. They wanted to present everything that was going on, not to show what they owned or even necessarily what they liked. They would venture into the most avant of the avant-garde; the point was to let the new voices be heard.

V

The network of collectors to whom the Executive Committee had access made it relatively easy for them to schedule one good show after another. Today it would cost a thousand dollars to ship or insure just one of their chosen artworks from New York to Boston and back again—more if a courier required a decent hotel. The paperwork could take days. But in 1929 instead of a detailed loan agreement, facilities report, and insurance certificate there was a handshake over a martini provided by a collector’s bootlegger. The owners of the more pioneering commercial galleries in New York—Valentine, Kraushaar, Downtown, Reinhardt, John Becker, and Weyhe—were equally gracious. They were delighted by what the young founders of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art were doing. Here was an avenue to their future collectors. Besides, these galleries wanted their work shown in any reliable place that would have it. All that was needed was for the students to manage to collect it. The Fogg might arrange shipping via Railway Express; alternatively, Kirstein, Warburg, or Walker would load the paintings or sculptures into the trunk of Warburg’s coupe and motor them northward on the Post Road. The costs were minimal. The total expense for the second show, for example, was $415.24, easy to cover by the intake of subscription fees.

The third Harvard Society exhibition was a bit like the catching of one’s breath between full-speed sprints. Held in early May, this was a solo show of pictures by Maurice Prendergast: competent, graceful, and noncontroversial. Duncan Phillips, the Kraushaar Galleries in New York, and Prendergast’s heirs lent the majority of work. Lillie P. Bliss, one of the New York collectors who a few months later would help incorporate the Museum of Modern Art, also provided a painting. The short essay in the Harvard Society flyer was, for the first time, signed, which meant that it was not by Kirstein; its author, rather, was the distinguished scholar and art historian Walter Pach. Credentials were high and the challenges minimal; the Boston papers once again, as with the society’s opening American show, voiced approval. This was a lot easier for Boston to take than the European exhibition had been.

The following show, however, drew gasps even from the society’s staunchest defenders. Duncan Phillips and Frank Crowninshield had little problem with Modigliani and Brancusi, but never before could even they have imagined the likes of what the Harvard boys were up to now. Called “4D,” it was devoted to the designs of a young man called Richard B. Fuller—known later as R. Buckminster Fuller. “4D” was a reference to the fourth dimension, since Fuller’s designing method was from the inside out. The structure that demonstrated that method was called “the Dymaxion House,” its name a combination of “dynamic” and “maximum.”

On May 17, 1929, the Executive Committee sent out an invitation letter as fearless as it was polite. “This house, built like a tree, with inflatable floors and doors, can be sold for five hundred dollars a ton on a mass production basis.… We would greatly appreciate your telling whomever else you think would be interested, and bringing them here to the rooms.” By the time the show opened on May 20, they had produced their largest flyer to date to tell the details. On bright lemon yellow paper, the text, set in bold sans-serif type and printed in gaudy valentine red, announced:

A cardboard prototype of this marauder-free, selfishness-resistant structure was installed in one of the rooms above the Coop. Its shape was hexagonal—a form indigenous to nature (and for which Fuller offered copious explanations) and found in honeycombs. It was built out and suspended from a mast according to the same principle of tension used in a suspension bridge. Its sides and ceilings were made of two layers of translucent casein, a fibrous material composed of vegetable refuse. This casein came in hollow triangular modules in which the partial vacuum between the layers served as insulation; these modules were held in place by rubber tubing, which, when filled with compressed air, would tighten to make the enclosure airtight and of high tensile strength. The large windows were unbreakable glass, the framework duralumin. The floors were inflatable rubberoid units intended to cushion young children. The doors were made of silver balloon silk—suitable because it was both inflatable and dustproof. To close the door, you pressed a button that inflated it; to open it, you pressed one that deflated it. The beds and divans were also inflatable silk.

All the air for the house came in through the top and was drawn out at the bottom “through imperceptible suction.” A diesel engine was suspended from the top of the mast to assist in this ventilation and also provide heating and lighting; further illumination was achieved by a system of mirrors and the translucency of the casein walls. The literature accompanying the model explained that to enter a full-scale version of this house you would go through an elevator in the mast. Underneath the neatly suspended structure there was room to store a small airplane.

The red-and-yellow brochure gave further explanation:

The 4D house casts away the cubical units of contemporary housing, and learning from the strength of crystals, and principles of dynamics, establishes the hexagon as a simplest and strongest unit.… The attempt here is to raise architecture from the one tune music box of “frozen architecture,” to the infinity of harmony arrived at as in Music today, by conversion from the personal equation to the abstract eternity, via a truthful and standard machine.

For five days, Fuller gave three lectures—morning, noon, and night—promulgating these theories.

Buckminster Fuller with model of his Dymaxion House, photograph in the Boston Globe, May 20, 1929.

The intention of Fuller’s design was to provide the “Best for All,” “with no compromise to vanity.” It wasn’t the first time that members of Kirstein’s, Warburg’s, and Walker’s families had considered the concept of “best for all.” In the 1920 presidential election, Walker’s grandfather, all of whose peers were staunch Republicans, had voted for Eugene Debs, the Socialist. The senior Mr. Walker explained that, since Debs was unjustly serving a jail term, the only way to get him out was to elect him to the White House. This elegant retiree—at age thirty he had given up work to spend more time reading, fishing, and gardening, while living off his stocks and bonds—delighted in shocking his contemporaries. He insisted on eating only two meals a day; having decided that they should be breakfast and lunch, he adapted a routine that consisted of going to bed at seven every evening and rising at three—in part to minimize the time he spent with his wife. The vote for Debs may have been based more on a deliberate wish to be eccentric than on true social commitment, but whatever the motives behind it, it reflected awareness of the unprivileged. The Warburgs and the Kirsteins, immersed as they were in luxury and good living, had certainly brought up their children to be conscious of helping those less fortunate than themselves. So to all three young men, the idea of mass housing was not an alien one.

But Fuller’s ideas went well beyond the acceptable realm of noblesse oblige. They addressed the issue of the greatest good for the greatest number with considerable force. This might not really have suited the senior Walkers, Warburgs, and Kirsteins so well. It did not trouble the young men, however. To make more money than their parents had, or to hoard their inheritances, never seems to have mattered to any of them. They did not skimp on summer travel or in occasionally sprucing up their wardrobes, but neither did they believe in living too high. They saw art and architecture not as the prerogative of the rich, but as something that might potentially benefit larger, and needier, audiences. Such thinking was consistent, to varying degrees, with the social consciousnesses of their parents, but now the benevolence had taken a new form.

To make “no compromise to vanity”—as Bucky Fuller suggested—would be to repudiate every notion of the visual embellishment of life with which the three young men had grown up. Eddie Warburg’s mother, for example, at times devoted herself to the acquisition of clothing, jewelry, and household furnishings as if it were her profession. She and the woman who was both her sister-in-law and half aunt, Nina Warburg, were regulars at Carrier’s. Belonging to large families, they bought gifts for every relative for every occasion—birthdays, wedding anniversaries, anniversaries of first meeting—and amassed a reassuring clutter of little bibelots, inscribed silver tea caddies, and boxes full of commemorative jewelry. Not that Eddie Warburg or John Walker or Lincoln Kirstein chose to live in a Dymaxion House, but even to promote such an idea was an act of rebellion.

Part of what was so shocking was Fuller’s approach to materials. “The standard architectural precept,” he said, is that

the material at hand should control the design; puddingstone houses for Massachusetts, and limestone for Illinois. The machine age says “we can think consciously only in the terms of experience, and every experience involves a material.” Therefore if we think in the best terms of experience, a material will always be found for each requirement of the new composition. This is harnessed—not worshipped materialism—true mind over matter—on the road from the complete, stony, compressive darkness of selfish materialism to the infinity of lightful, abstract, harmonic unselfishness.

One cannot be certain how much the three young men pictured the paneled salons of their childhoods as “worshipped materialism” with “compressive darkness,” but there is no doubt that in the furnishings of their new exhibition rooms as in their very souls they were seeking a “lightful, abstract, harmonic unselfishness.” Visually and psychologically, they craved change. Fuller’s ideas suggested that instead of being subject to the dictates of our natural surroundings, we can take control, find what suits us, and call attention to our genuine needs. This attempt both to take charge and to consider everything—as opposed to automatic acquiescence to a preexisting situation, physical or emotional—mattered greatly to the three young men.

Surprisingly, the press was lenient on the subject of Fuller and the Dymaxion House. Commentators stressed first of all—as if it gave the project legitimacy—that Fuller’s family had gone to Harvard for generations. Few writers could resist the sheer novelty of his undertaking. The May 20, 1929, Boston Globe summed up its lengthy account of these extraordinary developments at the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art with the observation:

All this and much more sounds freakish. Yet Mr. Fuller is no crank. He is an accomplished engineer. He has served in the Navy and is sane enough to have been entrusted by Uncle Sam. Henry Ford he considers the greatest living artist and, he says, he has done, in evolving his radical theory on housing, just what Mr. Ford did to the automobile.

Long, detailed reports of what the three undergraduates had wrought at Harvard appeared in all the major Boston and New York papers; the events were even considered newsworthy enough to be picked up by the International Herald published in Paris.

The Dymaxion show also attracted a new audience for the society. One young man who felt its lure was Philip Johnson, a classmate of Kirstein’s, Warburg’s, and Walker’s. Johnson had not even met the members of the Executive Committee; he had started Harvard three years ahead of them, and had only recently returned to join their class after a nervous breakdown that had caused him to take a considerable period of time off. His major was philosophy, his minor Greek; he never studied art history or got near the Fogg. But he had quite a bit in common with the committee members. Johnson had also been brought up surrounded by an abundance of traditional art. In the family’s large, four-story late-nineteenth-century Gothic house on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio, Johnson’s mother used to show him and his sisters lantern slides of Italian paintings, especially by the Sienese. He too had made a pivotal visit to Chartres with his mother, in 1919 when he was thirteen (Kirstein had been twelve when his mother took him there), an event that he much later called one of the three great architectural experiences of his lifetime, along with trips to the Parthenon and the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto. In his room at Harvard, Johnson had hung reproductions of work by Simone Martini and Piero della Francesca. But although his sister, a Wellesley student, had recently introduced him to Alfred Barr, Johnson had not encountered the Harvard Society fellows; he simply stopped in to see the Dymaxion exhibition because it was there, and it was new and exciting.

Johnson had a vested interest in Fuller’s use of new materials akin to aluminum. Homer Johnson, Philip’s father, was a lawyer who had done the patent work for the process to make that new substance, and had taken his legal fees in the form of stock in the company that was to become Alcoa. In 1926, Homer had turned those stock shares over to Philip, so that his son could have them before they became encumbered with estate taxes. But whether or not it was financial concern that drew Philip Johnson in to Fuller’s exhibition, it made “an indelible impression” on him. “That Dymaxion House, I disliked it very much, but that made no difference. You see the point is … that [from it] I learned vast amounts of the potentialities of architecture that I never forgot—from that show, not the many shows that we gave Bucky later, but from that show.” (The reference to “that we gave Bucky later” refers to Johnson’s years at the Museum of Modern Art.) He may have heartily challenged the specifics of Fuller’s design, but equally strongly he admired its startling willingness to try the unprecedented, to kick aside tradition and habit. He relished the use of new materials and was fascinated by the methods of construction. He also loved the side of Buckminster Fuller that would refer to “marauders” rather than mere robbers or thieves. “You see what people never realized about Bucky, he was a poet with an Emersonian, Thoreauvian grasp of the English language. He was a word man, and a delicious one. That poetic presence is what left the biggest impression on me.”³¹ To impress other young minds—especially of those people who might change the look of America—was what Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker had been hoping to do.

Philip Johnson, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, c. 1932. (Photo Credit 1.22)

VI

The Dymaxion House was followed by a traveling show of books and illustrations from modern German presses that had been at the Grolier Society in New York. After that came art by Harvard graduates, a diplomatic gesture scheduled to coincide with commencement. Then came summer holidays.

As usual, Kirstein and Warburg went abroad. For years Kirstein had spent those holiday junkets mostly in London. In the summer of 1929, this meant that he could regularly attend performances of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. On several occasions, his companion in the audience was Agnes Mongan.

Mongan was spending the summer abroad with her younger sister Elizabeth, also an art historian. Kirstein liked to pass lots of time idling in bookstores and studying shop windows, and during one of his midday browsings, he had encountered her. Neither had realized that the other was in London at that moment. They saw a fair bit of each other at Harvard, but were not close companions; their main link was the friendship with Eddie Warburg. But even if he did not know Sachs’s assistant well, Kirstein was delighted to see her; here was someone he might initiate into the thrills of Diaghilev. When he asked her to go to the Ballets Russes with him, she made it clear that she had no idea what this was all about. But she liked the idea of anything new, especially when it was an art form that excited a friend. Besides, as a Degas enthusiast, she always enjoyed the ballet. And so they made the date to go to Covent Garden together.

Kirstein would describe the performance he and Mongan attended in Flesh is Heir, a novel he published in 1932. Roger Baum is the Kirstein-like character; Christine Forrester is partially based on Agnes Mongan. When Roger is trying to explain to Christine the idea of this ballet, she asks if Diaghilev is nice. “Nice. I don’t know him. I wish I did. Some people call him the wickedest man in Europe.”³²

In the reader’s imagination, “wicked” is uttered with more delight than opprobrium. What mattered to Kirstein was Diaghilev’s intensity, and the excitement he could provide; anything was better than being humdrum and ordinary, or repressed. Roger Baum tells Christine Forrester about the dancer Nijinsky having “lost his mind.”³³ To be mad or evil is complicated, but also thrilling—a way of being more alive. Vitality is what Kirstein and Mongan, like Eddie Warburg, were seeking wherever they could find it. For Kirstein it was in the leaps of the Russian dancers. For Mongan it was in the quick, impromptu sketches of Renaissance masters. For Warburg it was in the energy of Kirstein and, that same summer, in a painting by Picasso. Kirstein’s Diaghilev brought a Byzantine, almost hysterical, style to a culture that generally prized tamer modes. Mongan’s beloved drawings belonged to the phase of artists’ work before they imposed the usual guidelines for balance and order. Warburg’s Picasso would, according to the standards by which he was raised, be crude and bumbling. But it was not customary good taste, or rationality, to which these people gravitated. They longed for extremes of feelings: the high moments, sometimes rough, sometimes refined, always ultimate. What counted was to do the unprecedented beautifully.

What captivates Kirstein’s Roger Baum is what would move Kirstein in ballet forever after:

Their thrilling dances then gave me a sharp pang of yearning to get a closer view of things immeasurable and unattainable, such as no poem of Heine’s, no prose of Poe’s, no fever dream has ever given me, and, since, I have had the same sensation, at once subconscious and acute, which I attribute to the silent and nebulous precision of all they do.³⁴

Roger adores the veritable violence of the motion. He is captivated by the hops and leaps and twirls, the sequence of kicks and thrusting limbs. The dancers are described as “fierce and passionate,” with “a Mongolian savagery.” They revolve and sway and stamp, in “a maelstrom.”³⁵

The highlights of the performances that Kirstein and Mongan saw together that season at Covent Garden were ballets choreographed by twenty-five-year-old George Balanchine—Balanchivadze, before Diaghilev rechristened him. One of these ballets was Apollon Musagéte. The music was Igor Stravinsky’s, the sets André Bauchant’s. Coco Chanel, a friend of Diaghilev’s, had designed the tunics that were much shorter in the back than the front. Serge Lifar danced the part of Apollo. The vibrant sounds and sights were different from anything that had ever been heard or seen before.

Then there was The Prodigal Son, a new production that season. Here the music was Serge Prokofiev’s, the costumes and sets by Georges Rouault. Better than any contemporary newspaper account of Balanchine’s choreography is the description in Flesh is Heir: “The gestures flowed smoothly and richly into one another like honey into a jar.”³⁶ Again Serge Lifar danced the leading role, with what The Times (of London) called “a Blake-like intensity of gesture and expression,”³⁷ hence conjuring one of Kirstein’s favorite artists. For Kirstein, whose artistic heroes were Blake and El Greco, the electric force was irresistible. Balanchine’s ballets for Diaghilev transformed everyday reality.

Surprising as they were, the movements, sets, costumes, and music were all grounded in tradition. Balanchine’s choreography was strikingly original, yet based on classical steps and movements; viewing a rehearsal of the production, Diaghilev had been heard to say to André Derain that Balanchine’s work was “magnificent. It is pure classicism.”³⁸ Real skill and a craftsperson’s sense of discipline were at the core. Everyone knew what he or she was doing, and knew it well. These ballets expanded the boundaries of experience, but there were still boundaries. The radical newness was accompanied by a keen sense of judgment in the interest of achieving grace and beauty.

To be the audience at such an event—and later to be its patron—was to feel empowered. Roger Baum is almost as excited by the other spectators at Covent Garden as by what he sees on the stage. They are like a society of cognoscenti, an exclusive community that shares inroads of knowledge. The narrative in Flesh is Heir expounds on their fever pitch: “Sometimes there was a pause in the music and the dancers paused, but the audience never rested for a second, for the gaps in the action were as rich in texture, in feeling as the highest leaps or most sinuous glides.”³⁹ Even the moments of repose have a charge to them.

As for Agnes Mongan—or Kirstein’s Christine Forrester—she watches the ballet “like a very happy child.” To have such childlike intensity and pleasure was a great achievement: the sort of pure, uncluttered, immediate response that new art forms might provide.

Roger Baum notes that ballet brings together various art forms at once. Diaghilev presents what is most exciting in painting and music as well as in dance. Moreover, he can survive, in fact flourish, on a shoestring budget. The views that Kirstein put in the mouth of his fictional hero were prescient of what would motivate him, and Eddie Warburg, for years to come.

With his admiration for undulating, keyed-up form, Lincoln Kirstein had decided to make El Greco the subject of his senior dissertation. In preparation, he spent August of 1929 retracing the painter’s steps from Venice to Rome. In Venice, he again ran into Agnes Mongan. Having written about El Greco in her course with Georgiana King, she was now considering the training which the Greek had received from Tintoretto in Venice. In particular she was looking for the source of El Greco’s way of rendering his subjects’ eyes so that they seemed to “look beyond this world to another.”⁴⁰ She believed that the answer was to be found in the painter’s early training. El Greco had also worked in the shops of Cretan icon painters; Mongan felt that this was where he had acquired the Byzantine line that led to the elongation of his figures. This was a point on which she and Kirstein differed. Kirstein felt that myopia or astigmatism was the reason for the shape of El Greco’s figures. They hoped to resolve this matter by seeing the art at which El Greco had looked in church. So on one blazing hot day, Mongan and her sister Betty and Kirstein went together to the Church of San Giorgio dei Greci, where they assumed their subject to have worshiped.

Approaching San Giorgio, the three art enthusiasts had a surprise. A basso was chanting a service of mourning. Moored on the usually tranquil Rio dei Greci in front of the church was a black gondola with gilded winged angels and a large black catafalque—the sort of structure used for the public exhibition of bodily remains. A red cross was atop the catafalque. There were other gondolas as well—some full of flowers—all part of a funeral cortege that had just made its way “over a green carpet of boughs, twigs, and leaves” strewn there by a violent thunderstorm the night before.⁴¹ The gondoliers were all dressed in black with red sashes. Inside the church the Mongan sisters and Kirstein saw men clad in elaborate uniforms and cocked hats, all black trimmed with gold braid. The mourners included three extremely stylish women dressed entirely in white. In front of the dazzling apse, thick with icons and gold-and-red mosaics, there was a coffin surrounded by an enormous mass of flowers. The Mongans and Kirstein assumed this to be the funeral of a Venetian prince. Agnes Mongan’s touch of Boston propriety won out over Kirstein’s curiosity, and she persuaded him to leave. Part of her role for her rebellious friends was that she might counsel them not to do things like crash a funeral.

The following day, August 24, the threesome decided to take a train to Padua, where they would hire a car and driver and go in search of a lost Veronese fresco. Kirstein bought the Paris Herald for the trip. Reading it on the train, he suddenly screamed. The paper announced that Serge Diaghilev had died in Venice on the nineteenth. Only ten days earlier, Diaghilev had arrived at the Grand Hotel des Bains de Mer on the Lido. One of his favorite places to rest, it was the same hotel where, in the ballroom seventeen years earlier, Stravinsky had played to him the beginning of The Rite of Spring. There Diaghilev had taken ill. The doctors had at first thought he was suffering from rheumatism. Serge Lifar, who shared his room, had taken care of him. Diaghilev had summoned his friend and backer Misia Sert, and she and Coco Chanel, who had been cruising on the Duke of Westminster’s yacht, had constantly been at the ballet impresario’s bedside. What no one realized, until it was too late, was that he was afflicted by irreversible blood poisoning. The funeral into which Kirstein and the Mongans had stumbled on August 23 in the Greek church had been Serge Diaghilev’s.

The three women in white had been Misia Sert, the Baroness Catherine d’Erlanger, and Coco Chanel. When Sert and Chanel had visited Diaghilev and his fever had been 105, he had exclaimed deliriously, “Oh, comme je suis heureux! How well white suits you, Misia, who must always wear it!⁴² … Promise that you will always wear white.”⁴³ Diaghilev had repeatedly told his secretary Boris Kochno that Chanel and Sert were “so young” and “so white”⁴⁴ when they visited; the mandate for their attire at the burial was clear. Accounts differ as to whether it was Chanel or Sert who paid for those final rites, but what is certain is that the Ballets Russes was heavily in debt at the time, that one of those two women in white footed the bill, and that the remaining member of the trio—the Baroness d’Erlanger—had organized the ceremony Not that any of this background was known to Kirstein or the Mongans—or to the writer of the account in the Paris Herald. All they knew was that they had rarely seen an event of such magic. Nor could they have imagined a ceremony so different from their usual ken. Funerals in Boston looked nothing like this.

Diaghilev’s funeral cortege in Venice, 1929. (Photo Credit 1.23)

After they got off the train in Padua, Kirstein and the Mongans hired a car and driver to take them back along the Brenta in the direction of Venice. They were lucky in their choice of driver. He knew that the undiscovered Veronese was in the very last Palladian house along the river before they would reach Venice itself—the Villa Foscari, known as “La Malcontenta.” This time Agnes Mongan had no qualms about whether they had the right to be there. She was willing to hazard the stop at the villa because she was carrying the document she called her “Dago Dazzler.” Bearing the gold stamp of Harvard, this official piece of paper identified its bearer as a worthy and accredited scholar of art history who should be permitted to see any and all artworks, whether they were sequestered in private houses or locked in minor chapels. She presented the document to the doorman at the Malcontenta. He, in turn, disappeared to give it to the owner of the villa, Alberto Landsberg, who was upstairs. Landsberg descended and invited the young Harvard woman and her companions to enter. He obligingly led them into a large, barrel-vaulted hall with whitewashed walls. After staring for a few moments, the Mongans and Kirstein realized that in a few places some of the distemper had been removed, and massive, armored figures were visible. Their host explained that these were the frescoes. In fact they were primarily by Zelotti, Veronese’s master, but Veronese may have worked on them. Landsberg said that his efforts to uncover the paintings were slow and laborious, but that he intended to chip away.

Talking with the three students, Landsberg suddenly became quite tense. He nervously announced that friends were coming to tea. The Mongans and Kirstein began to make their farewells. But before they were out of the great room, they caught sight of the arriving visitors. The men were all in black, the women in either black or white. Kirstein recognized the face of the dancer who had been “the prodigal son” in front of the Rouaults at Covent Garden; here in a villa on the Brenta was Serge Lifar. Following Lifar was the rest of the Ballets Russes troupe, the same people they had seen the day before mourning Diaghilev at San Giorgio dei Greci. The owner of the villa with Zelotti’s frescoes was in fact an old friend of the great master of the Ballets Russes.

Alarmed, Kirstein blurted to Agnes Mongan, “We’ve got to get out of here! We’ve got to get out of here!”⁴⁵ She did not understand why, but this was more than he could cope with, and he was desperate to leave. Without good-byes or thanks, the three of them fled out the back door. It seemed like an ending; Kirstein felt with horror that the ballet which he so adored was dead forever. But the way that fate had drawn together the Russian ballet and the young Americans twice in two days was a beginning.

Serge Lifar. (Photo Credit 1.24)

VII

Eddie Warburg was focused above all on painting that same summer when Kirstein and Mongan were on the trail of the Ballets Russes. Eddie’s vacation routine was to tour museums and visit his uncle Aby, his other two uncles, and additional family members who were living in Hamburg. Aby was an intriguing character. When, as a younger man, he had declared himself ready to terminate a five-year stay in a mental hospital, the doctors in charge decided that to prove himself able to leave he must give a lecture to the other patients and conduct himself appropriately. Having gone to America to attend Felix and Frieda’s wedding in 1895, Aby had been among the first white people to visit the Pueblo Indians; the subject of his lecture was their snake dances and the way in which we employ myth to explain what we don’t understand. Eddie was now in Germany, theoretically to follow in Aby’s footsteps as an art historian. But he lacked the patience for his uncle’s scholarship. Restless after sitting for five hours straight as the great iconographer held forth on “Why the King of England sits in the position of Neptune on the pound note,” Eddie took off for Berlin to do the run of galleries where contemporary art was being shown. One of his favorite haunts was the gallery run by Alfred Flechtheim, which he had initially visited with a letter of introduction from Paul Sachs. It was there during the summer of 1929 that he first laid eyes on a painting that would change his life.

Flechtheim’s gallery was managed by a likable young man—also from Hamburg—named Curt Valentin. In that summer following his junior year at Harvard, Eddie Warburg complained that the current crop of paintings on exhibition was not up to the standards of previous seasons. Valentin consoled the young American by showing him a painting in the gallery for summer storage but not for sale. This was Picasso’s 1905 Circus Period gouache called Garçon Bleu— or Blue Boy. It belonged to the Fürstin Mechtilde Lichnowsky, widow of a former German ambassador to England. She had bought it years earlier from Flechtheim, who had acquired it from the artist some five years after it had been painted. The painting had been in an important Picasso show at the Moderne Galerie in Munich in 1913, after which it had hung in the German embassy in London; for the past fifteen years it had been on loan to the Kronprinzen Palais in Berlin.

Pablo Picasso, Blue Boy, gouache, 1905. (Photo Credit 1.25)

In spite of Warburg’s eager support of modernism at the Harvard Society, until he faced the Picasso the artworks that moved him the most directly and personally had always dated from earlier centuries. His favorite painting in the world, to which he regularly made pilgrimages, was the fifteenth-century Avignon Pietà at the Louvre. Here at last was a twentieth-century painting with a humanity he had previously found only in older art, now in a fresh and familiar language. This straightforward portrait of a juggler seemed alive.

Picasso’s painting has the presence of Roman statuary, but it is uniquely simplified. The content is traditional, the style unaffected and entirely devoid of fuss. The palette consists of nothing more than chalky blue, brown, and tinted beiges. The features of the boy’s face are articulated with a few sketchy brown brushstrokes that on close observation are so spare that it seems impossible that they could be so convincing. The broad gashes of paint for the right armpit and the awkward articulation of the right shoulder seem deliberately uncouth. Everything is in shorthand notation and reduced to essentials; one could not take away a single element. The courage of this intense, jargon-free visual language and the new, unburdened methods riveted Eddie. All masking removed, here was a facing up to fundamentals—and a quiet, eloquent honesty.

Blue Boy was stylistically advanced; it also was disarmingly gentle and serene. Whatever Picasso may have been up to in the conduct of his own life, in his art he could be tender and compassionate. The thick-necked, strong-shouldered young man—he appears in many of Picasso’s Circus Period pictures, including the famous Boy Leading a Horse—is the incarnation of beautiful youth and maleness. He looks almost godlike: not just smooth-skinned and classically formed, but also stolid and confident.

Fancy as the trappings of Edward Warburg’s own childhood had been, what made him swoon was not Gainsborough’s sort of Blue Boy with lace cuffs and velvet waistcoat, not a fancy prince flanked by his polo pony, but an image both universal and humble. Picasso’s subject was from a circus family that could probably scarcely make ends meet. His clothing is rudimentary, the setting entirely blank. What matters here is something greater, and simpler, than the props of life. In theme the painting goes beyond all notion of class, position, or background. In style it extols the value of deliberately clumsy candor; consider the proportions of the left arm and the awkwardness of the ear. At home Warburg might look at Anders Zorn’s portrait of his mother in crinolines galore, but here at Flechtheim’s that sort of puffery had no place.

The measurements of the head, shoulder, and arms correspond almost precisely with those of real young men. Unlike most painted images, this one neither reduces nor enlarges. It is possible to stand up to it as if to a mirror. That honesty of scale makes the image all the more real. At the same time, Picasso’s boy is pensive and intense. He has large eyes and a slightly furrowed brow. A gray wash shadows his eyes. Much as he played the role of ham and joker, like all clowns Eddie Warburg was highly introspective too; his and Kirstein’s seriousness had an echo here.

But the tone has different facets. Thanks to the terra-cotta-colored background, the gouache is not grim. This is the hue of Mediterranean pottery—above all warm and earthy. It belongs to nature and to the sun, to the opposite side of the spectrum from the silks and brocades with which Eddie Warburg had grown up. These colors evoke the solid substance of things rather than their embellishment.

On the right side of the face, in the profile and the indication of the right cheek and the jawline, Blue Boy could almost belong to the nineteenth century. It is a realistic, if idealized, form. But on the left the head is flattened out in an entirely modern way. An oddly proportioned, broad expanse of cheek extends to the left ear. The different handling of the parts of the face is accentuated by the division of the surface; the left side is in a brighter glow than the right. This is a case of “seeing the light.” It looks like a mental awakening. It is as if the psyche has been divided into areas of greater and lesser awareness. For this reason it would be no surprise if Henri Matisse had seen Blue Boy in the six years between when it was painted and when he made the portrait of his son Pierre called The Piano Lesson. Both paintings capture the awkwardness—the ill-at-ease, unresolved side—and the brightness of adolescence.

Picasso’s juggler is mature and steady, but youthfully tense. His left shoulder is as broad and developed as that of a Bronzino warrior. But he grips his hands as if unsure about what to do with them or with his unchanneled energy. The right side of the face and the left side of the torso are perfect, flawless, classical images, thoroughly resolved; the left side of the face and the right side of the torso are contorted, compressed, suggestive of anxiety and questioning, paeans to stress and restlessness, physical and emotional. That juxtaposition of sedate Classicism and restless, twisting Cubism foreshadows aspects of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. The mix also pertained to the young man gazing at this work in Flechtheim’s gallery. Eddie Warburg had fine manners and impeccable bearing; he had been brought up to be a gentleman. At the same time he was not unaware of his own yearnings, discomforts, and anxieties.

Warburg remarked to Curt Valentin that if the Countess Lichnowsky ever needed hard currency, she should let him know. Two days later the negotiating began, and in little time he acquired Blue Boy for seven thousand dollars, an amount that required stretching even though he had recently come into some money on his twenty-first birthday. But when his ship docked on the Hudson at the end of his summer holiday, Warburg declared the Picasso at half its value. He knew that there was no duty on works of art anyway, and he could not confront his father and brothers, who were meeting him, with the extent of his extravagance for a modern picture. The customs officer, however, was stunned at even the reduced figure. Upon inspecting Blue Boy, he could not believe that anyone had paid $3,500 for it. “Sonny,” the officer said to the Harvard student, “I’m going down the dock, and when I come back, you change that figure to $1,000.”⁴⁶ Eddie’s brother Paul, who heard the exchange, explained to the officer that the family found it less expensive to allow the young traveler an occasional bit of reckless spending than to cover the alternative, which was maintenance in a psychiatric hospital.

It was one thing for Sam Lewisohn to own a Picasso, but for twenty-one-year-old Eddie Warburg to acquire one was beyond the realm of acceptable eccentricity. Other Americans had been buying the Spaniard’s work for more than a decade—the Stein family, John Quinn, the Walter Arensbergs, A. E. Gallatin, Albert Barnes, and Lillie Bliss had all acquired several examples—but it still just was not mainstream for the Tiffany’s/Cartier set. From Felix Warburg’s point of view the new purchase could hardly have been less in keeping with the advice he had often given Eddie to savor beauty. When Eddie brought the painting through the foyer of 1109 Fifth Avenue, his mother told him it was completely unsuited for any of the rooms downstairs. Up to the squash court on the fifth floor is where Frieda Warburg sent her child with his souvenir of Berlin. When Eddie returned to Harvard for his senior year, Paul Sachs was delighted to show Blue Boy at the Fogg, but in the family it long remained just another example of why the standard line about Eddie was “Oh my God! What’s he done now?”

The Warburg family: from left to right, Carola, Piggy, Fred, Gerry, Eddie, and Frieda Warburg, c. 1912. (Photo Credit 1.26)

“Oh my God” is what Eddie’s siblings had been saying about him ever since he could crawl. They had always considered him a mama’s boy. A smart aleck with a high-pitched voice, Eddie was known to his brothers as “Peeper”—from Peep Matz, the German word for a diminutive chipping sparrow, to which one of his nurses compared him. He looked like his mother, while the other three boys resembled their father. Frieda was forty-two when she bore him—late for those days—and since he was considerably younger than the others, she kept him at her side when they were running about. In her memoirs, Frieda made no pretenses about her preferences. “He was my favorite child.”⁴⁷ His siblings tended to be rough and tumble, but “Edward was always an exemplary child.”⁴⁸ As a result, Eddie felt like an outsider: “They really felt that I was some kind of disease. They felt I was a fifth columnist probably, as I was much too close to my parents.… I was blue-eyed. They were all black-eyed or brown-eyed depending on who hit who first. I was always trying to smooth out troubled waters when my brothers got into trouble or had done something awful. I had to try and explain it or keep mother from getting angry or involving father in the situation in any way. This was not appreciated. They preferred that most of their escapades were without me. I felt very much out of it.”⁴⁹

Eddie Warburg has often described himself as wanting above all to be one of the gang. Yet he never acted merely eager to please the sort of people with whom he grew up. He reacted to his brothers in the same way that he and Kirstein responded to the majority of their Harvard classmates: with great independence. They may have felt a twinge of envy, but they were deliberately different.

Warburg’s great challenge was to reconcile his simultaneous wishes to be an outsider and an insider. He wanted to fit in, but it took a while to figure out with whom: his brothers and the majority of his classmates, or the modernist elite. By backing the Harvard Society and buying modern paintings, he made his choice. Those moves guaranteed him the usual shocked response of his family and their set; it also garnered loud cheers from a far smaller circle of supporters. That need to affront some people and win the approval of others underlies a great deal of adventurous arts patronage. Rather than acquiesce to the judgments and power of the majority, the patron has chosen to join a smaller group. That need for self-definition can be more of a determining factor than is pure aesthetic response. It is all part of establishing how one fits into the world.

The usual way of fitting in, of course, is to conform to the prevailing tastes—whatever they may be—of one’s time. By the time that Eddie Warburg was helping bring Buckminster Fuller to Harvard and carrying a Picasso gouache off an ocean liner, his siblings had all gone from the grandeur of 1109 Fifth Avenue to the pleasant, decorator-designed, flower-patterned interiors suitable for affluent young people of their era. The modus operandi behind the Warburg children’s early education had been, after all, that they should not make choices. When they were little, the boys’ clothing was always laid out for them, and it never occurred to them to question the choice of suit or change the color of necktie or socks. In the country the groom decided exactly the direction in which to ride, and the vegetable garden and kitchen were things to be looked at from afar, not matters in which one was to have any say. It was assumed that art collecting would be handled in much the same way. This was to be young Edward’s domain, and the expectation was that he too would buy seventeenth-century etchings and Renaissance paintings. His siblings had stuck to the tried and true; presumably he would too.

On the other hand, it was very much a Warburg tradition to do things one wasn’t quite supposed to do. On those special occasions when the children dined with their parents and the pre-meal grace written by Jacob Schiff was recited, each boy would always conspicuously try to blow the floating flower in a perfect circle around his finger bowl. It was the family style to violate the very formality their surroundings appeared to impose. Humor counted in a big way. Once when Felix Warburg was giving a JDC speech in Zurich, a little man had persistently tugged at his sleeve trying to hand him a slip of paper. Felix had thanked him and pocketed the paper, but thought little more of it. Some time later he learned that the man was Albert Einstein, a passionate Zionist. The piece of paper was an autographed summary of the theory of relativity, the only way that Einstein could thank Mr. Warburg for what he was doing on behalf of Jewish refugees in Palestine. When Einstein came to New York, he and Felix grew to know one another quite well, but Felix made no pretense of understanding the scientist’s ideas. “I don’t understand one word of your theory,” he told Einstein. “The nearest I can translate it into terms that make any sense to me is ‘everything is relative except relatives and they are constant.’ ” It was a message he often reiterated to his family.

Felix was an upright philanthropist, but he was also a guiltless dandy and bon vivant who loved both his tiny pony cart and his giant yacht. His family and closest friends called him “Fizzie.” He wore a mask of propriety—when his sons, using their favorite euphemism for Felix’s philandering, would ask, “Are you going out to ride your bicycle, Father?” as he headed out to the flat of one of the Metropolitan Opera singers or other young women with whom he liked to keep company, he invariably grunted as if he had no idea what they were talking about—but he concealed little. And he was no harsher in his judgment of the whims of others than he would want them to be of him. Fizzie wholeheartedly backed Eddie’s involvement at the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. This mattered a lot to Eddie. For both Kirstein and Warburg—although not for John Walker—family backing weighed heavily. They thrived on approval as much as on disapproval. They knew how much their parents cared about what they did or did not do. Eddie counted on his father—who met often with Paul Sachs and Edward Forbes about art matters at Harvard—as his ally. To shock his family may have been part of his self-definition, but he also depended, especially in the case of his father, on emotional backing.

Felix’s involvement was useful on a practical level. The society managed to keep in the black, but that is because when it looked as if there was going to be a deficit, it was Eddie’s—and Felix’s—to pay. It was, however, a family tradition to back up one’s own. This had been the case when Frieda Schiff had undertaken her first major project in her early twenties. Frieda was chairman of the Building Committee of the Young Women’s Hebrew Association in New York, and her task was to raise money for a building at 110th Street and Fifth Avenue. Her father, Jacob, said he would provide twenty-five thousand dollars and not a penny more under the condition that two hundred thousand dollars be given by other people; it was up to Frieda to solicit those gifts. When the deadline came, she was still eighteen thousand dollars short. Knowing how her father stuck to his guns, she trembled. He was not the sort of person to go easy on a bargain. Nor could he let his daughter down. “I had a letter from my father formally addressing me as chairman of the building committee. He had said he had heard that, notwithstanding all my efforts, we were still $18,000 short—and he had persuaded Mrs. Schiff to give $18,000 for the library in memory of her brother, Morris Loeb—and the check was enclosed.”⁵⁰

Lou Kirstein also was firmly behind his son. Lincoln’s father didn’t understand far-out ventures like The Hound & Horn and the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, but he nonetheless backed them. That support was key to Lincoln’s ability to proceed against countless obstacles. As a person of strong impulses who always thought he was right about everything, it meant a lot that although his father did not share his views, he never in any way attempted to stop him either.

Louis Kirstein had, after all, named his son for a great man, and he wanted to see his son live up to that great man’s legacy. What remains unclear is which of two people the original great “Lincoln” was. There are those who say it was Lincoln Filene, the founder of the store Lou ran, but Lincoln Kirstein questions this. Filene’s last name, after all, was bogus; when his father had arrived in America from Eastern Europe, the family name had been Katz, which in the hands of an immigration authority went to Cats and then to Feline misspelled as “Filene.” So his first name seemed of equally dubious origin. In Lincoln Kirstein’s opinion the Lincoln his father had in mind was probably Abraham Lincoln, one of Lou’s great heroes. It was Abraham Lincoln’s passion for principles that he would carry forward as part of the family legacy.

Like Warburg, Lincoln Kirstein had strayed from his parents’ aesthetics while adhering in other ways to their well-defined sense of values. In his tenacity and unique way of looking at things, he resembled his mother. When Rose Kirstein returned from a trip to the Vatican during which, at an audience with the Pope, she had kept a hundred rosaries under her skirt so that they could be sold at Filene’s Basement, fifteen-year-old Lincoln told her he wanted to convert from Judaism to Catholicism; her reply was, “Of course. It’s all theater.”⁵¹ In his rigorous quest for directness and honesty, Lincoln was his father’s son. In February 1925, Louis Kirstein, then vice president of William Filene’s Sons Company, delivered an address before the annual convention of the National Retail Dry Goods Association about truth in advertising. He attacked the hype of inflated publicity claims as vehemently as his son, a few years later, promoted candor in art and language. Lou Kirstein admonished his audience of retailers “First—to make sure as far as humanly possible that our advertising is worthy of belief; second, to convince people of this so that they will read it, believe it and respond to it.” If you substituted the word “art” for “advertising,” this could have been the gospel his son followed.

Louis Kirstein advocated Better Business Commissions as watch-dogs for truthfulness. They would make sure that artificial silk was called rayon, and that “fashioned” hosiery would not be confused with “full fashioned.” Kirstein was adamant about the need for clarity in language. “When we say ‘fast colors’ we are using a loose term. A waist may be fast to boiling, fast to sunlight and fast to laundering, but if a customer buys it and perspires the first time she wears it, and the waist turns color, she doesn’t care a hoot about the other claims and makes up her mind that somebody lied.”⁵² It’s no surprise that a businessman who could come up with an example like that as his audience sat back under the glittering chandeliers of a hotel ballroom would bring up a son who would display Donald Deskey’s ashtrays on a modern steel counter and make everything from a Hopper tenement scene to Brancusi’s ovoid the basis of an art exhibition—all in the interest of honesty. What mattered was to know the truth and speak it plainly.

Of the three young men at the helm of the new organization, only John Walker had separated himself from his family. Not only had he chosen Harvard when his relatives had all gone to Yale or Princeton, but he had taken on the leadership of an art society when the sole organizations with which his father had ever affiliated himself were the exclusive Pittsburgh clubs where he and others of his background could spend afternoons at the card or billiard tables or backgammon board, or on the golf links. The most essential artifact for the senior Mr. Walker was his whiskey and soda, and when he died—largely from drinking too much too rapidly—when young John was seventeen, he left his son “all he had: a Patek Philippe watch … and a silver cocktail shaker.”⁵³ John Walker, Sr., may have liked nice things, but to work hard and try to shift public taste was a step of John Jr.’s own invention. And in one way or another, to invent a new self was what these three men and Agnes Mongan were determined to do.

VIII

When they returned in the fall of 1929 to start their senior year, Kirstein and Warburg put their memories of Diaghilev’s funeral and the Picasso acquisition behind them. The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art arranged a show called “School of New York, 1920–30” which ran from October 18 to November 1. Its goal was to round things out where the society’s inaugural exhibition had left off. The earlier show had brought together a disparate group of relatively established middle-aged American painters and sculptors; here were some younger artists unknown to the broad public. One of them was Stuart Davis, an artist in his mid-thirties who had done more than anyone else to bring Cubism to American painting. What the Harvard Society showed by Davis was no mere fragment; it was his quintessential work of that period, a large and pioneering canvas called Super Table that bore the influence of Picasso and Léger. The oddly flattened forms reflect a radical geometry in their obeisance to the discipline of the Golden Section. The palette of dusty rose and purplish gray that would in time become part of the everyday vocabulary of Art Deco—and, more recently, of post-modernism—was then as new and startling as Lindbergh’s flight. The Davis was one of six works lent by the Downtown Gallery in New York.

Cover of the exhibition brochure from “An Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by the School of New York.” The Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, 1929. (Photo Credit 1.27)

Other painters in “School of New York 1920–30” were Peter Blume, Preston Dickinson, Guy Pène du Bois, William Glackens, Walt Kuhn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, George Luks, Charles Sheeler, Max Weber, and John Walker’s beloved John Kane. For sculpture there were pieces by Gaston Lachaise—increasingly one of Kirstein’s and Warburg’s favorites—the twenty-six-year-old Japanese-American Isamu Noguchi, William Zorach, and the thirty-one-year-old Alexander Calder. Calder was represented by two wire pieces—John D. Rockefeller and Dowager (also called The Debutante’s Mother)—that characterized those dignified types with a bite sure to raise the eyebrows of many a well-brought-up young Harvard man. The show was a potpourri of some of the most advanced art of the day. Kirstein had also asked Arthur Dove and Elie Nadelman to exhibit, but they declined, ostensibly for lack of work.

Most of this art was too untraditional to be shown anywhere else in Boston, in either museums or commercial galleries. Albert Franz Cochrane in the Boston Evening Transcript of October 19 explained why: “The real reason may be that Boston is a bit discriminating as to what it accepts.… In art of the past decade we have tolerated mud and distortion. It is time to prune.” The main point of Cochrane’s long attack—the critics were allowed many more column inches back then than they are today—was that the so-called advanced art wasn’t advanced at all. “When we come to view the sophisticated childishness of mature men and women, we are prompted to say, ‘Take your finger out of your mouth, and act your age!’ ” It was just the sort of nastiness Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker were hoping for.

The stock market crashed at the end of October, but nothing altered the pace of the Harvard Society. Walker’s allowance money remained ample enough so that when he needed to get away from the whirlwind of his friends and his Harvard social life in order to study for exams, he would take a quiet room at the Ritz where he would park his notes on the mantelpiece and pace up and down committing facts to memory. There’s no sign that Kirstein needed to hold back; people still shopped at Filene’s. As for the Warburgs, they suffered far less than most of their ilk thanks to the advice of Felix’s older brother Paul, also a partner at Kuhn, Loeb. Paul had been nicknamed the Cassandra of Wall Street earlier that year because of his strong premonition that the boom was suspicious and that the smartest thing one could do was to convert assets to cash, advice he had implored the rest of the family to follow. Besides, the Harvard Society ran on a small budget, and although the Executive Committee had to kick in a bit extra from time to time, most of the expenses were covered by the various membership categories. In spite of the vicissitudes of the economy, the roster continued to grow.

The show that ran from November 7 through 27, 1929, delved more into the sort of material shown at the Fogg Art Museum than was usual for the society. It was “Derain Matisse Picasso Despiau”—three painters and a sculptor whose work one could see elsewhere. But the paintings shown in the two rooms over the Coop were their most recent, by no means the style for which they were already well known and had gained a degree of approval. Consider the case of Derain. The usual line on Derain was that he was greatest during his brief Fauve period (1906–8), and had never equaled that peak since—the cliché of opinion that prevails to this day. Shocking as the bright Fauve color and splashy forms had seemed when they were first shown, twenty years later they had come to be considered acceptable, even appealing, over one’s mantel, but his later work was viewed as inferior. The Harvard Society saw otherwise. They borrowed half a dozen major Derain oils of the 1920s, in addition to the highly animated 1911 The Bagpiper from the Valentine Gallery. These later canvases affronted the average viewer. A painting like The English Woman, owned by Sam and Margaret Lewisohn, struck most people as strident and gloomy.

In three lucid paragraphs in the exhibition flyer, the Harvard Society—which is to say Kirstein—stated its case. Kirstein unequivocally presented the view that Derain’s real achievement began after Fauvism. “Derain’s first real period can be dated from 1908–1914.” Because of World War I, Derain then did not work at all for four years. “His interest has been since [the end of World War I] in the application of paint in formal relations, in the creation of plastic massing, with hardly any reference to psychological insight or a literary subject.” Kirstein linked Derain’s work to that of the brothers Le Nain and Courbet, and continued:

He is a serious artist more interested in the complex simplicity of his personal problems than in the innovation or in the reorientation of tendencies in painting. He is an academic painter, in the old and good sense, a painter working soberly and strongly with a set of restricting, helpful principles of solidity, economy and precision.

André Derain, The English Woman. Oil on canvas, 42⅝ × 27½′. (Photo Credit 1.28)

It was, then as now, an unfashionable point of view. But it was no surprise that Kirstein would espouse Derain’s relentless search for visual truth and his tireless attempt at the best method for revealing with maximum honesty the appearance of things.

There were eight major oils by Matisse—among them three loans from Valentine—also from the 1920s: that artist’s least popular period. Assuming Kirstein was the author of the text, he may well have been identifying with the painter when he referred to “the almost ferocious directness of his vision.” Kirstein points out that “a freshness of colour surpassing in brilliance even Van Gogh led those used to his perplexing simplicity to call him a wild man, a Fauve.” If the deprecating Boston critics had called Kirstein and Warburg “wild men,” the two students would have been tickled.

Despiau was represented by six recent bronzes, all lent by Frank Crowninshield. The values the Harvard Society flyer ascribed to his work were synonymous with their raison d’être: “Despiau in all his emphasis on essentials, his sensitive handling of surfaces, his sympathies with human personality, and the intensity and profundity of his personal imagination is surely one of the greatest sculptors of our time.”

The sentences on Picasso—who was represented by five major oils, among them the large 1923 Bathers, lent by the New York dealer Paul Rosenberg—also suggest the personal goals of the members of the Executive Committee: “He rehabilitated the commonplace … His energy is colossal.” In addition, Kirstein presciently wrote, “Only the critic of fifty years from now can fully appreciate how profoundly he has altered, controlled, and assimilated European painting of the first quarter of the twentieth century.” Yet the three college students recognized this achievement already.

• • •

The next exhibition was a last-minute affair that had not been planned in time for the society’s printed schedules, and for which there was no catalog. Running between December 6 and 30 of 1929, it consisted of original drawings by “American Cartoonists and Caricaturists.” With Frank Crowninshield as the main lender, a number of these were artists whose illustrations regularly graced the pages of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Among the better known were Peter Arno, Peggy Bacon, Calder, Miguel Covarrubias, Charles Dana Gibson, John Held, Jr., Helen Hokinson, and Rollin Kirby. Their main common denominator was that nothing was sacred—an attitude that suited the Executive Committee perfectly.

What followed was a show that appealed to a very different aspect of their sensibility. It consisted of Japanese and English pottery and weaving. This must have been quite a managerial feat since it included a large number of artists, the best known of whom today is Bernard Leach. The exhibition, which ran from January 10 to 25, 1930, clearly took a lot of forethought, since it was accompanied by an elegant catalog printed on fine Japanese rice paper. The actual event, however, opened with disaster. A number of pieces of Japanese pottery were displayed on the monel-topped table with its ice-cream-shop legs when someone leaned on it and sent everything flying. Many objects broke. The only slight compensation was that the secretary for the society had erroneously overinsured the work, which was for sale, and had valued it at its selling price rather than at the society’s cost.

What came next was another of their unscheduled shows, too late for the calendar or a catalog. The Executive Committee had been so impressed with Alexander Calder’s contributions to the School of New York and Caricature shows that they asked the thirty-two-year-old sculptor back for a solo exhibition. It ran for scarcely more than a week, from January 27 to February 4.

On January 26, Warburg drove to Back Bay station to pick up Calder, who had taken the train from New York. Warburg was one of the few Harvard students with a car, and Kirstein had dispatched him to pick up the sculptor and the seventeen pieces he was supposed to bring along. Calder arrived, however, with only three coils of wire, some pliers, and a small suitcase. Warburg panicked, having no idea where the show was, but Calder told him to have no fear.

Back in Warburg’s room in Holworthy Hall, Calder opened the small flat suitcase. It contained a few pieces of clothing and a stack of wooden boards. He unpacked the boards, took off his shoes and socks, and changed out of his trousers into pajama bottoms. Then he set to work. Using his big toe as an anchor, he looped the wire around, turning and twisting it with his pliers. As Eddie Warburg sat there watching, Calder assembled all seventeen pieces, attaching each to one of the boards, which served as bases.⁵⁴

The subject matter was no more traditional than the sculptural method. Manipulating the wire into a few well-defined curves, Calder crafted The Hostess. Rising from the base on the narrowest high-heeled pumps, she sticks out her rear end, which is formed as if clad in skintight silk. One long-fingered hand hangs forward in a limp handshake; the other holds a lorgnette. The socialite’s profile—nothing more than the end of a piece of wire—consists of the perfect haughty nose and narrow eye, framed by a series of well-trained curls.

Alexander Calder, The Hostess, 1928. Wire construction, 11½ × 4½ × 11⅞″. (Photo Credit 1.29)

Calder knotted together a somewhat more elaborate group of wires to form his Cow. This creature has a quizzical look, floppy ears, and an enormous udder with sofa-spring teats. Directly underneath its hind legs, a truncated coil of wire, shaped like a flattened cone, is her “cow pie.”

While he worked away, Calder studied a large photograph of Felix Warburg on Eddie’s desk. Again the sculptor began to bend and twist. In little time the high-living philanthropist came to life before his son’s eyes. Calder set the head on a wire Star of David base, and then, as a finishing touch, incorporated a test tube to hold Felix’s signature boutonniere, which he crafted out of wire as well.

When Calder was sitting on the toilet in Eddie’s bathroom, he noticed a gas outlet, no longer in use, on the wall. The cork plugging the bulging metal form reminded him of a nipple. When he got off the toilet seat he chalked in a large voluptuous nude of which the gas outlet became the left breast. That bathroom ceiling and walls became famous all over Harvard. It was the first time that many of America’s future leaders saw an actual piece of contemporary art.

The usual notion of art and decoration in 1930 was that they required order and planning. Even if the interior of Eddie Warburg’s parents’ house at 1109 Fifth Avenue and the places where most of his Harvard classmates were brought up didn’t share a common style, they were unified in reflecting forethought and labor. For something to be deemed beautiful, it had to bear the imprint of endless hours of work by well-trained artisans. The molded plaster reliefs that decorated the most ordinary upper-middle-class American suburban houses at that time reflected the schooling and careful measurement that were considered the prerequisites of professionalism. Objects looked as if their makers were one further link in the chain from Vitruvius to Palladio to Sheraton. What was not acceptable was for art to look as if it had sprung from the unconscious. Nor should it be made of materials as rugged as coat hangers. Premeditated was better than spontaneous, imported better than local and convenient. Acceptable beauty in much of America depended on Italian marble, African mahogany (preferably worked in England), and gilded filigree. To construct sculpture with a few spur-of-the-moment twists of ordinary wire was both an act of daring and an act of faith. To be able to enjoy and champion it was nothing less.

The Calder exhibition had more popular appeal than almost anything else the Harvard Society did. Enlarging the respectful debunking that the caricature show had initiated, it had an urbane, good-natured mockery that audiences loved. And to people like Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker, it offered refreshing spontaneity. Here was someone who did not know in advance what he was going to do. Calder did not think it necessary to sketch, plan, or prepare. He did not lean on tradition or other people’s ideas for his means of communication; his unadorned forms belonged to as new a language as Brancusi’s. No one else had drawn with wire in air. Artists did not usually allow the sheer physicality of their work to be so blatant. To make these steps reflected—and this was a big part of the allure for the young Harvard men—extraordinary faith in oneself.

IX

There was little time to publicize the first public performance ever of Calder’s Circus, sponsored by the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art and held at 9 p.m. on January 31, 1930. But a lot of people turned up anyway. One of them was Alfred Barr, for whom it was the first exposure to this artist. Another was the society’s occasional visitor Philip Johnson. Even if he avoided the usual run of museum shows, Johnson felt that this was an event not to be missed. He began to enjoy himself the moment Calder handed out peanuts to the assembled audience before the action began. He loved watching the bearlike artist’s enormous hands become “nimble, delicate, and skillful” as they pulled the strings of the various circus animals. It was “a kinetic experience,” seeing the horse’s and kangaroo’s hind legs flex as they came over the three-inch-high structure that was the circus ring. Calder pulled the strings at just the right speed to edge the acrobats along their wire and to prompt the cyclists and wheeled cages into action. The scale and timing were so splendid that “everybody burst out in laughter and applause.”⁵⁵ By comparison, the Circus as it stands now in its permanent installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is a dead experience. Like Calder’s later mobiles, the Circus was designed with motion—never the same twice—as one of its essential elements.

The Circus looked as if it could have been made with materials from a garbage heap. If the miniature animals that Philip Johnson, Lincoln Kirstein, Eddie Warburg, and John Walker had known in their youths had the glaze of Staffordshire, now the stuff of art was discards of cloth and bent scraps of metal. Each creature looked about as haphazard as it could be while still representing something. Like the Cubists whose work he had studied in Paris, Calder fashioned his images out of the detritus of everyday life. He looked toward the direction of ordinariness, away from the rarefied. What was presumably unimportant could be given new meaning. You could make something out of nothing. Circus visitors—figures a few inches high who had wire limbs and wore striped dresses and floppy hats—were fashioned out of coat hangers and fabric remnants. There were a kangaroo of wood and tin; a stuffed felt elephant whose trunk and tail were constructed from shreds of industrial rubber tubing; a dachshund supported by two small wheels (in fact washers) and made of rigid macaroni-like ribbed rubber. A cyclist was crafted of tin painted bright yellow. Acrobats and dancers, structured of wire, were covered with stuffing and bright festive outfits made of rags. The garbage-fleshed cast of characters also included Monsieur Loyal, the ringmaster; two stretcher-bearers; a spear thrower; exotic dancers; a cowboy; a sword swallower; the bearded lady; a stilt walker; clowns; a weight lifter; animal trainers; and charioteers. Among the animals were a cow and a bull whose head and torso were fashioned of corks, seals who could bounce a miniature beach ball, and a quintessential lion with a large stuffed head. Each creature was the epitome of its type. The busty, pinch-waisted chanteuse with her rhinestone tiara and choker was the showgirl par excellence. The tin-legged acrobats could scarcely have looked nimbler, the angel in a paper gown and with paper wings more the soul of goodness. For Kirstein and Warburg this epitomized a way of generalizing—a creation of recognizable, ordinary types—that would underlie much of the art they would endorse and bring to the larger public.

Alexander Calder working on the Circus, photographed by André Kertesz, 1928. (Photo Credit 1.30)

Cowboy from Calder’s Circus (1926–31). Wire, wood, yarn, leather, cloth, metal, and string, 10½ × 5¾ × 18¾″. (Photo Credit 1.31)

The sense of imperfection and frank revelation of flaws were a big part of the charm of all this. The rough twine that held the high wire in place had been knotted and tied and looped all over, as if it had been patched a hundred times. Bits of rags hung from it. The decoration of the bright yellow and orange lion’s cage on wheels consisted in part of two mermaids whose cork breasts had nipples that were the roughest splotches of paint. Today none of this may seem startling, but to revel in flaws in 1930, especially for boys born with silver spoons in their mouths, was an act of revolution.

Having first made and performed a small-scale circus in Paris in 1926, Calder had packed it into a couple of suitcases and taken it with him to New York, where he elaborated the circus setting and made more animals and performers. By 1929 he was doing occasional private performances of the enlarged Circus. The first was a party with beer and hot dogs in the Fifty-sixth Street showroom of dress designer Elizabeth Hawes, the person who a couple of years earlier had introduced the young sculptor to Joan Miró. The next was in the Lexington Avenue house of designer Mildred Harbeck and her sister. There the guests included Frank Crowninshield, Edward Steichen, and the gallery owner E. Weyhe. Kirstein or Warburg may well have heard of Calder from any of these people.

But the first occasion when one of them actually saw the Circus was when Lincoln Kirstein attended a performance in the apartment at 270 Park Avenue of the wealthy theatrical designer Aline Bernstein. A detailed fictionalized account of that event is given in Thomas Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home Again. It is presented very cynically by Wolfe, who regarded Calder’s work pretty much as F. W. Coburn did: as the plaything of elitist swells.

The novelist calls it “Piggy Logan’s Circus,” a performance that takes place at “The Party at Jack’s.” Frederick Jack is a prosperous Wall Street broker. His worldly and stunning wife, Esther, a devoted patroness of the arts with vast social skills, was closely modeled on Aline Bernstein, with whom Wolfe was in the throes of a passionate love affair—and to whom he dedicated Look Homeward, Angel the same year that Calder presented his Circus in her home. In earlier writing he had named his Aline Bernstein figure Rebecca Feitle-baum; by changing it he evoked more of her and her husband’s characters, since Esther means “star” in Hebrew and “Jack” can signify a knave or maverick.

Wolfe had met Mrs. Bernstein during the summer of 1925, when he was a third-class passenger on the Olympic—the White Star Line’s sister ship to the Titanic—as it made its way from Southampton to New York. A Harvard friend of his had introduced him to two ladies who were traveling first class.⁵⁶ Mrs. Bernstein was one of them; the other was Mina Kirstein. Wolfe was poor and unworldly, Mrs. Bernstein a beautifully dressed woman. Part of the same prosperous German-Jewish circle that included the Warburgs and the Sachses, she was a member of the board of directors of the Neighborhood Playhouse, where her fellow directors and close friends included Eddie Warburg’s relatives Irene and Alice Lewisohn—Sam’s cousins. Mrs. Bernstein moved easily in an echelon of New York life that could make a pivotal difference to the struggling writer; the Neighborhood Playhouse was just in the process of considering Wolfe’s play Welcome to Our City. Wolfe was then twenty-four years old, Mrs. Bernstein forty-three; he six and a half feet tall, she diminutive. In spite of—or because of—some of these differences, they developed a great liaison. So when Sandy Calder presented his Circus in Aline Bernstein’s apartment, with Lincoln Kirstein in attendance, Thomas Wolfe was there too.

On one side of Mrs. Bernstein’s living room sat Calder’s friends. On another sat Mrs. Bernstein’s—by Calder’s account “dressed negligently or in negligees.”⁵⁷ Calder crouched on basketball kneepads as he took the little animals and acrobats along their course. The only comment Mrs. Bernstein made afterward was, “It’s a lot of work.” The only utterance from her sister, who was associated with Bergdorf Goodman, was a question as to where Calder got the box from that store into which he packed some of the Circus figures.

Thomas Wolfe’s lengthy version of that evening pretty much corroborates the chic audience’s point of view that there was nothing so great about what had gone on. Wolfe’s preference was for the fancy ladies mocked by Calder; in his eyes “beautiful women with satiny backs were moving through the room with velvet undulance.” Calder, by comparison, was like a longshoreman. Piggy Logan—Wolfe’s Calder character—is

a thickset, rather burly-looking man of about thirty, with bushy eyebrows of a reddish cast, a round and heavy face smudged ruddily with the shaven grain of his beard, a low, corrugated forehead, and a bald head gleaming with perspiration.…

Mr. Piggy Logan was attired for his performance in a costume that was simple yet extraordinary. He had on a thick blue turtleneck sweater of the kind that was in favor with college heroes thirty years ago. Across the front of it—God knows why—was seen an enormous homemade Y. He wore old white canvas trousers, tennis sneakers, and a pair of battered knee pads such as were formerly used by professional wrestlers. His head was crowned with an ancient football helmet, the straps securely fastened underneath his heavy jowls.

Wolfe describes the performance of the Circus:

It started, as all circuses should, with a grand procession of the performers and the animals in the menagerie. Mr. Logan accomplished this by taking each wire figure in his thick hand and walking it around the ring and then solemnly out again …

Then came an exhibition of bareback riders. Mr. Logan galloped his wire horses into the ring and round and round with movements of his hand. Then he put the riders on top of the wire horses, and, holding them firmly in place, he galloped these around too. Then there was an interlude of clowns, and he made the wire figures tumble about by manipulating them with his hands. After this came a procession of wire elephants. This performance gained particular applause because of the clever way in which Mr. Logan made the figures imitate the swaying, ponderous lurch of elephants …

Wolfe writes of the trapeze performance and the sword-swallowing act as well. Here, however, the impressions are of resounding failure. The little wire figures keep failing to catch one another as they hang from the trapeze. The audience, whom up until this point Wolfe has shown to be restless and often bored, is now even more uncomfortable.

It became painful. People craned their necks and looked embarrassed. But Mr. Logan was not embarrassed. He giggled happily with each new failure and tried again. As for the sword-swallowing, it is even more of a disaster, with Piggy Logan giggling even more nervously as the doll’s rag throat resists the hair pin being thrust into it, and the audience responding with blank faces … in a puzzled, doubting way.… But he persisted—persisted horribly.⁵⁸

The unpredictability was discomfiting to Thomas Wolfe. But Lincoln Kirstein, who was also on Mrs. Bernstein’s side of the guest list, didn’t just like what he saw; by arranging for the Circus to be presented under the auspices of the Harvard Society, he sponsored its first public performance—as opposed to a showing at an invitation-only party in someone’s house.

Today the Mr. and Mrs. Jacks of this world flaunt the Calder mobiles in their bank lobbies and living rooms more proudly than their shares of IBM. The Circus itself is treated as a modern icon: one of the very few objects that never-gets moved and is a constant fixture in one of our major museums. Facing the lobby of the Whitney, it is almost always surrounded by as many viewers as Monet’s Water Lilies at the Museum of Modern Art—more people than generally fill the Rembrandt rooms at the Metropolitan. But in 1930 it was unacceptable to the public at large, and the Boston critics lambasted its presentation at Harvard. Calder signified above all the ability to let go—of ideas about planning, of traditional notions of surface and finish, of the idea that everything had its unvarying position. As ingenuous as child’s play, his performance took the supreme courage to do something without being able to foresee how it would turn out. It risked a new language, as unadorned as Brancusi’s or Picasso’s. Calder dematerialized sculpture, letting the voids, rather than masses of precious material, be the subject. No one else was willing to be as bluntly physical, even clumsy. And if people as astute in many ways as Aline Bernstein and Thomas Wolfe could give so little in return, the palpable glee of a roomful of bright young men and their friends at Harvard and Radcliffe colleges must have given quite a boost.

X

The society published a report of its first year. The document summarized the purpose and content of each exhibition, and presented a meticulous accounting of income and expenditures. Receipts were $7,879.05, and expenditures $7,288.43. The most expensive show had been “Derain Matisse Picasso Despiau” at $724.33; the total cost for the Calder exhibition had been $60.70. The Dymaxion House had been the least pricey of all, at $56.66, with all of the other shows ranging between about $100 and $500. The main expenses were for rent, furnishing, insurance, shipping, printing, and teas.

A small amount of the society’s income was from commissions on sales. The society had netted $567.70 for its share of the sale of paintings by Maurice Prendergast, Martin Mower, and Margarett Sargent and of sculpture by Alexander Calder, and $338.02 for sales of prints and decorative art objects. The rest of the income came from membership fees. By the end of that first year they already had thirty-five people in the “more than $10 annually” sustaining member category. Among them were Eddie Warburg and his parents, who were probably the most “more than $10” of anyone. Other sustaining members were Philip Johnson and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Lillie Bliss—two of the three women in the process of founding the Museum of Modern Art in New York at that time. There were 137 ten-dollar contributing members, and 129 two-dollar Harvard and Radcliffe members.

The society had hired an able part-time secretary who did most of their bookkeeping. Lincoln Kirstein was officially treasurer.⁵⁹ But Eddie Warburg was the member of the Executive Committee with the most business sense, and the accounting statement had been his responsibility. This was a triumph, since in spite of the family’s financial interests, their knowledge of business methods was slight. For example, once when Eddie had gone off to Chicago, his father both signed and countersigned all his American Express Travelers’ Checks. The son, knowing nothing more than his father about the need to have these checks in his own name and to countersign only when cashing them, had tried to use one to pay for his train ticket home. After answering no to the question “Are you Felix Warburg?” he had had to walk, completely penniless, from the train station to the American Express office in search of assistance. At American Express he politely suggested to a clerk that “maybe a telephonic communication might help.” The clerk was not about to start trying to ring up some student’s father in his New York office. But he couldn’t help falling for the deferential tone of voice and earnest look. He agreed to give Eddie enough cash for the ticket, if not a penny more. Eddie got home, even though very hungry. And he began to learn a bit more about how money really changed hands, so much so that by the time he had turned twenty-one at least he could tally the books of the Harvard Society.

The acquisition of Calder’s sculptures—The Hostess, Cow, and Felix Warburg—had been made by Warburg himself. He covered their purchase prices out of his allowance money. This wasn’t easy, however. For even if Jacob Schiff’s estate in 1920 had been valued at about fifty million dollars—about half the amount Warburg’s grandfather had given to charity during his lifetime—that allowance was relatively modest. The family did not believe in indulgence. Another Harvard student—for whom Warburg’s parents were paying tuition, room, board, and pocket money—fared far better. He was the son of the director of the New York YMHA, the organization Jacob Schiff had helped establish and Frieda had done her best to perpetuate. Frieda always saw to it that the other young man got more extra money than her Edward did. The idea was to instill energy, not just a sense of well-being, in her children.

The second year of the Harvard Society opened with safe and daring side by side. “Watercolors by 5”—the second-generation American Impressionists Marion Monks Chase, Charles Hovey Pepper, Carl Gordon Cutler, Charles Hopkinson, and Harley Perkins—accompanied bronzes by Noguchi. Noguchi had for a while been living in Paris as Brancusi’s studio assistant as well as the gramophone operator for Calder’s Circus. There he mainly sculpted biomorphic abstractions out of sheet metal. Then, after having a show that sold nothing, and feeling that he was “too young and inexperienced for abstractions,” he had moved to New York and rented a studio on top of Carnegie Hall. At that point, “There was nothing to do but make heads. It was a matter of eating, and this was the only way I knew of making money.”⁶⁰ He took commissions from friends and friends’ friends, one of whom was Bucky Fuller. Fuller was going to be showing an updated version of the Dymaxion House at Harvard, and by the time he was heading to Cambridge with the model for it in the back of his station wagon, he packed several dozen of Noguchi’s bronze portrait busts in with it, and invited Noguchi to take the passenger seat. It was these boldly simplified and direct portraits of modernist heroes—among them Fuller himself, Martha Graham, and George Gershwin—that occupied the two rooms above the Coop.

Noguchi’s bronzes offered no great shock. They were more intense and streamlined than the portraits people were used to, but at least they resembled their subjects. Their presentation, however, raised eyebrows. Most of the public was appalled. The Harvard Society had installed the busts on pedestals made of lengths of shiny new galvanized furnace pipe. The February 28 Boston Transcript summed up this affront to the usual way of doing things: “One just can’t see the fire for the smoke.”

The showing of the updated model of the Dymaxion House took place on March 12, 13, and 14. This time the model was erected in the courtyard of the Fogg. It included a laundry that could wash and dry clothing within three minutes (unfortunately none of the contemporary accounts explain how this worked), a revolving hanger large enough for thirty overcoats, and a semicircular closet that could hold up to fifty dresses. The “everyone” for whom Fuller intended his structures apparently consisted of people with ample wardrobes.

Time and again the Harvard Society was the first institution ever to deem something worth showing. They assembled artworks that the public had never before seen, either individually or grouped. From today’s perspective the exhibition list doesn’t seem particularly unusual, but at the time it offered one innovation after another. From March 21 to April 12 the society presented “Modern Mexican Art,” an assemblage culled from several New York galleries. The key painters included Jean Chariot, Carlos Merrida, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo, and David Siqueiros. What had been identified as the quintessential values of art in the catalog essays for the “School of Paris” and “Derain Picasso Matisse Despiau” shows were now out of favor. The text about the art from south of the border espoused some entirely new ideas.

At least for Kirstein, who was probably the author of the unsigned flyer, each undertaking was like a rebirth. He and Warburg—Walker was by now even less involved than before—were always looking for the major answers to life. With each event they sponsored, the answers changed. The urgent writing about the Mexican show rings like salvation, even if salvation this month had a very different form than it did last month. The text—based largely on Anita Brenner’s Idols Behind Altars, a book published the previous year—gave politics and social values the supremacy that a season earlier had been awarded to humor, and before that to the purely formal qualities of art.

Art for Art’s sake, and Pure Painting as practiced in Montpar-nasse have no place in Mexico. Drawing and painting became the language adapted for the teaching of all subjects—from geography to hygiene. The expression of a religious and political tradition in art is the living breath of the land, and it tastes of the soil whatever the form that period and locality define … It is not improbable that future historians will find in Mexico City, in the fusion of architecture and painting, illustration and decoration, an actual renaissance, a rebirth of original values, far exceeding in importance the sterile ingenuities of the followers of contemporary Paris.

No one seemed troubled by the contradiction with the previous adulation of the art of contemporary Paris and of the American art that mimicked it.

The Mexican exhibition evoked a range of responses. As usual, The Christian Science Monitor championed the activities on the second floor of 1400 Massachusetts Avenue. Referring to “the courageous Harvard Society for Contemporary Art,” it pronounced that “the freshness of art uncorrupted by foreign influence is welcome.” The Boston Herald took the middle ground. Its stance was mainly that this Mexican foray was an event to reckon with; they covered it extensively, but without judgment. An unsigned editorial pointed to “Modern Mexican Art” as a major political statement, “made by revolutionaries for the revolution’s sake” and revealing Communist ideology. It was certain to prompt “letters to editors denouncing the young gentlemen of the Harvard Contemporary Society for bringing such an exhibition into this country.”⁶¹ But precisely what those editors thought was unclear.

The society’s next exhibition was “Modern German Art.” The German art historian William Valentiner had organized the first contemporary German show at the Anderson Galleries in New York in 1923, and subsequent exhibitions had been arranged by Katherine Dreier for the Société Anonyme by the collector Galka Scheyer, by A. E. Gallatin at the Gallery of Living Art, and by J. B. Neumann in his New York gallery. But the Harvard Society’s show was still a milestone. Because of the strong anti-German attitude that had prevailed ever since the end of World War I, this was the first time in more than fifteen years that an extensive showing of German art of any period at all had been presented in the Boston area. Besides ten major paintings by Paul Klee, there were works by Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Karl Hofer, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Oskar Kokoschka, Georg Kolbe, Otto Mueller, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, as well as the lesser-known Anita Ree, who was represented by a portrait of Eddie Warburg called The Tennis Shirt. The sculpture in the exhibition included another piece from Warburg’s burgeoning collection—Kolbe’s Kneeling Figure, a souvenir of one of his summer sojourns to visit his uncle Aby—as well as a Lehmbruck. Other lenders of this modern German art included a number of new sources for the society—among them Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Jere Abbott, J. B. Neumann, and above all W. R. Valentiner, who had become a close friend and adviser to both Paul and Felix Warburg. But what Valentiner sold to the older generation were Dürers and Rembrandts. The art that Eddie and his friends were borrowing for the rooms over the Coop was the fire of their times.

XI

At the same time that the three college students were showing Brancusi and Bucky Fuller in their two rented rooms over the Harvard Coop, Mrs. Rockefeller and Miss Bliss—along with Mrs. Cornelius Sullivan—were busy making plans for their new museum of modern art to open in the middle of Manhattan. In November of 1929, nine months after the Harvard Society had presented its first show, they opened their doors in rented quarters on the twelfth floor of the Heckscher Building on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. Like the Harvard Society, they opted for a startlingly simple setting, and had the walls covered in light beige monk’s cloth.

At the advice of Paul Sachs, the founding trustees had selected Alfred Barr as the Modern’s director. Barr wanted to open the museum with a show much like the inaugural exhibition his advisee Lincoln Kirstein had organized for the Harvard Society nine months earlier, which Barr himself had reviewed so enthusiastically for Arts. But his trustees insisted on something French, and a bit more time-tested. Their opening exhibition was a more traditional form of recent art than the first shows in the two rooms on “Mass. Ave.” The premiere of the new Museum of Modern Art consisted of paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh. This could be classified as modern, but not contemporary.

It is difficult to assess the precise role that the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art played in the early development of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But in April of 1930 the Modern’s trustees did invite the three undergraduates, along with Philip Johnson, onto its newly formed Advisory Committee. This new committee, consisting of “young people interested in the Museum,”⁶² was intended to propose ideas to the trustees. Starting in July it held monthly meetings on the Tuesday before the trustees’ meeting. The chairman of the Advisory Committee and three of its members periodically met with the regular board, and one member of the board attended Advisory Committee meetings. Agendas for the trustees’ meetings were sent to each member of the Advisory Committee. Kirstein, Warburg, Walker, and Johnson were not the only members of the inaugural crew; Mrs. Charles Payson, John Nicholas Brown (the Harvard Society trustee), James Johnson Sweeney, Mrs. James Murphy, Mrs. Porter Chandler, Mrs. D. Percy Morgan, Mrs. Charles Russell, Howard Sachs (Paul’s cousin), Miss Elizabeth Bliss, Nelson Rockefeller, Miss Ethel Hawes, and George Howe were also on the Advisory Committee. But the four Harvard men were strong and significant voices.

Newspapers of the era made much of the connection of the Harvard Society Executive Committee with the Junior Advisory Committee. The New York Evening Post, on March 3, 1932, summed up that bit of recent history by reporting,

The almost instantaneous success of the Society for Contemporary Art was followed before many months by the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, more pretentious and with more substantial backing than the Harvard Society, but identical with its Cambridge predecessor in its basic aims.

The undergraduate directors of the Harvard organization were elected to the directorate of the New York museum—acknowledgement of how much the latter owed to the germ of that idea born at Harvard.

A few years later the St. Louis Post-Dispatch unequivocally called the Harvard Society “the germ of the Museum of Modern Art” both for the way it had sponsored startling exhibitions and for the overlapping cast of characters of the two institutions.⁶³ The Dispatch pointed out that both Alfred Barr and Jere Abbott, who was the associate director of the Modern, had been Lincoln Kirstein’s advisers at Harvard College and had closely observed the Harvard Society. (It might also have been said that some of Kirstein’s taste was attributable to his tutor’s guidance.) Moreover, by the time this article appeared, Eddie Warburg—identified as “the bad boy of Harvard Yard”—was a regular trustee as well as secretary and treasurer of the Modern’s new film library, and Kirstein had been the instigator of several major exhibitions.

It’s a far reach to say that the Museum of Modern Art was begat entirely by the venture over the Harvard Coop. But there is no doubt that the founders and many of the other principal characters of the Museum of Modern Art were profoundly impressed by what Kirstein, Warburg, and Walker achieved. As sustaining members of the society, Mrs. Rockefeller and Miss Bliss were particularly attuned to what was going on there. In addition, at least two of the Modern’s three founders had attended the society’s opening exhibition.⁶⁴ Barr and Abbott were contributing members of the society; Philip Johnson, who went to work at the Modern shortly after its founding, was in the “sustaining” category.

Town house at 11 West Fifty-third Street, home of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1936. (Photo Credit 1.32)

Installation view of the exhibition “Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Van Gogh,” November 7 through December 7, 1929. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The worlds of the two organizations overlapped constantly. When Felix Warburg took the Olympic home from England in June of 1929, one of the people meeting the liner at the pier in New York was A. Conger Goodyear, who had recently become the first president of the Modern and was at that point planning its opening. Goodyear wanted to be there when the Olympic docked because Paul Sachs was also on board. Goodyear was desperate to ask Sachs to be on the museum’s founding committee. Goodyear and Felix Warburg talked eagerly as they waited for Sachs to finish arguing with customs officials about some of the art he was bringing in; Felix was undoubtedly regaling Goodyear with accounts of young Edward’s carryings-on in the two rooms over the Coop. Within a year, Goodyear would become a trustee of the Harvard Society.