I

A taste for the literary side of painting, a tenacity about modernism, the will to prevail, a soupçon of arrogance: this was what Lincoln Kirstein admired. On July 16, 1933, Kirstein wrote Chick Austin a long letter from Batt’s Hotel on Dover Street in London that began,

Dear Chick, This will be the most important letter I will ever write you as you will see. My pen burns my hand as I write: words will not flow into the ink fast enough. We have a real chance to have an American ballet within 3 yrs. time. When I say ballet—I mean a trained company of young dancers—not Russians—but Americans with Russian stars to start with—a company superior to the dregs of the old Diaghilev Company.… Do you know Georges Balanchine? If not he is a Georgian called Georgei Balanchivadze. He is, personally, enchanting—dark, very slight, a superb dancer and the most ingenious technician in ballet I have ever seen.… He is 28 yrs. old—a product of the Imperial schools. He has split from the Prince de Monaco as he wants to proceed, with new ideas and young dancers instead of going on with the decadence of the Diaghilev troupe, which I assure you, although it possesses many good, if frightfully overworked dancers, is completely worn out inartistic-Commercial.… I proposed the following and they are willing and eager to do it. To have a school of dancing, preferably in Hartford: it is distant from New York—plenty of chance to work in an easy atmosphere. Balanchine is socially adorable—but he hates the atmosphere both of society, as such (Lifar loves it) and the professional Broadway Theatre. For the first he would take 4 white girls and 4 white boys, about sixteen yrs old and 8 of the same, negros. They would be firmly taught in the classical idiom—not only from exercises but he would start company ballets at once so they would actually learn by doing. As time went on he would get younger children from 8 yrs. on. He thinks the negro part of it would be amazingly supple—the combination of suppleness and sense of time superb. Imagine them, masked, for example. They have so much abandon—and disciplined they would be nonpareil.… Now, if you could work it he could use your small theatre: a department of the museum [where] a school of dancing could be started.… It would be necessary to have $6000 to start it. That guarantees them for one year with passage back and forth. I count this sum as dead loss—though it won’t be at all because by February you can have four performances of wholly new Ballets in Hartford. Balanchine is willing to devote all his time to this for 5 yrs. He believes the future of Ballet lies in America as do I. I see a great chance for you to do a hell of a lot here. The expense can be underwritten, say I glibly—but you must realize how much this means—so I have to be arrogant, by Phil Johnson, who is willing, myself, Jim Sobey [sic], Jere, the Lewisohns … and I feel sure there are others.… It will not be easy. It will be hard to get good young dancers willing to stand or fall by the company. No first dancers. No stars. A perfect esprit de corps.… He is an honest man, a serious artist and I’d stake my life on his talent.… He could achieve a miracle, and right under our eyes: I feel this chance is too serious to be denied. It will mean a life work to all of us.… It will not be a losing proposition.… I wish to God you were here: that you could know what I am writing is true. That I am not either over enthusiastic or visionary. Please, Please, Chick if you have any love for anything we do both adore—rack your brains and try to make all this come true.… Please wire me, give me some inkling as to how you will receive this letter. If not I can’t sleep. I won’t be able to hear from you for a week, but I won’t sleep till I do.… We have the future in our hands. For Christ’s sweet sake let us honor it.

Yours devotedly

Lincoln¹

The sixteen-page-long paragraph was filled with accounts of the dancers who might come with Balanchine; of ideas for American ballets with subjects like Moby Dick, Custer’s Last Stand, Pocahontas, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Defense of Richmond; and with more on Balanchine’s independent stand against the decadent remnants of Diaghilev’s original Ballets Russes.

Kirstein and Austin had stayed in touch ever since the Harvard Society days. They periodically encountered one another in the New York galleries like Julien Levy’s and John Becker’s where one could count on seeing the most interesting current art. They also met frequently in the key salons of that era. One of these was in the home of Muriel Draper, who for a number of years had been at the center of the contemporary music world in London. Muriel Draper “knew everyone in New York,” and sat in a sort of throne.² She was married to Paul Draper, a singer and man about town. At one time or other she had been the mistress of Arthur Rubinstein, Paul Robeson, and Bernard Baruch. Her skill as a saloniste came in part from her uncanny ability to link the right people, and to become everyone’s intimate within moments of first meeting. The other great salon was the East Sixty-seventh Street brownstone of Kirk and Constance Askew. Kirk, who had also taken Paul Sachs’s course at Harvard, was a small, alert man with chiseled features who directed the distinguished Fifty-seventh Street gallery Durlacher Brothers, where Austin often shopped for Baroque paintings. Constance was a wealthy New Englander whose serenely beautiful face Virgil Thomson likened to Greta Garbo’s and John Houseman compared to that of a Greek goddess; her ample bosom and coils of silvery-blond hair were the talk of the town. Kirk was in London for about half the year, but when he was in New York, he and Constance always held Sunday afternoon “at homes” in their opulent Victorian drawing room with its tall windows overlooking a fine garden. Throughout the week, they also routinely offered tea at five, cocktails at six, and dinner at seven-thirty. Dinner meant dressing, and there were dinner guests every night except when the Askews were dining out. More people came after dinner, and at around midnight those who had stayed late often headed toward Harlem. All evening long people would talk animatedly, above all about art. The going drink was homemade Prohibition gin—which during cocktails would be shaken with nonalcoholic vermouth, and after dinner would be mixed with soda or ginger ale. Along with the other regulars like Austin, Kirstein, and Thomson, the people there often included Houseman, Aaron Copland, Joseph Losey, Carl Van Vechten, Emily Hahn, Archibald MacLeish, Gilbert Seldes, Henry McBride, e.e. cummings, Agnes de Mille, and assorted young curators and painters. Art dealers like Marie Harriman, Pierre Matisse, and Valentine Dudensing were also in attendance.

Seeing each other in the galleries and at Muriel Draper’s or the Askews’, Kirstein and Austin liked each other’s enthusiasms, but were very different types of people. In many ways Kirstein considered Austin a bit of a lightweight.

Although I must have talked about books with him, I never imagined him reading any.… He did not consider himself an intellectual and had contempt for the rather solemn group of young critic teachers-to-be that awed me. He was already playing quite hard; he made a business, or rather a professional career, of playing—playing at pictures, at theater, at museum administration. This was somewhat disturbing, at least in the serious and dedicated context of the heirs of Ruskin.… I wanted to be a professional poet, painter, novelist and dancer. But professional. Chick did not deign to dignify his dilettantism.… He was anti-intellectual by policy. By intellectual, I suppose one means a person capable of analysis on a comprehensive or consecutive basis. Chick was not notoriously analytical, or rather he judged ideas and objects by enthusiasm rather than in sequence. His antennae vibrated at large, in all directions at once; his nostrils sniffed new smells from afar; he heard advance blasts from distant trumpets minutes sooner than the sentries who were supposed to be permanently alerted.³

In spite of their intellectual differences, that extraordinary receptiveness was ample ground for making Austin the target of Kirstein’s urgent letter.

Kirstein had long felt the sway of anything connected with Diaghilev, and he had often admired George Balanchine onstage. But he had only finally met the dancer—in the kitchen of a house Kirk Askew had rented that summer in London—a few days before he wrote to Austin. His thoughts were all new and unformed. He had, however, picked the right person to pour them out to. In his search for a foothold for Balanchine and the new ballet company, Kirstein was better off with a spirited amateur in a position to help than with a fellow bookworm. Austin wasn’t even halfway through the letter when he brushed everything else off his desk and burst out, “ ‘This is the only thing that’s of any importance. We’ve got to get them, we’ve got to get them.’ ”⁴ In little time he was charging around to his more sympathetic trustees. Within weeks a new School of American Ballet—with George Balanchine as its director—had the promise of a home. The lecture room of the old Morgan Memorial would do perfectly for practice, and in a few months time the small theater in the new Avery building would be ready for performances. This would be a national school of dancing—along the lines of the great Russian imperial academies—reapplied to the American idiom. It was all set.

Fortunately, though, Austin wasn’t the only ally back on American shores to whom Lincoln Kirstein turned that summer. There was one person he did not even bother to name in that list of patrons because he was so much his soulmate that Kirstein knew he could count on him even more than on his own loyal father. Even before he had mentioned his dream to anyone, he had known that he could depend on Eddie Warburg.

That confidence in Warburg’s support had been one of his mainstays in some pivotal early discussions Kirstein had had in Paris before he actually met Balanchine. The seeds of the future undertaking had been planted early that summer in the French capital when Kirstein had told the artist Pavel Tchelitchew of his wish to create an American ballet company. Tchelitchew, who was doing sets and costumes for Balanchine’s Errante, had proposed Balanchine as the choreographer for this hypothetical entity. Following Diaghilev’s death four years earlier, Balanchine had helped found the Ballets de Theatre Monte Carlo. But since then he had been at loose ends. Kirstein thought this possibility of backing him made sense, and went off to see Virgil Thomson about it. Thomson had been graduated from Harvard a few years before Kirstein, and they had come to know each other at the Askews’. Thomson was very direct with him about the need to think first of all about money: “Whose? How much? How certain?” Kirstein’s response was to think, “I had an ally as far as money went.… It was he who made my presence in Paris and my conversations with Thompson and Tchelitchew not entirely irrelevant.”⁵

So when Kirstein wrote to Austin, he also wrote to Eddie Warburg. Warburg was someone whose intellect Kirstein held in no higher esteem than he did Chick Austin’s, but like Austin he was kind and generous, he believed in supporting the arts, and he was a true friend.

Kirstein was desperate. At the same time that Balanchine was entertaining this idea of going to America, he had other offers. There were invitations to become maitre de ballet in Copenhagen, to stage a Stravinsky-André Gide opera at the Paris Opera, and to take on other European projects. Wanting above all to go to the United States, the Russian needed only transportation and living expenses. The question was how to secure them. Kirstein had the impetus, but not the funds.

In little time, however, Austin and Warburg as his support system made everything possible. Austin guaranteed institutional support for the ballet; Warburg wrote to say he’d cover the steamship fare. This meant buying tickets for both Balanchine and his business manager, Vladimir Dimitriev. Dimitriev, who had been in Nijinsky’s class at the Imperial School in St. Petersburg and in 1924 had organized the flight of the Ballet Russe troupe to Western Europe, was considered an essential part of the program. What was required were two round-trip tickets; the Russians didn’t want to be stuck in America if Hartford didn’t work out. By August 12, Kirstein felt free to send Austin a cable from Paris:

DERAIN BERARD TCHELITCHEN [SIC] BALLETS CAN BE PRESENTED HARTFORD BY JANUARY FULL OF NEW PLANS JUILLARD [sic] COPENHAGEN PARIS BIDDING OR [sic] BALANCHINE BUT HE WANTS US ALONE ANNOUNCE NOTHING YET DON’T GET COLD FEET LINCOLN.⁶

The moment Kirstein’s boat docked in New York at the end of that summer, he headed out to White Plains to Warburg’s parents’ country retreat. It was a noticeable change from Kirk Askew’s kitchen and from the theaters and hotel lobbies in which he had been negotiating with Balanchine in London. To Kirstein it was “a tract of land as large as a duchy” in which “the Warburgs held state in considerable grandeur.”⁷ Called “Woodlands”—although Eddie’s uncle Morris Loeb had suggested “Moneysunk”—the estate had started on thirty acres that in little time had grown to six hundred as Felix and Frieda did their best to keep the neighbors from encroaching on their privacy. Woodlands had come into being before Edward was born. Felix and Frieda used to take their children to the nearby Century Country Club on Sunday afternoons, and the older boys were so noisy that the Warburgs had decided to buy some adjacent land for them to run around on without disturbing anybody. Then one Sunday it had rained, so Fizzie realized that he had better build a roof over their heads. The result was an enormous, rambling, multiturreted Tudor-style house with a three-story-high fieldstone tower topped by a crenellated parapet. Eddie had been born in the house, in his parents’ large first-floor bedroom overlooking the woods. There had been some grumbling at White Plains Hospital by those who felt that Frieda had called for the doctor like a page—she had sent a horse and buggy for him—but it was easier for him to make the trip than for her, and she had arranged a nice guest room for him.

Edward Warburg, photographed by George Platt Lynes. (Photo Credit 3.1)

Woodlands.

In addition to the usual spaces a large family with a lot of friends might want for living and entertaining, Woodlands had an indoor swimming pool and a squash court, which, unlike the one in town, was used for squash. A hothouse grew the carnations for Fizzie’s signature boutonnieres. Fizzie had a passion for sweeping vistas, so he periodically cut down pieces of forest to open up splendid views of the surrounding countryside. Felix Warburg always thought big; after Frieda suggested that they rent a couple of cows to provide milk for the children, he bought a herd of Guernseys, hired a herdsman, and named the cows for family members. He also built a rambling half-timbered stable and silo that looked as if they should be behind a vast château in the Barbizon forest. There were more than a dozen horse-drawn carriages available to meet family and guests at the White Plains train station. The boys skied and skated in the winter, and in the summer they played tennis on the grass court with Helen Wills, Alice Marble, and other participants in a nearby tournament who regularly stayed over in the big house. There was never any danger of not having a place to play, since there was a second, all-weather court on the other side of the house. There were also almost seven miles of bridle paths, and a polo field that was generally used for football. There was no saying with whom one might play football; on one occasion the Warburg boys were joined in a game by the entire police escort there to guard British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald when he was inside visiting their parents. Not every visitor was interested in a game, however; when Alfred Knopf brought Thomas Mann to meet Felix, the boys were told to keep as quiet as possible.

It was walking past the stables and tennis courts and polo fields as they headed through the pristine gardens out into the Warburgs’ private woods that Kirstein poured forth the details of his scheme. Eddie was all ears. He had been delighted ever since his old friend had telephoned to say that he was on his way. Kirstein’s calls always meant the prospect of something new and interesting; this time he knew the subject was dance, and he wanted to hear more. Back at Harvard Warburg and Kirstein had spent endless hours questioning how an artist in any medium could make enough money to survive. They had bemoaned the struggle of any serious composer, painter, dancer, or musician who lacked family money and needed to make ends meet. Even then, Kirstein had championed the idea of ballet. As he had pointed out to Agnes Mongan, this was the art form that brought together the greatest range of creative people—composers, costume and set designers, musicians, and dancers—in a single undertaking out of which everyone might receive a cut from the box office.

From Warburg’s point of view, the plan that Kirstein outlined as they wandered through the fields and woods at Woodlands was the dream at last. Here was a way that he might really help those less fortunate than he. His father had told him to have “all the noblesse oblige that station requires.” The style with which he would have it might be very different from Fizzie’s, but at least he would be lending a hand.

It was, after all, a tradition of Eddie’s childhood milieu to back the arts. In 1907, Otto Kahn, one of his father’s and uncle’s partners at Kuhn, Loeb (although no friend of Felix’s), had gone from being a leading shareholder of the Metropolitan Opera to becoming chairman of its board. It was Kahn who lured to New York the general manager of La Scala, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, and with him the new maestro Arturo Toscanini. Kahn was instrumental in getting Enrico Caruso to give his first performances. If Eddie Warburg in 1933 knew little about the ballet itself beyond the concept of its ability to reap the greatest benefits for the largest numbers, he understood the idea that people lucky enough to have money could do a great deal. Moreover, he never could resist an adventure, whatever the risks or possible embarrassments. Walking around Woodlands, Eddie Warburg guaranteed further funds and agreed to head a corporation. With Balanchine as artistic director and maitre de ballet, he would be “director general” of Ballet Productions, Inc., the producing company of the School of American Ballet. It would all be legal and correct. The future New York City Ballet was under way.⁸

It was necessary to raise as much money as possible before Balanchine and Dimitriev actually set sail for Hartford. Beyond the round-trip tickets, Warburg came up with a thousand dollars right away. Kirstein, generally more inclined to tap than to give, contributed two thousand dollars. Philip Johnson gave five hundred. The poet Cary Ross contributed fifty. Jere Abbott was good for two hundred, Kirk Askew and his wife for fifty, A. Everett Austin’s mother for twenty-five. Austin himself gave a hundred. More importantly, Austin knew to whom he could turn in Hartford. His assistant, Paul Cooley, gave five hundred dollars. Pretty much as Kirstein had predicted in his letter, the other five-hundred-dollar donor was Jim Soby.

Under advisement from Connecticut 1st District Congressman Herman P. Kopplemann, Balanchine’s importers applied for a visa for the dancers. Its four guarantors were Lincoln Kirstein, A. Everett Austin, James T. Soby, and E. M. M. Warburg. They provided suitable references: Lee Higginson Trust Company of Boston for Kirstein, Phoenix State Bank and Trust Company of Hartford for Austin, Hartford National Bank & Trust for Soby, and Kuhn, Loeb for Warburg. On September 1, 1933, the four men wrote the American consul general in Paris. They wished not just to have Balanchine and Dimitriev come to the United States, but to bring in three dancers—Roman Jasinsky, Tamara Toumanova, and Madame Toumanoff—as well. The four young supplicants had deposited three thousand dollars in George Balanchine’s account at Lloyd’s Bank “to pay for the passage of the members of his troupe to this country and for their return passage to France.” They “jointly and severally” guaranteed that Balanchine, Dimitriev, Jasinsky, Toumanova, and Toumanoff “shall not become public charges either of the United States or of any State, County or City therein while they remain in the United States.” They promised that if the three thousand dollars was insufficient for the return passage of any of these individuals, they would be responsible for the remainder. Their guarantee would “be operative until the departure of everyone of the above named people from the United States.” The three dancers never made the journey, but for George Balanchine that return passage would never be necessary.

Vladimir Dimitriev and George Balanchine, then twenty-eight years old, sailed from London to New York on the Olympic. When Felix Warburg and Paul Sachs had sailed home on that ship two years and four months earlier, they had been traveling in first-class cabins. But as Eddie Warburg, Lincoln Kirstein, and Chick Austin waited at the dock to meet the two Russians, they had no idea what class their visitors were traveling in—even though Warburg had paid the fare. The three young Harvard graduates desperately scanned the crowd for the slim, dark Balanchine and his gray-haired, monocled business manager. Then Kirstein spotted them in Tourist. But they appeared not to be getting off the ship; as one newspaper reported, “Passenger after passenger came down the gangplank, but no Balanchine and Dimitriev.” Through the din of unloading the greeting party could barely make out Balanchine’s voice saying that they could not disembark. They would have to stay on the boat overnight and go to Ellis Island—“not a very pretty place,” Balanchine later informed the press.

Photograph from the Hartford Times, October 18, 1933. The caption read “Coming to Hartford to Direct Ballet. Georges Balanchine (second from right), famous ballet choreographer, and Vladimir Dimitriev, teacher and manager, were met when the Olympic docked in New York last evening by three members of the corporation which is responsible for bringing the Russians here under the auspices of the Morgan Memorial in Hartford. In the picture are, from left to right, Dimitriev; A. Everett Austin, Jr., director of the museum; Edward M. M. Warburgh [sic] of New York; Balanchine; and Lincoln Kirstein of New York, editor of Hound and Horn.” (Photo Credit 3.3)

Advertisement for the School of American Ballet, Stage, January 1934. (Photo Credit 3.4)

The problem was that the Russians had a six-month visa and a year-long contract; in addition, Balanchine had lost his landing card. Warburg briefly disappeared. “By the magic of a name, Mr. Warburgh”—the journalist covering this may have thought the name magical, but did not know how to spell it—“made his way on board, and settled the difficulties, and soon the two men came down the gangplank, smiling and very happy to be at last in America.”⁹ The date was October 17, 1933.

The two Russians quickly got a taste of the new life. After checking into their rooms on the thirty-fourth floor of the Barbizon Plaza they had dinner in the hotel dining room. Although he spoke only Russian and French himself, Dimitriev complained because the menu was in French; he wanted “everything American, because … there is going to be a great American ballet in Hartford.” Balanchine, who had picked up quite a bit of English since his discussions with Kirstein that summer, kept saying that everything was “swell”: it was “swell” to be in America; Eddie Warburg was “a swell guy.” Over dessert he exclaimed, “Ice cream is good. And ice cream soda!” But ice cream wasn’t all that was needed; the two émigrés were whisked off to the Askews’ in hope of finding some Prohibition vodka. The next evening Kirstein and Warburg took them to Radio City Music Hall. Afterward they took their visitors to the top of the RCA Building so that they could see the skyscrapers at night. Looking at the lacy flamelike tower of the nearby American Radiator Building, Balanchine exclaimed, “Mon Dieu, on a déjà des ruines ici!” (“They already have ruins here!”)

On October 19 Kirstein and Warburg drove Balanchine and Dimitriev to Hartford, where they stayed at the Austins’ house on Scarborough Street. There’s no saying exactly what the Russians thought they would find in America, but the neo-Palladian villa could not have been less typical. Their expectations were hardly the norm either. A day or two after the pair reached Hartford it was Jim Soby’s task to help them find a place to live. Cruising past brick apartment buildings and tree-lined streets of Victorian and neo-Colonial wooden houses, Balanchine saw nothing he liked. Finally he told Soby, “in his mild, gracious way … that what they really wanted was an eighteenth-century apartment. It was rather difficult to explain to him in French that people in Hartford did not build or live in apartments in the eighteenth century.”¹⁰

This was just one of the many difficulties the American Ballet School was having in the insurance city. Another concerned Soby’s role in general. Austin told Soby that Kirstein objected to Soby’s presence at meetings about the school’s plans because he felt that Soby knew too little about dance. Soby couldn’t have agreed more. The only ballet he had ever attended had been the Ballets 1933 in Paris, and he had only gone to that because he wanted to see the sets and costumes by Bérard and Tchelitchew, two young artists who interested him greatly. Austin, however, wouldn’t hear of excluding his greatest aide-de-camp, whatever Soby’s own views were, and said he would bail out if Soby didn’t remain. That settled, the situation exploded when an announcement appeared in the Hartford papers saying that there would be no tuition at the new ballet school at the Atheneum. For one thing, Balanchine was irked by the idea that in a museum that bore the name of Morgan he would earn little more than a pittance. It wasn’t that he expected to take in a lot of money, but he found the attitude denigrating. The idea that the school would be run on a nonprofit basis also raised hackles from the outside. In the Hartford Courant, two sisters who headed a local dancing school publicly attacked Austin for thus enabling a tax-exempt institution to support their competition and thereby help put them out of business. And James Thrall Soby’s cousin, Walter Soby—who for Charlie had been the black sheep of the family because he had become a professional dancing teacher and headed a Hartford institution called Soby’s School of Dancing—added his eager voice to the opposition. Walter, who had the distinction of being national secretary-treasurer of the Dancing Masters of America, Inc., presided over a meeting of some twenty dancing teachers. He pointed out that “free dancing lessons”—which is how the new program was regarded—were “unfair competition and a violation of the DMA program.”¹¹ All local dancing teachers “should have been consulted and called into conference for advice and suggestions.”

Chick Austin responded by publicly guaranteeing that the ballet school would take at most two dozen pupils—most of whom would come from Boston or Philadelphia. There would only be full-time pupils, and hence few Hartford residents would even qualify. He appealed to his dissidents by voicing his hope for “a true American ballet [that] would give an opportunity to American composers and artists … in an attempt to express through this art those native literary and artistic ideals which have never been developed to their fullest extent. The artistic prestige of Hartford,” Chick Austin proclaimed, would be established “not only nationally but internationally.”

The Hartford dancing school contingent wouldn’t calm down, however. Walter Soby called Jim and carried on about “Russian freeloaders.” And the hostility of the fox trot set was not the only problem. The Russians and their backers could not come to grips with the tuition issue. The Hartford Times gave the story.

It is Mr. Austin’s contention, and that of James T. Soby, one of the members of the managing committee, that the school here should have been maintained on a non-commercial basis. The plan was to keep the school as a purely artistic project and to make it an opportunity for the training of a genuine American ballet. This would involve the admission of pupils without tuition and an intensity of training not equalled in any other school. The school was to be practically an endowed institution and to be operated as a non-profit making program.

Despite the fact that all the preliminary plans were in accordance with this idea, Mr. Balanchine and Mr. Dimitriev objected to this proposal after they reached Hartford.¹²

This was not their sole objection, but the local paper could hardly be expected to say that the Russians had found Hartford to be a hostile environment and that they were longing for eighteenth-century housing and better restaurants. In any event, less than a week after it had arrived, the American Ballet School left Hartford.

Hartford did not have sustaining power, but without it, the new ballet would never have progressed beyond the drawing board. Austin and the Atheneum had given the ballet the legitimacy that enabled Warburg to guarantee sufficient funds and that persuaded Balanchine that he was really heading somewhere. It was the Hartford area congressman who cleared the paperwork. But the only place where the new enterprise had a real chance was New York.

Balanchine and Dimitriev might not find an eighteenth-century apartment in Manhattan, but at least they could go to the Russian Tea Room. Not only was Eddie Warburg willing to pick up their tabs there, but he also paid the rent checks for the ballet school’s new premises in Isadora Duncan’s former studio at 637 Madison Avenue. Balanchine had its walls painted the gray-blue that he remembered from the Imperial Academy. Everything was coming together at last. A new corporation was formed, in which lawyers who usually concerned themselves with the problems of Kuhn, Loeb and the legacy of Jacob Schiff now turned their energy to the needs of a fledgling ballet company. Official letterheads were printed for the School of American Ballet, Inc., with Georges (in this case using the s) Balanchine as its artistic director, Edward M. M. Warburg, president, Vladimir Dimitriev, vice president, Lincoln E. Kirstein, secretary-treasurer. Advertisements appeared in the New York Herald Tribune and the New York Times telling future students how to register and explaining that the purpose of the new institution was

to develop a national ballet created by American artists to express an American tradition. The curriculum constitutes a complete education in the art of the dance and has been designed to train a permanent company of American dancers whose productions will be presented by the school.¹³

On December 11, 1933, the School of American Ballet opened its doors.

II

In November of 1932 the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art elected Edward M. M. Warburg, who had recently turned twenty-four, to join their ranks. The only other person that young in the same position was Nelson Rockefeller. Warburg took an office in the museum’s new building, which had just opened on West Fifty-third Street. He paid for his secretary out of his own pocket, and began to give art objects and books to the museum. Rather than take a salary, he made an annual contribution of five thousand dollars. The museum had an operating budget of about sixty-five thousand dollars a year, and Warburg also went after his parents to make regular gifts beyond his own. To achieve this, he wrote them letters of solicitation, even though he was still living at home. With great tact he would acknowledge their distaste for modern art and confess his own expenditures on the museum’s behalf, before appealing to their generosity on the basis that it was above all an educational institution.

The 1932–33 season on Fifty-third Street opened with a show of Persian frescoes organized by Arthur Upham Pope, in large part a result of the trip on which Warburg had accompanied Pope. At the start of 1933 there was an American folk art show that was like an expanded version of the one the Harvard Society had done. But what interested Warburg above all was the need of the museum to reach the larger public. In addition to his pioneering lecture on Matisse, he gave a radio talk about abstract painting on WNYC. Every week he sent long reports to Alfred Barr on his idea for further lectures and for a broadcast series. The speakers would include Lewis Mumford on architecture, George Gershwin or Kay Swift—a composer married to Warburg’s cousin James Warburg—on music, Philip Johnson on arts and crafts, Gilbert Seldes on the movies, John Mason Brown on the theater, and Lincoln Kirstein on the dance. To spread the gospel of the new to the greatest number of people, he proposed a national radio hookup. But that wasn’t all that was on his plate.

Balanchine and students at the School of American Ballet. (Photo Credit 3.5)

On August 31, 1933, Eddie Warburg wrote the following letter Alfred Barr:

Dear Alfred:

I want to tell you about another project that I have been playing with during the last few weeks.

One Mr. Rice came into my office several weeks ago and told me that he had formerly been connected with Rollins College in Florida and that due to a disagreement with Dr. Holt, the president, he and several other professors resigned (9 to be exact) from Rollins College. And some twenty students resigned with them. The argument, it seems, concerned itself with progressive education.…

Rather than wait around for jobs that might be offered from more conservative organizations, they banded together. They found a place in North Carolina that is used by a conference centre in the Summer by the Young Men’s Christian Association, and which, with very little change, could be turned into a college during the Winter months. They decided to rent this place and with a $20,000 guarantee which they have collected, and thirty students, they are opening up this Fall.

The members of the faculty will receive no salary for the first year and are pooling their own personal libraries for the benefit of the students.…

Mr. Rice came in to see me about finding a man to head their Fine Arts Department, and both Phil and I immediately thought of Albers. We have written him a letter to find out whether he and his wife would come over here, and we received a cable to the affirmative.

The problem now is how to get them into this country. Phil, Mr. Rice and I went down to see Mr. Duggan of the International Institute for Education, and he informed us that the Immigration Authorities demand that the invitation for any professor who has taught for a minimum of two years prior to application, must come from an accredited institution. As Black Mountain College (the proposed name for their college) is not yet on the list as an accredited institution, this does not apply to them. However, Mr. Duggan felt that if it were possible to guarantee a salary of $1500. to Albers, and his wife as well, that Col. McCormick, the head of the Immigration Bureau, would be perfectly willing to let him in. And we are now trying to figure out where we can get $3,000.…

Unfortunately, Albers’s not being a Jew, my usual contacts are fairly useless as my friends are only interested in helping Jewish scholars. The Christian people who might be interested, have given towards foundations and the foundations are usually a bit scarey of new organizations.

I would like to know from you whether you think it would be diplomatic and right for me to place this whole matter before Mrs. Rockefeller.

I cannot help but feel that getting Albers into this country would be a great feather in the cap of the Museum of Modern Art.…

With Albers over here we have the nucleus for an American Bauhaus!

What do you think of the whole scheme?

As ever,

Eddie¹⁴

“Phil” was Philip Johnson. Johnson had met both Anni and Josef Albers on his visits to the Dessau Bauhaus. Josef was active in furniture design, typography, metalwork, photography, and above all in the glass workshop, where he had developed an elaborate technique for making the sand-blasted glass constructions so similar to the vibrant abstraction Kirstein had designed for the Harvard Society’s Bauhaus show. Josef Albers was also deeply immersed in Bauhaus theory about the nature of form and the teaching of art. He was the first Bauhaus student to have been elevated to the status of “Master,” and had become an important teacher of its preliminary course in material and design. In 1930 he had been appointed the school’s assistant director.

The placid-faced Albers—with his narrow eyes, fair skin, and blond bangs he looked like one of Memling’s saints—had started at the Bauhaus when he was thirty-two. That was in 1920—one year after the school was founded in Weimar. This meant that he had been affiliated with the institution longer than anyone else. Albers was a working-class Catholic who had previously taught public school in his hometown of Bottrop, a bleak industrial city on the River Ruhr. In 1925 he had married Anneliese Fleishmann, one of the star weavers and textile designers at the school. Anni—in keeping with the new style, she had made even her name simpler and more functional—was from a very different sort of background. Her parents were both Jewish, albeit the sort of German Jews who didn’t enter a synagogue; one branch of the family had had a group conversion (some eighty members of the family baptized together one Sunday at the end of the nineteenth century), and her parents had had her confirmed in Berlin’s fashionable Protestant Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche. Her father’s family were successful furniture manufacturers; her mother’s, the Ullsteins, were prominent publishers. Her maternal grandfather owned one of the first telephones in Berlin, but wouldn’t answer it “because bells were only for domestics.” When she had told her father that she wanted to attend the experimental “Bauhaus” in order to pursue “the new style,” he had replied that there were no new styles; there had already been the Renaissance and the Baroque, and everything else just repeated them. But Anni had persisted, and even if her Ullstein uncles sometimes mortified her by visiting Dessau in their Hispano Suiza, she had plugged away as a young Bauhausler, working diligently at both designs for yard materials and the creation of bold, abstract, rigidly geometric, and simplified woven wall hangings.

A couple of months prior to Eddie Warburg’s writing Alfred Barr, Philip Johnson had run into Anni Albers on a street in Berlin. Anni’s father was helping the young couple by paying rent on an apartment they had stripped to the barest white and furnished with their own art and the leanest chairs and tables they could find, and where they served water from chemists’ flasks in order to avoid ornate decanters. Anni invited Johnson to come up and to see the place as well as their recent work, and to have a cup of tea.

The Bauhaus had just closed. Under the directorship of Mies van der Rohe, the school had a year earlier moved from its large Dessau campus to an old Berlin building that formerly housed a telephone company—in an effort to cut costs as the Nazis stepped up pressure against them. National Socialism had little use for abstract art and the new design, or for the sort of people that made them. But in spite of the move to Berlin, faculty salaries at the start of 1933 were still paid by the city of Dessau. Then, on June 15 of 1933, the Oberstadtinspektor of the Dessau City Council had written Josef Albers a letter in which he stated that the Bauhaus was “a germ-cell of bolshevism.” Moreover, as a member of the Bauhaus faculty, Albers was reminded that he “did not and [would] not offer any guarantees that [he would] at all times and without reserve stand up for the National State.”¹⁵ Therefore Dessau was discontinuing his salary. A month later, the Gestapo padlocked the doors of the school. On July 20, the faculty, at a meeting in which Albers was one of the seven participants, voted to dissolve the Bauhaus. So when Anni Albers invited Philip Johnson up for tea, she wasn’t just being gracious; she was also picking up any thread that might lead to her husband’s finding a new job.

Anni Albers was a personality to reckon with. A painting owned by James Thrall Soby gives clear evidence of that fact. In 1931 Soby had acquired a small Paul Klee called Gifts for I. As Eddie Warburg and Philip Johnson had done before him, Soby had called on Alfred Flechtheim in Berlin. Chick Austin, who had been in the gallery a short time before, paved the way for him. Knowing that Soby would be coming in and was above all interested in Paul Klee’s work, he had Flechtheim take out approximately fifty of the best Klee oils and watercolors he had to offer. Soby wanted everything in sight, but he was out of money. He had acquired Picasso’s Seated Woman earlier that year, and en route to Berlin had bought a Bonnard and a Gris in Paris. Unable to purchase the lot, he settled happily on Gifts for I, which shows a large head on its side and some ambiguous objects descending from above it.

Soby saw the painting as representing the sort of scene he knew well from West Hartford. “It records a party for a friend of the painter. In the picture I assume it is the friend’s head which rests horizontally on the floor, and above him are the festive table, champagne glass and salt and pepper shakers.”¹⁶ Had Soby ever gotten to know Anni Albers, he could have been put straight on this. If its American owner thought the painting depicted a drunken partygoer passed out cold on the floor with the remnants of a celebration tumbling toward him, Anni knew better from direct experience. She had helped organize Klee’s fiftieth birthday party in 1929, and that is what Gifts for I really showed.

Klee was Anni’s “god at that time”; he was also her next-door neighbor. Although the Swiss painter was, in her eyes, aloof and unapproachable, she admired him tremendously. She had even bought one of his watercolors—an unusual move for a Bauhaus student. As her god approached his major birthday, she had the idea—along with three other students in the Dessau weaving workshop—of hiring a small plane from the Junkers aircraft plant, not far from the Dessau Bauhaus, so that they could have this mystical, otherworldly man’s birthday presents descend to him from above. Klee’s presents were to arrive in a large package shaped like an angel, for which Anni made the curled hair out of tiny, shimmering brass shavings. Various Bauhaus people made the gifts the angel would carry: a print from Lyonel Feininger, a lamp from Marianne Brandt, some small objects from the wood workshop. Anni was in the small plane from which the angel descended. As the cold late October air penetrated her coat, and the pilot joked around with the four young weavers by doing complete turnabouts as they huddled together in the open cockpit, Anni was so obsessed with abstract art that what struck her most was her sudden awareness of a new visual dimension; she had been living on one optical plane and now saw it from a very different vantage point. Then she spotted Klee’s house, next door to her own. As planned, they let out the gift. It landed with a bit of a crash. But Klee was excited nonetheless, and memorialized the unusual presents and delivery in the painting that later went to Jim Soby. What Soby thought were the accouterments of his habitual sort of social encounter were in fact souvenirs of the Bauhaus workshop and part of a new and adventurous world in which Anni Albers was an enthusiastic player. The figure on the ground was the gift-bearing angel. Soby’s idea of a champagne glass was in actuality an inverted parachute.

When Johnson was in the Alberses’ new flat, he was as intrigued by Anni’s personality and work as by Josef’s. She wove simple, unadorned yard materials in which the fibers themselves and the structure with which they were linked constitute their entire design. At the same time, she made abstract geometric wall hangings that made a claim for textiles as a high form of art, as serious in intention as her husband’s glass constructions and the oils and watercolors of Klee and Kandinsky. Johnson was fascinated. He was also intrigued by a bit of injustice of which he became aware in the Berlin flat. On that summer afternoon he looked at several fabric samples that, a few months earlier Mies van der Rohe’s mistress, Lily Reich, had represented to him as having been hers. These were Anni’s, and Johnson realized that Anni Albers was not only exceptionally talented on the basis of what he knew she had done, but also on the basis of what he had been led to believe someone else had done.

• • •

Johnson had his visit with the Alberses in mind when, shortly after his return from Berlin, Warburg invited him to join the meeting with John Andrew Rice in the museum’s offices. Rice had gone to see Warburg at the suggestion of Margaret Lewisohn. Margaret was especially aware of what her young relative Eddie was up to those days because Sam Lewisohn was then secretary of the museum board. The reason Rice had approached Margaret Lewisohn was because of the mother of a young man named Theodore Dreier.

Ted Dreier, who had been seven years ahead of Warburg and Johnson at Harvard, was the nephew of Katherine Sophie Dreier. His father, Henry, was the only one of Katherine’s four siblings to bear children. Aunt Kate also was childless, so Ted grew up with an especially close connection to her. He saw her often and heard her discussed all the time. It wasn’t just her art collecting that gave the family plenty to talk about. At one formal Sunday dinner, Katherine made a particularly strong impression on the children by scratching her back with her knife. Her explanation was that the conversation was getting a bit dull.¹⁷ Like a number of the Warburgs, she made a point of misbehaving in the dining room as well as challenging the usual way of doing things out in the world. Ted took easily to this notion that it was important to violate a few rules on many fronts.

Ted Dreier’s own interests were outside the art field. What impressed him most in the family legacy was the idea of rebellion and the spirit of good works. Another of his aunts headed the Women’s Trade Union League. His mother was chairman of the Women’s Suffrage Party of Brooklyn and the Women’s Committee for Mayor La Guardia’s Re-election, and she had politicized the Women’s City Club of New York City. What moved Ted above all were causes to better humanity.

Although Aunt Kate had made him more cognizant of Surrealism and other modern art developments than were most Harvard undergraduates of the day, Ted had had few overlaps with the world of Paul Sachs and the Fogg Museum crowd. At Harvard he majored in geology, before studying electrical engineering at Engineering School. At Rollins he was teaching physics when he met Rice, who was a classics professor. Then, as Eddie Warburg had intimated to Alfred Barr, Rice was fired by Rollins’s president, Dr. Holt. Holt claimed that, among other things, Rice had “called a chisel one of the world’s most beautiful objects, had whispered in chapel, … had an ‘indolent’ walk, had left fish scales in the sink after using the college’s beach cottage, and … wore a jockstrap on the beach.”¹⁸ Two other faculty members were fired shortly after Rice. Sympathetic to their cause, Ted Dreier had been the next to resign.

Almost immediately, this group of outcasts set about forming Black Mountain College, with Rice at the helm. Their progressive coeducational institution stressed free inquiry, gave faculty the control of educational policy, eliminated grades, emphasized participation in community life, and elevated the arts as the focal point of the curriculum. Rice was particularly glad to have Ted join him in the new venture. In his eyes the young Harvard graduate was “a sweet person, a very endearing dreamer—one of those strange creatures that the rich families produce every now and then; they want to repudiate the whole thing.”¹⁹ In addition, his coming from one of those wealthy families would do the new school no harm. Not only did his relatives have money, but they had friends with money. Of the fifteen thousand dollars in contributions required to get Black Mountain off the ground, Ted’s friends Mr. and Mrs. J. Malcolm Forbes had anonymously provided ten thousand, and his parents had given two thousand.

When Ethel Dreier told Ted some of the things she had learned from Margaret Lewisohn about what the people at the Museum of Modern Art were up to, it was only natural to go knock on the door. In little time he and John Rice were looking at photos of the folded paper experiments done in Josef Albers’s introductory course at the Bauhaus. They both immediately felt that it was precisely what they were looking for. The Black Mountain founders were especially eager “to break the tradition of the idea that it was effeminate to be in the arts,”²⁰ and felt that this sort of work could only help advance that point.

Philip Johnson had various reasons for wanting to help Black Mountain get the Alberses. He thought that Anni was “the best textile designer [he’d] ever met.” He admired the honesty and rigor of her work. In his own designing, he was advocating the aesthetic of exposed radiator pipes in preference to brocades. He believed in acknowledging the truth of things: that’s where heat comes from; that’s what the material is made of. It was time to stop disguising. Johnson believed that Anni Albers’s presence in the United States would improve textile design in general, and that she and Josef would help the museum.²¹ Shortly after Eddie Warburg wrote to Alfred Barr, so did Johnson:

Eddie is writing to you about Albers.… But I know he is thinking of paying his way himself if he has to. He also got $500 from Mrs. R. for him. Personally I wish no responsibility for him, but I can’t think better [sic] person could be got from the lot of ex Bauhaeusler [sic] than Albers. He could be very useful in all the industrial arts and in typography.²²

Barr, who had met Josef if not Anni at the Dessau Bauhaus—and had written him a long letter (in German) four years earlier—was sympathetic.

When Eddie Warburg had written Barr about his scrambling for the funds to get the Alberses over from Germany, Black Mountain College was still five hundred dollars short of the minimum amount it needed to get started. Rice may have told Warburg that they had received a twenty-thousand-dollar guarantee and were opening in the fall, but in truth they weren’t there yet. Moreover, although Warburg was able to wangle things with the immigration authorities and Johnson was able to negotiate with Albers so that all that was needed to get the Alberses to America was a guarantee of fifteen hundred dollars for the combination of Josef’s salary for one year and his and Anni’s fare over, no one was coming up with the necessary money. Warburg did indeed go to Mrs. Rockefeller and get five hundred dollars from her—whether this was with or without Barr’s clearance remains unclear—but he had no choice as to what to do about the remaining sum. He gave it himself.

According to Ted Dreier, without that gift from Eddie Warburg, “Black Mountain College would never have started.”²³ Dreier had promised the Forbeses that he would abandon the whole venture unless he got five thousand dollars in addition to their ten thousand. He had managed to scrape together forty-five hundred, but had reached his deadline without seeing how he could possibly raise another penny. Warburg’s own contribution, along with the one he raised from Mrs. Rockefeller, entitled the school to receive the Forbes money, in addition to guaranteeing that Josef Albers—whose thousand-dollar salary would be the only wage paid to a Black Mountain faculty member that first year—could come to the United States.

In November of 1933 Anni and Josef Albers landed in New York on the S.S. Europa. Philip Johnson was waiting at the docks. The following day, he and Eddie Warburg took them to 1109 Fifth Avenue for a tour of the collection of Rembrandt and Dürer etchings. Then they crossed the street and walked downtown a few blocks to the Metropolitan Museum, where the Alberses marveled at the eager crowd—as they had at the energy and dynamism on the city streets. Two days later, Anni and Josef were at Black Mountain College. At first things were hard to get used to. A thumbtack attaching a notice to an Ionic column at the school’s Robert E. Lee Hall was difficult to fathom; in Germany, columns were made of marble. There were new notions of aristocracy. Back at home people of Ted Dreier’s and his wife Bobbie’s social and economic class might have spent their holidays taking the waters at Baden-Baden; the Dreiers’ idea of a vacation was to go backpacking. If their German counterparts would have whiled away the hours playing baccarat, Ted and Bobbie joined the road crew. But Anni and Josef Albers fit in soon enough. Once Warburg had got them across to America, they would never again leave except for brief travels.

III

Late in 1932, when Kirstein took Warburg to the New York studio of Gaston Lachaise, the French-born sculptor was practically penniless. Lachaise had been one of the favorites of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. He had been sporadically helped by a handful of patrons, but he was unable to hold on to money. The previous year, Kirstein had posed in the nude for Lachaise—for a sculpture that Gertrude Whitney bought for twelve hundred dollars. Kirstein had periodically done what he could to help. Now Warburg commissioned a portrait bust of himself. He wanted to understand the processes of sculpture, and he wanted to provide funds.

Lachaise regularly recounted his daily struggles at that time in letters to his wife Isabel and his stepson Edward Nagle, who were in Maine while he was in New York. Suddenly, on April 3, 1933, he wrote a letter to Nagle in which the tone of the correspondence changed completely. He gave his address for the next week as “c/o EMM Warburg Esq., Hotel Greenbrier,” in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. After months of sitting for the portrait (he posed sixty-five times in all) Warburg had wanted some variation in the routine. At the lavish resort where Lachaise was Warburg’s guest, they followed their three-hour morning work session with Lachaise sunbathing and Warburg playing tennis. The afternoon and evening sittings were framed with pleasant walks, fine meals, and the occasional swim. Lachaise carried the life-size Plasticine head around in a cardboard box in which it was suspended between large nails at the top and bottom so that its surface never touched the sides. Warburg was highly amused to be accompanied by someone carrying his head in a box.

Paul Strand: Gaston Lachaise, Georgetown, Maine, 1927. (Photo Credit 3.6)

Throughout 1933 and 1934, Lachaise’s stream of correspondence to Isabel—in scrawled pencil script alternating between French and English and a blend of the two—was packed with references to projects with the young Warburg. From White Sulphur Springs the report was that his patron had a “nature tellement agreeable & aimable.”²⁴ He was, at the very least, patient; the commission took seven months to complete. From New York in the ensuing weeks came a cycle of statements that the bust was almost done and then that it wasn’t. First Lachaise wrote that he would be casting it in bronze within a day or two. Then he was back at work on it. Again he was about to cast it, but in the next report he was refining it just a bit more. So it continued. Finally, on May 1, he wrote Isabel, “Pour moi, et pour lui, c’est un success.” The same day, he informed Edward Nagle, “I finished Warburg portrait in Plasticine it is a great thing. I do like Warburg very much the more I know him, almost as much as Joe Gould which I know for many years and which as you know is a great friend for me.” On May 9 the sculptor wrote to Isabel that this could go among the best portraits ever made, on May 10 that it was “le portrait d’un jeune Empereur.” The letter of May 11 said not only that Warburg had taken it home and Felix was pleased, but also that Eddie and Lachaise had visited the Museum of Modern Art together. By the end of May, Warburg—who had paid a thousand dollars for the bronze—had agreed to a second version, for four thousand, in pale English alabaster.

Gaston Lachaise, Torso, 1934 (front view), plaster, 45 × 41¼ × 21¼″. (Photo Credit 3.7)

Lachaise’s goal wasn’t primarily physical resemblance. What he was after, in his own words, was “a likeness with the skin removed.”²⁵ It scarcely mattered when Henry McBride told the sculptor that Eddie Warburg’s features were not quite right, that “the nose was too high on the head, not the Semitic two-thirds but Roman proportions.” The bronze, even more than the alabaster, is the essence of the young art patron it portrayed: pensive yet outgoing, reflective, fervent.

If McBride was correct, and the well-defined features lack perfect verisimilitude to Warburg’s appearance at the time, they nonetheless make a good pass at his rather exotic good looks that also show up in photographs. And Lachaise has arrested Warburg’s features in a moment of intensity. Under strong light, the bronze is as smooth and shiny as Bellini’s paintings and School of Fontainebleau enamels—the art with which Eddie Warburg was essentially the most comfortable. The veneer is flawless, the patina refined and elegant. But there is no bland perfection. Lachaise’s Warburg, subtly asymmetrical, has the irregularity of living form. The bust is an exquisite object, but it reflects the complexity of human feelings. The face looks hungry for a purpose, engaged in a relentless search for the meanings of existence. Formed like a statuesque god, it is also tortured. Eddie Warburg may have prepped with impeccably bred American upper crusters and palled around with the right Wall Street boys, and he may have been brought up with perfect scrolly monograms, but this image shows someone unable to cut off the darker sides of life. This is a person who recognizes suffering, both in himself and in others. Sixty-five sittings may have seemed like a lot, but Lachaise was getting somewhere. His subject is as questing and restless as he is handsome, rich, and empowered.

By the time all three versions of the portrait bust were complete, Warburg had become Lachaise’s primary benefactor. He had started early in 1933 by buying the powerful, intensely simplified marble Knees. In a letter to Isabel, Lachaise described Felix’s and Frieda’s reactions to that purchase. Lachaise stated, in French, “He showed the knees to his father and mother—his father liked them—his mother said I have knees better than those—showing her knees—his father said no”—and continued in English “and Warburg say that a family affair started.”²⁶ Frieda thought even less of what followed. Eddie’s next purchase was a highly sensuous, smooth-surfaced marble sculpture of bulging breasts with their firm, disproportionately high nipples jumping like exclamation points. Then he acquired the grossly exaggerated twelve-inch-high marble Torso in which vastly oversized breasts and buttocks—and nothing else—emerge from a rough block. Celebratory or deprecating, the voice of these works is certainly obsessional. The woman who vetoed The Knees and thought Picasso’s Blue Boy too daring for the living room now thought her son had gone mad. Eddie’s brother Fred’s only comment, uttered repeatedly, was that he would be buying kneepads for Knees and a bra for Breasts. This was the sort of stuff Eddie had to put up with all the time.

Frieda Warburg went into a state over the enormous plaster Lachaise figure that Eddie gave to the Museum of Modern Art in 1934. Shortly after the presentation of his gift had attracted the attention of the national press, he took his mother to see what the excitement was all about. She could only see the piece as a mockery of her own need to drop some weight. “All I can say, Edward, is that I take this as a personal insult,”²⁷ Frieda balked audibly in the midst of the crowd on West Fifty-third Street. Two years later, however, Eddie turned her reaction to good advantage. The occasion was Frieda’s surprise sixtieth birthday party at 1109 Fifth Avenue. Eddie gave a slide show of artworks that represented his mother’s life. A Cubist Picasso portrait suggested her confused. The Lachaise represented Frieda before one of her pound-shedding visits to Elizabeth Arden’s Maine Chance Farm, while a Malvina Hoffman sculpture of Pavlova portrayed her after her stay there.

The larger public, though stunned by the new Lachaise at the museum, saw it as more than a commentary on diet. The sculpture was the first major work by an American sculptor to be given to the museum’s permanent collection.²⁸ Time magazine showed a photograph with the caption “huge steatopygous torso of a woman labeled COLOSSAL.” This novel notion of female beauty was national news.

Warburg was buying both big and small. Having acquired Lachaise’s bronze Dolphins, he commissioned—for $350—a nickel-plated dolphin as a radiator cap for his Packard. This prompted one of Lachaise’s finest French-English blends, in a letter of March 6, 1933, to Isabel: “je travail pour lui a un radiator cap pour son car an open big touring packard.” Warburg also periodically bought drawings. On one of his regular visits to Lachaise’s studio, he noticed a new development in the recent pencil sketches. He told the sculptor that he had a sense that there was one particular work to which everything else was leading but which he had still not seen. The observation prompted Lachaise to show Warburg the plaster version of Dynamo Mother, hitherto unknown to anyone else. The vivid and daring sculpture, although only eighteen inches long, was in many ways the culmination of the sculptor’s work. It shows a highly exaggerated female form in a pose that suggests both the sexual act and the process of giving birth. Her erect nipples are as big as limbs. The head and legs are reduced in scale, the breasts and buttocks enlarged, the enormous labia pushed forward. Even today there are few collectors who would dare get near such a thing. But Lachaise wrote to Isabel on September 25, 1933, “He told me that the finest thing you have done of all these,” and that Eddie Warburg wanted it. The sculptor promptly made a single casting of the piece into bronze—“It is the most powerful thing I have ever done”²⁹—and Warburg bought it immediately.

What motivated Eddie Warburg to make the purchase is difficult to assess. Lachaise’s account makes it a matter of an immediate, instinctual response. Warburg’s own evaluation is less kind:

To a certain extent I think it was my ambition to be considered “daring.” And there never was anybody less daring than I was. I was a timid guy wanting very much to be included. And wanting to be part of the gang. The gang that I wanted to be part of was the young enthusiastic art followers and collectors. Somehow I felt that by owning these things and having had the courage to purchase them I thereby established my credentials.³⁰

This may be a case of relentless self-denigration. It may be a valid commentary on the motives behind a lot of pioneering art collecting. In either case, the acquisition of Dynamo Mother was a brave step that gave the artist essential support, both emotional and financial.

By the middle of 1934, Warburg had signed the lease for Lachaise’s studio at 42 Washington Mews and was paying the monthly rent. He had taken on the sculptor’s needs as his personal problem. Sometimes this meant writing to him as a father might to a recalcitrant son. Consider the letter of May 15, 1934, on Museum of Modern Art stationery:

You have been very considerate in sparing me the details of your financial condition. At the same time this prevents me from really helping you solve it. Until I know the exact amount you need to take care of your past debts and your future maintenance, I cannot cope with the situation.

Warburg goes on to request a statement of all obligations and expenses, to remind Lachaise that his wife and stepson will take on his debts when he dies, and to urge him both to get a job and to work on the more salable side of his sculpture. But after instructing his beneficiary to “face the cold facts,” he closes by saying that his motive is “to solve this impossible financial muddle so that the work of America’s foremost sculptor, Gaston Lachaise, may continue under the most favorable conditions.”

Warburg would often start out tough and then go easy. On October 11, 1934, he wrote Lachaise that he could no longer pay his rent. The main reason was the demands on his funds “partly caused by the European situation and partly by the world-wide depression.” It was no false claim; he had begun to sign further affidavits and to come up with more people’s ticket money, and he could hardly turn his back on the escalating needs of his parents’ pet organizations like the Joint Distribution Committee. So Warburg wrote Lachaise, “It is only right … that in view of the contracts you have for the coming year that a certain amount of this [rent] money, if not all, be paid back to me.” But he crossed out his secretary’s typewritten “if not all,” and a paragraph later changed his tune: “I am perfectly willing to let bygones be bygones, and to forget all past debts as long as I do not have to meet any new obligations.” He moved from his hard line even more readily than Jacob Schiff had with Frieda over the YWHA. In fact, Warburg did not stop paying Lachaise’s rent at that point. That occurred only with a letter written five months later, in March of 1935—this time on a letterhead of the American Ballet. Warburg had reached his limit. Declaring that Lachaise’s ideas on money were “completely impractical and therefore impossible in the civilization in which we live,” and calculating that he had spent seventeen thousand dollars on Lachaise’s work—“for which I have received in return many of your finest pieces of sculpture”—he finally gave up the lease on Lachaise’s studio.

Besides buying Lachaise’s sculpture and paying the rent, Warburg brought other collectors to the sculptor, intervened for Lachaise’s getting commissions for Rockefeller Center, and steered grant money his way. He also lectured about Lachaise. In a talk at Vassar, he had to project the slides on a sheet hanging freely in a doorway. Winds blew in, and the sheets began to billow. His back turned to the makeshift screen, Warburg could not see what was happening. But his audience of young women was overcome by laughter. Never before had they seen naked women with such buxom figures dancing so freely.

Warburg and Kirstein worked in tandem on Lachaise’s behalf. Warburg laid much of the groundwork for the retrospective show the sculptor had at the Museum of Modern Art in February 1935; Kirstein made the selection and wrote the catalog. The show was a success. To accommodate more conservative visitors, the museum paired it with an exhibition of work by the nineteenth-century American George Caleb Bingham, but while the Bingham show sold 101 catalogs, Lachaise sold 371. The combination of the two exhibitions drew in over twenty-five thousand people in thirty-four days.

As usual, it was Warburg’s job to handle the nuts and bolts while Kirstein attended to more esoteric matters. Just before the exhibition was scheduled to open, a marshal of the City of New York served notice on Lachaise, care of the museum, for $78.92 that the sculptor had owed one of his marble suppliers for the past three years. The supplier was going to lay claim to one of the sculptures in the show if the debt wasn’t settled. It was not the sort of expense for which the museum had ready funds. A letter from Alfred Barr to Eddie Warburg—at the offices of the ballet—tells what happened:

Dear Eddie:

You were more than angelic to leap into the breach with your check in payment of Lachaise’s debt to the Tompkins-Kiel Marble Company. I have made the check of $78.92 over to Albert Hohauser, marshal no. 48, who brought the notice of levy.

Lachaise does not know who has saved him though he may guess. I will tell him if you wish me to.

You may have saved the Museum considerable embarrassment since a sale of Lachaise’s work on the premises might easily have been given an unfortunate publicity slant.

Now for the great event.

Expectantly,

AHB³¹

Henry McBride, in Lachaise’s obituary eight months after the exhibition, listed as the sculptor’s admirers e. e. cummings, Gilbert Seldes, Lincoln Kirstein, and Edward Warburg. The one he singled out was Warburg.

It was probably due to the influence of the last named that the astonishing one-man exhibition of the Lachaise sculptures occurred in the Modern Museum last winter, an exhibition so overwhelming in its appeal that you would have thought the whole world must have succumbed to it; but there were no signs of such a submission.³²

Four years after the artist’s death, Warburg wrote a letter to Isabel Lachaise—this time on the streamlined Art Deco letterhead of his private office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. He was responding to her proposal that he “select some work of Gaston’s in payment of past indebtedness.”³³ From his point of view he had been “more than amply repaid,” having bought work at prices “far from adequate” although Lachaise had insisted they were “fair and just.…

I in no way feel that you or Mr. Lachaise’s estate owe me anything. As a matter of fact, I am really grateful for the privilege of not only possessing such fine examples of his work, but for the warmth of his friendship, and for the insight into sculptural problems as well as the problems of the sculptor, which I gained from him.