I

“The Second World War was the key experience of my time and it would have been impossible to avoid it. In fact, I loved it. I enjoyed the Army very much indeed.” So stated Lincoln Kirstein when assessing the major achievements of his lifetime some forty-five years after he joined the U.S. Army.¹ As director of the School of American Ballet and Ballet Caravan, Kirstein had been fascinated with the processes of orderly physical training. What concerned him were “disciplines toward extremity: how do you manage extreme situations, whether they’re spiritual situations or physical situations or psychological situations. This is what ritual is developed to handle.”² He had long had a penchant for military organization and structures. The breed of modernism that relishes abandon and the absence of restraints had never held sway for him. He had always adhered to rules for his rule-breaking endeavors. And he had always had a sense of purpose. So enlistment was a natural sequitur to all that had preceded. Kirstein served both as a courier and interpreter, and in the “arts and monuments” section of the U.S. Army. He landed in Normandy three weeks after D day, after which one of his many tasks was to drive General Patton’s jeep. Subsequently, in the Steinberg Salt Mine at Alt Aussee, he helped discover and recover a vast collection of art looted by the Nazis and intended for Hitler’s proposed Führer Museum in Linz.

Eddie Warburg had landed on the Normandy beaches the day after D day. But even if he and Kirstein had arrived at precisely the same time, they would have by then had far less in common than at Harvard or in Balanchine’s studio. When Kirstein had gone on the road with the Ballet Caravan, Warburg had not joined him. Six months after the Stravinsky Festival, Felix Warburg’s death had left his youngest son multiple tasks to replace his ballet work. Once issues of culture took a backseat, Eddie’s circle of acquaintances had changed as well.

F. M. Warburg’s death was major news for New Yorkers. The headline announcing it on the front page of the Times was in the same large type as headlines about the mayor’s budget battle, Third Reich aggression in Czechoslovakia, and fighting between China and Japan. The public was informed that Felix’s wife and five children had all been at his bedside at 1109 Fifth, and that his sons would bear his coffin at Temple Emanu-El. To be one of those sons was something to reckon with. That front-page piece identified their father as “an indefatigable worker in the fields of charity and social welfare.… Few worthy causes failed to win his support and his own business affairs were at all times subordinated to his philanthropic interests.” He was a key figure in organizations that benefited immigrants, nurses, underprivileged children, and the victims of Nazism. He had served on the boards and often been an officer of various hospitals, museums, and educational institutions. He had also helped found the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and started—with Louis Marshall—the Jewish Agency to work with the British government in the administration of Palestine. Most recently, in the year of his death, he had actively opposed the British plan for the partition of Palestine and taken “a stand for a bi-national state with the recommendation that further efforts be made to reconcile interests of Arabs and Jews within the same community.” While he wanted Palestine “developed as a refuge for the oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe and as a great Jewish cultural center,” he was noted for having “consistently opposed the idea of a Jewish state.”³ Above all he had run the Joint Distribution Committee and helped form the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies. Governor Herbert Lehman, Mayor F. H. La Guardia, former President Herbert Hoover, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Chaim Weizmann, and scores of other public figures in America, England, and Palestine all praised him lavishly.

These were values to live up to, and Frieda was not about to let her family tradition flag. Her husband had continued her father’s work; now it was up to her sons. A few days after Felix’s death she called a meeting of her children in which she designated successors for each of their father’s responsibilities. Eddie’s assignment was the American Jewish. Joint Distribution Committee.

For years Eddie had been free to rebel against the family style, but with his father no longer alive, it became his job to uphold it. He didn’t have much grounding in things like JDC work, but in 1934 he had been Felix’s representative at a board of governors meeting of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that Felix had deliberately avoided so as not to have to take a side in a confrontation between his two friends Chaim Weizmann and Judah Magnes, and Eddie had proved his diplomatic skills. As an arts patron he had shown his ability in getting people to work together and in rousing audience interest and had demonstrated his eagerness to free people from any sort of oppression. Now he would put his abilities and passions to new purpose. Eddie soon became chairman of the organization devoted to the rescue, relief, and rehabilitation of Jews wherever they were oppressed. This became the new direction of his life.

The woman with “class with a capital K” about whom Eddie Warburg had written Agnes Mongan was the recently divorced Mary Whelan Prue Currier. Striking, elegant, and articulate, Mrs. Currier was assistant fashion editor for Vogue. On December 6, 1939—exactly five years after the curtain had risen on Alma Mater on the stage of the Wadsworth Atheneum—Eddie Warburg and Mary Currier were married in the apartment of Condé Nast, her employer and his brother’s father-in-law. The bride wore a beige crepe afternoon gown trimmed with Manchurian ermine, and carried a Manchurian ermine muff decorated with yellow orchids. The night before, when everyone was in evening clothes, the family raised their glasses to the betrothed pair on the last great occasion in the tapestry-filled dining room of 1109 Fifth Avenue. Eddie Warburg had begun a new life, and he had also returned home.

Warburg’s everyday companions switched from people like Stravinsky and Balanchine to diplomats, writers, and socialites. He continued to own his paintings and sculpture and to sit on museum boards, but the linoleum and chrome of 37 Beekman Place were quickly replaced by chintz and Chippendale in the East Sixties. When he and Mary moved into a town house decorated by George Stacey, the man who had watched Sandy Calder paint the bathroom and Lachaise craft his portrait stayed mum. “Look, I don’t want to interfere with your decor—you and Mary are working that out—but tell me something: where do you visualize that you’re going to put the various paintings?” “On the wall,” Stacey replied. At least it beat the squash court.

Warburg had learned to seek new territory rather than take the predictable course. As the supporter of Calder and Lachaise, he had admired candor and bravery; he sought them in new forms. He had always liked entertainments grounded in ordinary people’s everyday reality like football and poker games; in the late 1930s, he reconsidered what everyday reality was. The former arts aficionado was content to stump the country on a speaking tour for the JDC. He joined the New York Guard. He soon felt, however, that this was not enough for him. Because of what was happening in Germany, he decided to enlist. Not wanting to be part of the dreaded black-tie set or to use family position, and determined to be tested on his merits alone, he joined the army as a private. “Here at last was a chance for anonymity, a chance to get lost in the crowd, to demonstrate, at least to myself, just what if anything I had on the ball. I wanted to be free from the advantages and disadvantages of inheritance and publicity, and from the flattery of those who courted favor.”⁴

Edward Warburg at Citizens Military Training Camp in Plattsburg, New York, 1940. (Photo Credit 7.1)

From basic training on, Warburg proved himself. The way to do this was sometimes by providing entertainment. Early in his military career, he performed solo at a graduation ceremony from officers’ candidate school; in a fireman’s helmet from the local 5&10 and a greatly oversized overcoat covered with every discarded chevron and medal he could find, he parodied his instructors with an incomprehensible lecture on the use of obscure weapons. But by the time he had landed in Normandy as a captain in the First U.S. Army, life had become serious business. Six weeks after D day, when he checked up on the derelict headquarters of the JDC in Paris, he learned that ten thousand Jews were starving in Paris. The soup kitchens were desperate for supplies. Warburg arranged for food to be delivered immediately, and within a day he engineered an instant loan of sixty-five thousand dollars from the New York JDC office for relief for French refugees. Shortly after that, he took a role in Operation Lion—a complex mission to find the exiled King Leopold of Belgium—that earned him the Belgian Ordre de l’Officier de la Couronne.

II

In May of 1938 Hitler, Mussolini, Ribbentrop, and Ciano had a meeting of Axis partners in Florence, for which occasion the city’s Fascist leaders put on a great military display. But for a while it seemed that the study of art history could go on unimpeded. To Agnes Mongan and Bernard Berenson, the politics of the Fogg mattered as much as the politics of Europe; the provenance of art objects still seemed more essential than the ramifications of the backgrounds of people.

As Berenson fine-tuned the plans for making I Tatti part of Harvard, he depended on Mongan to keep him entirely “au fait” about what was going on at the Fogg as people rose or fell from power. Mongan had a unique ability to remain objective about university politics, and to provide an accurate and unbiased account. Her explanation of Edward Forbes’s resignation and planned retirement in the summer of 1938 was the only account of that event that made it comprehensible to him; she described the balance of power at the Fogg by remarking that Sachs always acceded to Forbes’s wishes. Berenson thanked Mongan repeatedly for including him with the level of candor reserved for the inner circle. His letters to her were warm, beholden, and admiring. And once Mongan visited I Tatti itself that summer, she became as earnest and ardent as she would be to anyone in her life. She was overwhelmed by the experience of entering the baronial splendor of the great villa. There she felt respite from the midsummer Tuscan heat in the cool rooms with their sixteenth-century Bolognese furniture and masterpieces by Sassetta, Bernardo Daddi, and others. She idled contentedly in the library that rivaled those of many universities. Before ascending to Settignano, Mongan had spent days looking at art for every minute that the Uffizi and other museums and churches were open. Not only did I Tatti offer more of the same intoxicating beauty, but her host had an intensity that matched her own. Berenson never tired of discussing this art, and making his own days as enchanted as the life depicted in Renaissance painting. “Dear San Bernardo da Settignano,” Mongan wrote after her first series of calls to the villa,

For the Fogg and above all to me, you have certainly assumed the rôle of a patron saint dispersing spiritual and temporal joys …

My visit Sunday was a revelation (not only of weaknesses) but of beauty and astonishing richness. Why had no one told me you had such a vast quantity of really fabulous treasures? Why had I not heard of the enchanting Bonfigli, the magnificent Lorenzetti, the Daddi, and the wonderful Buddha’s head to name the merest handful. I came away, after Nicky had completed my tour, in a real daze. When I came out of it I began to fear that, in my eagerness, I had kept you on your feet a long time in the middle of a hot day. I hope I did not exhaust you.…

As for my visit of Friday night—I don’t think I shall ever forget the sense of magic and the unearthly beauty which you lead [sic] me into when we emerged from the grove in darkness & there above us was I Tatti & the gardens in serene moonlight. Even now it seems scarsely [sic] possible that that peace & harmony 8c beauty was real enough to be touched 8c felt 8c lived in.

Yes, your legend is wrong. The whole quality and flavor of it is wrong. But anyone who has created “I Tatti” merits a legend. Surely the right one, which is more exciting and wonderful than the wrong one, will begin to grow—must, if others have been moved as I have been, indeed continue to be, already growing.…

Devotedly,
Agnes⁵

Typically, Mongan was on a campaign. She would rectify Berenson’s reputation. She had other wrongs to right as well. Eleven days later she wrote Berenson—whom by now she was addressing as “B.B.”—from the Hotel des Alpes in Madonna di Campiglio, to voice her frustration at not seeing the drawings in the Pinacoteca in Bologna, where a new drawing and print cabinet were under construction:

It was absolutely impossible for me to see anything! I felt thwarted, tricked & enraged, until they let me go through the registrar’s book and I saw there was nothing really worth seeing! However I’m going to start an agitation, when I have a moment, about restorations, repairs, and lendings. I don’t think it’s fair to concentrate all publicity efforts on what’s to be seen. I think I’ll suggest to the Editor of the Art news that next year when they make up their summer list of things to be seen, they should add an addenda of those which can’t be! In the latter list this year would be the Bologna drawings, the San Vitale and Baptistry mosaics in Ravenna and the [frescoes in the] Vatican.

Do I sound horrid, cross & spiteful? I sincerely hope not, for I’d hate to have you think of me in those terms. I’m “letting out” to you because I know you can share my feelings & because I feel you may spare other pilgrims (who plan to tread the same paths I’ve just been over) some disappointment.

And yet every gallery and every museum in all Italy could have been locked and barred this year and my visit would still have been a successful one & not a failure—because there would have been all those wonderful & unforgettable hours with you at Settignano.

I don’t know why you were so good to me, but I adored it all and I live in the hope and expectation of other equally joyous visits. Cosset yourself, turn away all bores, store up your tale and keep that wonderful glint in your eye until I come again. I promise it won’t be long—for only the forces of nature doing unexpected turns can keep me away.⁶

Anyone who has ever tramped through hot Italian streets to find closed the cloister the guidebook said would be open will wish this self-anointed “pilgrim” from Somerville had succeeded in her mission of getting information about unavailable artworks disseminated.

What prompted Mongan’s striking out at error was the depth of her enthusiasms. These she felt intensely, in Berenson the man and in the visual experience about which she could commune with him. After the problems in Bologna she wrote B.B. from Venice about a happy reunion with “Daisy” (Marga) Barr. And what was

in itself worth heat & mosquitoes & traveling Germans [was] San Rocco! Have you seen them recently? Of course, you have. I was so thrilled and stupefied and overwhelmed by their glory and beauty Sc magnificence that I could feel my bones turning to water and in that fluid state I knew I’d seen vast visions.

I don’t know whether I should regret your godly stature or not. Your demesne seemed to me so perfect of its kind that I would have neither it nor your powers altered. They are both considerable and wonderful as they are—& I should prefer them to remain so.⁷

From Venice Mongan was on her way to an Alp “to contemplate the magnificence of nature rather than the handwork of man.” Her keen responsiveness had many sources. But little inspired such vehemence as Berenson himself. She often wrote him of her longing for the next visit and for more frequent encounters, to which he always responded in kind. After returning to Cambridge she let him know that walking to and from the Fogg each day she would mentally compose letters to him. When too much time lapsed she would open a note to him with statements that resembled the dialogue in a Victorian novel. “How my conscience has tormented me because I’ve been so long silent,”⁸ one started; “Doubtless you have crossed me off your list,”⁹ commenced another. One letter began, “Dear B.B., I can scarcely bear contemplating the breadth & darkness & length of the shadow which must cover your thought of me”¹⁰ because she had gone so long without writing.

But the dark shadow Mongan really had on her mind was the one cast by what was happening in the world around them. In that same letter where she voiced such guilt at not having written Berenson sooner, she said of her work on the Fogg catalog, “in the face of human need Sc anguish the importance of considering the beauties of the past assumes a waiting role.” Like other Americans who traveled abroad, Mongan was more directly aware of the European situation than were most of her countrymen. And after her own time in Italy that summer, Agnes had heard from her sister Elizabeth, who visited Berenson a couple of months later, about a train in Italy where the passengers included the last group of people to get out of Austria before the borders closed, and about how on the voyage back to America the Queen Mary was packed with exiles. When she spent time in late 1938 doing research at the British Museum and Windsor Castle, she had used every available minute from opening to closing time because she felt that soon these collections would be shut down and their contents packed against damage from bombing. She wrote to the painter Rico Lebrun that she extended this trip “because when the international situation became both tense and grim, it seemed to me that I should see as many things as possible for no one seemed to know how long it would be before they would be blown to bits.”¹¹ At Windsor she was looking through the 175th case of drawings, with sandbags piled up to the window ledge of the library, when word of the Munich Agreement came. The following morning, when Mongan arrived back at the castle library and a Church of England clergyman greeted her with a jaunty “ ‘It is to be peace,’ ” she replied, “ ‘I think it is a terrific price.’ ”¹² For this she was frowned upon and then avoided—a castigation she took with satisfaction.

Mongan ended her stay in London by helping Kenneth Clark wrap up paintings at the National Gallery so they could be moved from Trafalgar Square for safekeeping. Then, after she returned to America, she began helping with refugees. Through Eddie Warburg and Marga Barr and Eddie’s cousin Ingrid Warburg, she met a flow of European exiles seeking work and housing in the Boston area, and she devoted herself to trying to assist them. To this she would have found Berenson less sympathetic than to her other activities. Berenson referred to such people as “refu-Jews.”¹³ He wrote to his wife that Jews were “neither a religion nor a nation nor a race any more, whatever they may have been at one time.… I wish one could define what they are, and why so attractive and repellent, repellent chiefly.”¹⁴ Berenson’s primary disdain was for German and Austrian Jews, from whom he, as a Lithuanian, had suffered a degree of snobbery: “They may have Jewish noses and souls but their minds are super-German and that to me and not their Jewishness makes them a public danger.”¹⁵

But Mongan and Berenson could continue to discuss drawings. After one of Mongan’s visits to I Tatti, Berenson labeled her his saint, saying that no one’s appreciation of his drawings meant more to him than did hers. From the Fogg she kept him abreast of her work completing the drawings catalog, for which she and Sachs always kept Berenson’s own book on Italian drawings at their side. Mongan reported on learning to use a slide rule to make proportional reductions of photos, and on doing freehand drawings of the watermarks. At Paul Sachs’s home in the Adirondacks, she made the index. And finally she sent her “conscience,” as she called Berenson, the three hefty volumes. It was no easy task to get them to Italy late in 1940. Together they weighed fifty pounds. The usual communications channels were closed. But Mongan finally found a way, and to her enormous satisfaction Berenson immediately applauded the catalog’s appearance, writing, tone, and informativeness as being without equal. This was the first publication of its kind in America. There was a comprehensive biography and bibliography for every artist represented. Besides a full-size reproduction, each work had an entry of its own that provided a full description, an analysis of the technique and subject matter, and a complete provenance and exhibition history. For the portrait drawings, Mongan made comparisons to every other portrait the given artist had done of the same sitter. In keeping with the finest publications of the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Albertina, these volumes became the model for scholarly catalogs in America. As Sachs acknowledged in his introduction, not only had Mongan joined him on all attributions, but she had done most of the labor and research.

Mongan had taken risks. As she wrote to Berenson,

It is, I know, filled with glaring errors, many of which will leap to nightmarish life before your eagle eye. And I am terrified lest I might incur your wrath, for I have had the audacity to disagree with you here and there. (Poor Miss King is probably turning in her grave, because any pupil of hers should be incapable of disagreeing with you on any point.)¹⁶

Yet the catalog garnered only praise.

Mongan may have challenged Georgiana King’s authority, but she had dedicated the drawings catalog to her memory, and did a great deal more to abet and honor her early mentor. For Mongan the most direct effect of the Depression may have been that because of the budget restrictions at the Fogg they had had to produce “horrid little mimeographed affairs” rather than nice catalogs,¹⁷ but in 1937, having learned that her former professor was retiring from Bryn Mawr in poor financial circumstances, she had initiated communication with the president of the college about how to raise funds clandestinely for King. Mongan also wrote King a glowing tribute, published in the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin, and sought similar testimony from others. Then, following King’s death in 1939, at which point Mongan became her teacher’s literary executrix, she undertook to have Harvard University Press bring out a hitherto unpublished book by King: The Heart of Spain. For this purpose she solicited funds from Berenson, recalling to him that it was G.G. who had first introduced her to him “in a small dark lecture room at Bryn Mawr. And long before I knew the dancing light in your eye, your swift, soft step and the movements of your hands, I knew the turn of your thought, the quality of your imagination & the vividness of your language.”¹⁸ The vividness of her own language succeeded, and B.B. assisted with the necessary subvention. Harvard published the book, with an introduction by Mongan. One of the people to whom she proudly sent it was Gertrude Stein.

Mongan liked to do right by people. After Felix Warburg’s death, she finally realized her dream of making peace between Paul Sachs and Eddie Warburg in a way that greatly benefited her museum. Eddie was the family member most responsible for his father’s art collection. With Mongan’s coaxing, he pleased Sachs both by having key works go to the Fogg and by endowing a large exhibition hall named in his father’s memory. In July of 1939 Eddie wrote “Ag” about what this meant as a reconciliation with his former adviser: “I feel it will do your heart good to know that there is a decent streak in me, and that I am burying the old hatchet. Frankly, it is awful how tolerant I am becoming.”¹⁹

She replied in kind,

I never thought I should see the day when you and uncle Paul would put your heads together for such calm discussion. I can’t call it the lion lying down with the lamb because I don’t think either of you could be termed lamb-like, but I do rejoice to see certain Utopian tendencies evident in my own time.²⁰

And loyal as she was to Bryn Mawr and the Fogg, the former champion of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art had by no means dropped her support of what was new and pioneering. In 1944, shortly after Alfred Barr had been ousted from the directorship of the Museum of Modern Art, she heaped praise on him in Art News. Through Paul Sachs she had been hearing about Barr and the Modern since before it opened its doors. Pointing to the “electric atmosphere” and educational role of the Modern in presenting the diverse strains of recent art—whatever one might think of it—she singled out Barr as the key factor behind the museum’s success. She described Barr as “a man of deep learning, sound scholastic training, unshakable integrity, unflagging, wide-ranging interests, and true vision.… His curiosity is tireless, his prophetic sense ever alert.”²¹

Bernard Berenson had little taste for Barr’s sort of modernism. He regarded the enthusiasm for nonobjective art, particularly as it had taken hold in New York, as comparable to “the raptures with which even the people most greatly endowed with taste must have admired barbarian art objects when the last fires of Alexandrian art had gone out and these people were already satiated by the clumsy attempts produced out of the decadence of Rome.”²² But this did not prevent Agnes Mongan from doing everything within her power to make Berenson more aware of the Museum of Modern Art’s director, whose wife B.B. had gotten to know.

You have never met Alfred, have you? When you do many of the questions you asked me last year about Marga will be answered. I know of no pair more divergent in background, in emotional inheritance, or in outward manner—& more devoted or more reliant upon the well-being of the other, and I like & admire them both immensely. Marga’s Italo-Hibernian ebullience, quickness & force, Alfred’s Scotch quiet, steadiness & tenacity, her gaiety & energy, his contemplative judgments & almost silent perceptions—& both for their extraordinary intelligence and taste and loyalty.²³

While she was working for recognition for people like Georgiana King and Alfred Barr, Mongan continued to have her own battles to fight. She became a teaching assistant to Paul Sachs, but her name could not appear in the course catalog because she was a woman. In the mid-1930s, Sachs and Edward Forbes wanted her named “Curator of Drawings.” The university administration responded that a curatorship was a corporate appointment; she could only be “Keeper of Drawings.”

At the start of the 1940s Mongan continued to work tirelessly with scholars and museum people on issues of attribution, but the significance of the work was gone. “And so while the world goes on to its damnation, I skim across its frivolous surface,”²⁴ she wrote Bernard Berenson. She continued to read scholarly papers, but she also did her best to place refugees. “I doubt I am an ostrich & I try to do what I can to prove I’m not one. What more can one do? That & one’s daily task.”²⁵ If formerly she had been investigating the depiction of piebald horses in Renaissance drawings, in 1942 her research was for a handbook on what had happened to art objects and to contemporary German painters under the Nazi regime.

In the winter of 1942–43, the ninety-five-person staff of the Fogg was reduced to a skeleton crew of forty-two. Most of the men Mongan knew had entered military service. James Plaut joined the army, and Nathaniel Saltonstall the navy, so activities at the Institute for Contemporary Art slowed down considerably. Mongan wrote to Thomas Howe, who was enlisting in the navy, with news of Warburg and Kirstein in the army, reporting that Kirstein had lost twenty-five pounds in the first three weeks of basic training. Mongan had attended a party at Kirk and Constance Askews’ after a concert sponsored by Virgil Thomson, but nothing was the same. “I was shocked and horrified at the faces of most, many of whom I had not seen since the war had started.” Although she heard the next day that the party had lasted until 5:30 a.m., she left early. “My frame can no longer take it, even did my taste incline me to wish to.”²⁶ Her energies went in other directions, like judging an exhibition called “Bandwagon on Parade,” organized by the United Services Organization of the U.S. State Department, and featuring art by people in military service. Mongan had found her niche as a scholar and connoisseur at the Fogg, and was on as straight a course as the world would permit.

III

On January 6, 1938, another ballet had had its world premiere at the Avery Memorial in Hartford. Three years earlier the theme had been college football; now it was gas stations. Lincoln Kirstein had continued to look for American subject matter for the Ballet Caravan. He considered dances based on tales by Mark Twain, Hawthorne, and Melville, and he wrote the books for Harlequin for President, Pocahontas, Yankee Clipper, and Billy the Kid. What he wanted above all was to set the caravan’s fifteen dancers in an ordinary, everyday situation. Like so many of the moderns, he eschewed the sort of refinement and elegance generally associated with high art. He spurned the usual subject matter and turned to the commonplace. The work that premiered in Hartford was called Filling Station, for which Virgil Thomson composed the music for the caravan’s two pianos. Paul Cadmus designed the sets and costumes. A mural called Shore Leave that Cadmus had painted under the auspices of the Works Projects Administration had recently caused a scandal for its depiction of sailors in one of those moments the navy didn’t like people to talk about; Kirstein knew Cadmus was the man for the job. The artist came up with a suitable set: a large window and rest room door to indicate the station, a neon sign that read in reverse, and a gas pump.

Mac, the station attendant, wore translucent nylon accented in red. To choreography by Lew Christiansen, he pumped gas, pointed the way to the telephone, and supplied a monkey wrench and road map. A family of tourists, some jerky truck drivers, a stylish pair of lovers, and several gangsters all stopped by. Thomson’s music for all of this was “waltzes, tangos, a fugue, a Big Apple, a holdup, and a chase, all aimed to evoke roadside America as pop art.”²⁷ In those days the “Big Apple” was the latest dance craze.

When Filling Station opened, the Avery auditorium had a different look to it. The neo-Romantic Kristians Tonny—admired by Jim Soby and Chick Austin—had graced its walls with murals of a dreamlike vision of flying horses. Things had slowed down since the Paper Ball, but the Atheneum was still advancing both art with literary themes and pure abstraction. At the end of 1936 Austin had mounted a show of paintings by the brothers Le Nain and of Georges de La Tour, who had been out of favor for centuries and whose reputation he and Soby helped revive. He also put together a show of abstract painting by Katherine Dreier, Werner Drewes, Paul Kelpe, and Josef Albers. Nineteen thirty-seven had been a quieter year for exhibitions, but Austin arranged concerts, film programs, and many more magic performances. He also managed to spend two and a half months in Europe, where he met up with Tchelitchew and with Jim Soby together with Nellie Howland. Throughout his travels he found paintings for “Modern Art from 1900 to 1937,” which opened the February after the Filling Station performance. “Constructions in Space” by Naum Gabo followed.

But except for those individuals like Albers and Gabo to whom abstract art offered a necessary reprieve from worldly events, for many people it was becoming difficult to think of art in a vacuum. This wasn’t true only for European painters like Miró and Balthus, but also for the individuals closely connected with those painters. Travelers to Europe were confronting the prospect of war before it became a crucial issue in America. Whether they were looking at Picasso’s latest work, following the German Expressionists, or just heeding the latest news, they couldn’t avoid reality the way that more isolated Americans could.

On October 9, 1938, an article appeared in the Hartford Courant with the headline “A.E. Austin Tells of War Ado Abroad.”

A.E. Austin went abroad to talk about art and confesses that most of his time was spent with persons who simply would not discuss anything but the war which they believed was certain to come. France was within hours of mobilization, Austin reported, and there was a false report that Hitler was marching on Czechoslovakia, he said.

“The report was, of course, absolutely unfounded,” he said, but the scars were so bad that no one wanted to sell or show pictures. The paintings in the Louvre had been removed. The French people who hadn’t believed war possible suddenly decided that it might just be something they would have to go through. They didn’t become excited but their faces were solemn. There was no laughter on the street.

With no laughter on the street in Paris, and no paintings to buy or borrow, it was getting harder to keep smiling in America as well. The mood of New York was changing too. Austin and Hitchcock began to cut down on their trips into the city; prospects for exhibitions and entertainments were rapidly shrinking.

Austin did, however, manage to divert Hartford for a while longer. But not only were the splashes slighter and fewer, they no longer avoided the dark realities of life. At the end of 1938 Austin borrowed from Julien Levy an enormous Tchelitchew canvas called Phenomena. This conglomeration of grotesques in a landscape of volcanic mountains and bizarre buildings put parodies of Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Christian Bérard, Virgil Thomson, Edith Sitwell, and Tchelitchew himself alongside visages of Hitler and Mussolini. Depicting both the saviors as well as the despots of Western civilization, it made no one look good. Shortly after Phenomena was shown, Tchelitchew designed a backdrop for a performance of the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo at Hartford’s Bushnell Memorial Auditorium. It included six hands positioned to communicate with the twenty-five students from the American School for the Deaf in West Hartford who were at the back of the orchestra. Austin would do what he could to make the arts available for a larger public.

But in spite of the occasional high point, the pace was slackening at the Atheneum. There were no major shows in 1939. At the start of 1940 the museum showed “Some New Forms of Beauty, 1909 to 1936”—sixty-nine works from Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme, among them paintings by Albers, de Chirico, Duchamp, Gorky, Gris, Kandinsky, Klee, Léger, Malevich, Miró, Nolde, Schwitters, and Villon—but this was no longer unusual material. For one thing, people in various parts of America had now caught on; the “new forms of beauty” had become standard fare for a greater audience. The Museum of Modern Art, already a decade old, had made its impact.

Early in 1942, Austin organized an exhibition of first-rate paintings all for sale at under a thousand dollars. The catalog voiced Austin’s hope that Hartford’s citizens, either individually or through their groups or clubs, would buy some of this art and give it to the Atheneum. There were some fine opportunities. Austin had arranged loans from eight art galleries—Durlacher, Julien Levy, and Pierre Matisse among them—that included two Kensetts for $150 each, a Cuyp for $850, a Utrillo for $750, three Salvator Rosas priced from $500 to $900, a Siqueiros for $500, Balthus’s Girl with a Cat for $850, a Tchelitchew for $450, three Picassos, works by Miró and Matta, and drawings by Boucher, Delacroix, Matisse, and Goya. Yet even with such a fine idea, few of the paintings found their way into the Atheneum’s collection. Austin next took another show from Julien Levy. Called “Painters of Fantasy,” it had work by de Chirico and Ernst, as well as the perpetual court favorites: Léonide, Bérman, and Bérard. But here, too, the public was no longer there. With America’s entry into the war, most people had chosen to focus on reality. Mrs. Richard Bissell, who had had a leading role in both the Venetian fete and the Paper Ball, now turned her energies toward a benefit sale at the museum on behalf of the British War Relief Society.

In 1942 an Association of Arts for Defense was formed in the dance studio of Alwin Nikolais, not far from the museum. Nikolais was chairman, Austin vice chairman. But unlike Eddie Warburg, Austin was unable to change course entirely. Lincoln Kirstein had said he had his antennae up for what was happening; if that meant World War II, then Austin would make the theme of soldiery a drawing card to the Atheneum. At the start of 1943 he mounted an exhibition called “Men in Arms,” its catalog a patriotic, star-studded red, white, and blue. The message of its paintings was the glamour and nobility of donning a uniform, even if that idea slightly took on the tone of a costume party. For Austin to borrow what he did for that 1943 exhibition was no small achievement. Drawing heavily on New York galleries, he put together a remarkable group of paintings including works by artists ranging from Lorenzo di Credi, Francesco Guardi, Rubens, El Greco, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Paolo Veronese to Gilbert Stuart, Delacroix, Géricault, Derain, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, and William Gropper. The show portrayed the laughing side of army life as well as the rigors of battle. The diversity of the pictures suggested the universality of taking up arms. It also ennobled that act. To glorify, and to find the light side of things, was what Chick Austin could be counted on to do.

Not that Austin saw war as only marching bands and shining armor. The tenor of the art he acquired for the Atheneum as battle raged in Europe reflected devastation above all. In 1942 Austin bought—with fourteen hundred dollars from the James Thrall Soby Allocation Fund—Max Ernst’s Europe After the Rains. In 1943, again using funds from the Soby allocation, Austin bought Yves Tanguy’s 5 Strangers. Painted two years earlier, the canvas depicted an inexplicable ghost town. The tone could not have offered a more strident contrast to the qualities of the works that Austin had been purchasing only a few years earlier—the flippant optimism of the Mirós, the joy of the Lifar ballet art, and the positive assuredness of the Mondrian.

But what was increasingly interesting Austin more than art of any sort was theater. In 1941 he played Hamlet to the music Virgil Thomson had composed for Leslie Howard. In May of 1943 he starred in, and made the costumes for, the play ’Tis Pity, by John Ford, set to music by Paul Bowles. Then, that July, he requested and was granted a one-year paid leave of absence from Hartford. The official story was that “he was tired and felt that he needed ‘fresh ideas’ to carry on his work. He said of his plans for the leave, ‘I just want to wander.’ ”²⁸

After this sabbatical, Austin returned to Hartford. He gave up his position as director, but, at the start of 1945, set about working on a catalog of the Sumner Collection. It was very much like Alfred Barr’s role at the Museum of Modern Art at the same time. Barr had been removed from his position as director, but still had his hand in things. Functioning as deposed kings, these men could not quite give up the domain they had built to such a peak. But in May of 1945 Chick Austin left Hartford once and for all. He and Helen rented out their house on Scarborough Street, bought a place in Los Angeles, and—with Virgil Thomson in the car—headed for Hollywood.

By the time Austin had left Hartford, Jim Soby had also gone onto other things. In 1939 he had joined the Museum of Modern Art’s Junior Advisory Committee. He was basing his activities more and more in New York. In 1940 he was appointed to both the Acquisitions and Photography committees at the Modern, and in 1942 he became a trustee—a position he would hold until his death thirty-seven years later. Alfred Barr replaced Austin as Soby’s primary mentor. Barr became one of his closest friends, and he one of Barr’s truest allies.

Soby moved to New York in February 1942 to direct the Modern’s Armed Services Program—a project that further opened the museum to soldiers and sailors and helped provide art supplies to military training camps. When at the start of 1943 he was appointed the Modern’s assistant director and director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, he finally gave up his position as assistant secretary of the Atheneum. The Museum of Modern Art would be his workplace from then on. He ran the Armed Services Program until the end of the war, and although he was to keep his house in Farmington for quite some time, the Atheneum would never again be his base of operation.

IV

World War II marked the end of the period when American culture could be run from the seat of one’s pants. Since 1945, it has been virtually impossible to do things with the impromptu style in which Kirstein, Warburg, Mongan, Austin, and Soby had previously functioned. Nor could there be more covert operations to acquire collections like the Albertina; the arts have left the realm of the inner sanctum and become very public.

Since the Second World War, art exhibitions, ballet performances, and opera premieres have become part of a national, multimillion-dollar industry. The costs have increased dramatically, and the government and giant corporations have taken much of the responsibility. Even extremely wealthy patrons like Paul Mellon or J. Paul Getty have made their decisions in carefully structured collaboration with universities or federal agencies. If Lincoln Kirstein had previously engineered ballet performances in the Warburgs’ backyard, now he could arrange them in a large public theater with the support of New York City and countless other donors. Calder and Picasso and Surrealism have taken their places in every major museum around the country. What was once relegated to two small rooms over the Harvard Coop, or to the squash court, is given full honor behind marble porticos and in grand climate-controlled halls.

What Kirstein, Warburg, Mongan, Austin, and Soby managed to do before the start of World War II, and the way they lived then, would never again be the same. Not only had priorities changed, but the fun was gone. Everyone needed to readjust after 1945. The war had made their world entirely different, both economically and socially. Moreover, these individuals had in their own lives moved on from the years when everything seemed possible, and entertainment rich, to middle age and the time when the value of earlier pleasures and beliefs is less certain. Each would build on what he or she had done before the war, but for none of them could there be a repetition of what had occurred at a unique time in history and in their own personal developments.

After the war, Edward Forbes was given a second opportunity to find Chick Austin a job. On his sabbatical in Hollywood Austin had helped found the Gates Theatre Studio and had designed the occasional set, but although he returned to Hollywood after his resignation from the Atheneum in January of 1945, in the long run it was not the place for him. Later that year, his old mentor from the Fogg was in Sarasota, Florida, when Florida’s governor was looking for a director to open the state-owned John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art. Forbes recommended Austin as the best person in the country to take the post. In April of 1946 he was appointed, and at the end of the year the renovated galleries of the Ringling opened to the public.

That summer, Austin also opened a summer theater in the barn of the estate he had inherited from his mother in Windham, New Hampshire. He produced, designed sets and costumes, and performed there. He soon appeared on the stage in Sarasota as well, after joining a local drama group there. In 1948 he opened the Museum of the American Circus near the Ringling; the next year he mounted an exhibition called “Art, Carnival, and the Circus.” Meanwhile, he kept up his usual Austin round of activities. He acquired Baroque paintings and showed modern ones. He arranged concerts, film programs, and readings by people like Dame Edith and Sir Osbert Sitwell. Then, in March of 1952 he installed, in Sarasota, a fine small eighteenth-century Italian playhouse from Asolo, where it had been torn apart by the Fascists. The gem of a theater opened with a performance of Pergolesi and Mozart with sets by himself and Eugene Berman. Austin brought to Sarasota everything from Desiderio and Rubens to Renoir, Tchelitchew, and Picasso.

In 1957, when he was fifty-six years old, Chick Austin died. Today his legacy can be felt above all in the extraordinary paintings ranging from Caravaggio, Luca Giordano, Tintoretto, Louis Le Nain, Goya, and Corot to Balthus, Dali, Ernst, Miró, and Mondrian—along with Lifar’s collection of ballet art—at the Wads worth Atheneum.

After the end of the war, Jim Soby’s association with the Museum of Modern Art lasted for the rest of his productive life. With the Modern as his base, he was able to support the art he believed in—quite free of the sort of controversy he met up with in Hartford. An increasing number of people were now on the side of the art he wanted to buy, exhibit, and write about. In addition to chairing MoMA’s Department of Painting and Sculpture intermittently until 1957, periodically chairing the Committee on Museum Collections, and remaining a trustee until the time of his death in 1979, Soby directed many major exhibitions in the 1940s and 1950s. He and Nellie took a floor-through apartment on East Seventy-ninth Street, and frequently entertained artists and museum people. Above all, Soby wrote prodigiously. His insightful and articulate texts include After Picasso, Salvador Dali (1941), The Early Chirico (1941), Tchelitchew (1942), Romantic Painting in America (written with Dorothy Miller in 1943), Georges Rouault (1945), Ben Shahn (1947), The Prints of Paul Klee (1947), Contemporary Painters (1948), XXth Century Italian Art (written with Alfred Barr in 1949), Amedeo Modigliani (1951), Giorgio de Chirico (1955), Balthus (1956), Arp (1958), Juan Gris (1958), and Joan Miró (1959); periodically he would bring out revised editions of these volumes. Soby’s succinct prose easily led readers to an understanding of both the visual and literary sides of the art he discussed. This was true not only in the monographs, but also in the articles he wrote regularly for The Saturday Review of Literature. His pieces there, which were assembled in the 1957 book Modern art and the new past, were a model of clear perceptions and straightforward writing that opened the magazine’s readership to the merits of both contemporary and older art of which they would otherwise have been unaware. No less an authority than Paul Sachs would say of Soby’s writing in these essays, “Free of all pedantry he does what few closet scholars ever do—he conjures vision with words. He allows us to share his delight in details and he holds us entranced and exhilarated by revealing qualities in works of art that might escape our less practiced vision.”²⁹

Soby also continued to collect on a major scale. Sometimes this meant selling a picture. Although he swapped fewer works than in the early years, he did sell Derain’s Bagpiper. Having paid fourteen thousand dollars for it in 1930, he received eighty-five hundred for it in 1949; Curt Valentin, who sold it for him, had received ten thousand from which he had deducted a 15 percent commission. But the loss did not bother Soby; profit and investment were not the goals of his art collecting. He bought paintings because he could not resist them, and sold them only when they lost their emotional hold on him. In the 1940s and 1950s he acquired, in addition to Miró’s Still Life with Old Shoe, two other extremely important Mirós—the 1929 Portrait of Mrs. Mills in 1750 and the 1937–38 Self Portrait; a Morandi still life; several Yves Tanguys; major paintings by Francis Bacon; Joseph Cornell’s Taglioni’s Jewel Casket; an extraordinarily delicate painted bronze figure by Giacometti; some large canvases by Matta; Marini bronzes; a Peter Blume; and a Dubuffet. He was generally ahead of public taste, often buying work that the larger audience would only come around to years later; in 1958 he bought Jasper Johns’s encaustic White Target when it was fresh from the easel—long before most collectors would have dreamed of considering it. Almost as soon as he acquired some of these paintings, Soby began to transfer them—along with his earlier purchases—to the Modern’s permanent collection, a process completed by his will after his death.

Not that Soby’s life always took a straight and easy course. At times the perfect New England gentleman was more than ever like a surreal character. Even when he was based in New York, Soby kept his house in Farmington, and in 1951 he created a scandal that was front-page news in Hartford. He had fallen madly for a woman who was married to one of his best Farmington friends and had two sons. The woman got a divorce in order to marry Soby. The ensuing custody battle, much publicized, dragged in everyone from child psychiatrists to an angry nanny, and made much of the new Mrs. Soby’s heavy drinking.

By the time of the trial, greater Hartford had become too sticky a place to live, even on weekends. Jim Soby and his third wife, Melissa, switched their country address to New Canaan, again to a Greek Revival house with the large Calder outside—this time minus its well.

By the time Soby died in 1979, ambiguity and haze, whatever their horrors and drawbacks, had won out. But the presence of his art collection—above all the de Chiricos and Mirós, and Balthus’s Street—today is one of the major glories of the Museum of Modern Art, and his books continue to elucidate some of the most obscure art of this century with insights and ease.

Lincoln Kirstein’s achievements since the war until the time of this writing defy measure. He has worked in numerous capacities as a curator, impresario, and official adviser on the arts. In 1978 a bibliography was printed of his published writings ranging from fiction and poetry to stories for ballets and books and articles on dance, the visual arts, and other areas of culture. It has 473 entries. Above all else, Kirstein has made his mark as the general director of the New York City Ballet, which he and Balanchine started in 1948. The American Ballet had lasted from 1935 to 1938, and the Ballet Caravan from 1936 to 1940. The NYCB was, and is, the culmination of their efforts together.

Portrait of James Thrall Soby with Jacob Epstein’s Portrait of Oriel Ross. (Photo Credit 7.3)

Kirstein has remained relatively quiet and behind the scenes—in keeping with his understated listing on The Hound & Horn masthead and the anonymity of his essays for the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art flyers. But in both his positive and negative views, he has vehemently opposed prevailing trends. He has publicly taken apart certain establishment institutions and tastes:

Lincoln and Fidelma Kirstein in the salon on East Nineteenth Street, photographed by Cecil Beaton, 1957.

The museums have been taken over by the dealers, and the appreciation of art is really the appreciation of negotiable value.… With the Manet show [held in 1983 at the Metropolitan Museum] no one looks at the paintings or realizes what a lousy painter he was. They have just been in the precincts of status and they can rub some of this magic off on themselves.… [Manet was] clumsy, easy to look at, unfinished, no interest in psychology whatsoever—a simple French bourgeois hedonist.…

One of the worst influences in cultural history is the Museum of Modern Art. It is a corrupt combination of dealer taste, marketing, and journalism, and it has nothing to do with the essentials of what made art whatever it was for the last two thousand years.…

Modern art, as I see it, is nothing but a terrible inflation of a kind of cancerous self-indulgence, the great availability of the media, the terrible effects of behaviorism and of the idea of progressive education.…

There are very few people who look at anything, and if they do they’re not equipped to look at it.³⁰

Agnes Mongan, Mexico, 1945. (Photo Credit 7.2)

In this lack of faith in the audience at large, Kirstein has grown even more cynical than Eddie Warburg was after Bryn Mawr and the Stravinsky Festival. Having once tried so energetically to educate the public and sway popular taste, on one level Kirstein lost his faith. Yet this has not prevented him from taking action where he can, primarily through his writing and the management of the ballet. Kirstein has done his best to see his taste take hold, by doing things like persuading Nelson Rockefeller to hire Philip Johnson to design the New York State Theater when Wallace Harrison was the architect for the rest of Lincoln Center. Unlike Warburg, Kirstein found the arts at their best to have sustaining power. Although contemptuous of trends, institutions, and the general public—and famous for the arrogance of his diatribes—he has still remained staunchly loyal to his personal notions of quality. He has written tirelessly in defense of his chosen painters and sculptors, and has championed dance with unique fervor and knowledge. The magic he felt as he watched those performances of Diaghilev’s troupe at Covent Garden in 1929 has never worn off. And until 1989 Kirstein remained director of his and Balanchine’s ballet company and president of their school—fulfilling that dream for which he, Eddie Warburg, Chick Austin, and Jim Soby had signed that affidavit fifty years before George Balanchine’s death in 1983.

• • •

Agnes Mongan is another of the young stalwarts whose early passions have never waned. More than for any of the others, art continued to affirm her faith in life and to nourish her sense of purpose. And to some degree the world came around to esteeming Mongan and her discoveries. Having frequently claimed that for a woman to succeed she “merely had to be better than the men,” she was just that. In 1947 Mongan was finally given the title of curator of drawings at the Fogg, and in 1954 her name appeared in the Harvard course catalog. But although her name became synonymous with the Fogg and she generally had the honor of escorting prestigious visitors through its collections, it was still many years before Mongan could take her rightful position as the museum’s director. In the mid-1950s Alfred Barr went before the Harvard Corporation to urge that they appoint her to that post, but it was more than ten years later that the corporation did so. When she became the Fogg’s director in 1969, she was the second woman in America—perhaps anywhere in the world—to direct a major museum, Adelyn Breeskin at the Baltimore Museum of Art being her sole predecessor.

Mongan continued to work in close cooperation with Bernard Berenson. As more people began to visit I Tatti in the 1950s, he wrote to her frequently about what he wanted the villa to be, and she kept him alert to the pertinent politics at Harvard and in other American institutions. Few people could offer more direct, trenchant assessments of others. Of John Walker—who Berenson had said was like a son to him, and who had become the second and longtime director of the National Gallery in Washington—Mongan wrote Berenson in 1948,

John I’m afraid will never again do a serious, original, careful or inspired job. For one thing his social engagements would not permit him the time—such a job would need persistent reflection. For another he shares the National Gallery’s suspicion of learning.

Mongan felt that her sister, who had become the curator of prints there, was the one true scholar at the National Gallery. And in this same letter in which she denigrated Walker, she added, “The only person I know who gets in deeper is Lincoln Kirstein. And he gets more done because he not only has more drive, he has more intellect.”³¹

In 1961, two years after Berenson died at the age of ninety-four, I Tatti became the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, since which time Agnes Mongan has helped raise money for its restoration and worked in myriad ways to help the villa perpetuate the finest sides of its owner’s legacy.

At Harvard, Mongan taught a seminar from the 1950s to the 1970s in which she trained some of the most important curators in America. Since World War II she has edited numerous volumes; continued to write articles, reviews, catalogs, and books; and lectured all over the world. Her scholarship remains unique. She succeeded in identifying some key sixteenth-century portraits as being by François Clouet because she recognized the handwriting of Catherine de Médicis’s secretary on one of them, which, since Clouet had worked for Catherine, enabled her to make the connection. Her research on the image of dogs in art led her to the discovery that seeing-eye dogs go back to the 1480s; the evidence is in a painting by Sassetta.

Like Kirstein, Mongan is relentless in her sense of standards. She crusades against the misuse of the word “exhibit,” which she will point out is simply one object in an exhibition. She champions the cause of natural light in museums. The strong code and faith in her own beliefs that Mongan developed as a young girl have never failed her. But neither has her diplomacy. Mongan has devoted herself to the place where she once had to sneak out of the library, and she has thrived there. Time and again in the recent past she has been acknowledged as one of Harvard’s treasures, and even if she has never again tried to make an acquisition that rivals the Albertina, she has expanded and improved the Fogg’s collection and activities with fierce institutional loyalty.

Mongan appears to have had few regrets about not having led the usual life of women of her generation. She enjoys recalling that she had marriage proposals but turned them down in favor of her independence.³² In the 1940s, at a time when she was trying to learn Spanish, she had written Bernard Berenson, “It would be a good deal easier if I had, like some other ladies, more leisure.”³³ Her voice was clearly ironic. The reason she wanted to learn Spanish was that she had just been in Guatemala and had joined the Pan American Council, of far more interest to her than leisure time. Although she often had health problems and had the hectic pace of her life interrupted by illnesses, she also kept up a breathless schedule of travel, work, and socializing. Scholarly yet funny, warm yet prickly, she has a rare engagement in living.

Writing and scholarship were the best avenues open; Mongan took them gladly. By allying herself with as venerable an institution as Harvard, she endured certain obstacles as a Catholic and a woman, but she also gained access to the upper echelons of American and European life, and succeeded in making a mark. To do so Mongan was willing at first to assume the role of apprentice, to work for the establishment and be the young legs and eyes for Sachs and Berenson. She felt “always in the background, never in the foreground.”³⁴ But it did not take her long to know her own strength and speak and write with an unhesitant clip and the authority of true knowledge. She maintained the tradition of real intellectual achievement and hard work in which she was raised. Mongan had never lost that craving and energy for knowledge she voiced to her father as a young girl, and which he did his best to encourage. Her only unfulfilled wish in life was to be an Orientalist, but she ultimately felt it would be foolish to take up the art of a culture of which one did not know the languages.

Agnes Mongan once wrote to Berenson, “How can one ever know enough or look enough? I try to keep my eyes open, but there are so many interruptions & so many little things to keep track of in our mad American life that looking & reading often come in sadly near the end of time.”³⁵ But she has looked and read, and seen and conveyed, more than most people.

By the end of the war, Eddie Warburg had signed more affidavits than he could even remember to help refugees come to America. This was often at the request of Alfred Barr. After the fall of Paris in 1940, Barr had helped many artists escape to the United States, and the Museum of Modern Art had become a sort of life raft. Margaret Barr was often the person in charge of finding sponsors who would guarantee that the refugees would not be a burden to the U.S. government and that they were not Communists, and would provide about four hundred dollars for each person’s passage. She worked on this with Varian Fry—another graduate of the Harvard class of 1930, and one of the founders and editors of The Hound & Horn—and with Ingrid Warburg. Curt Valentin, who had moved from Berlin to New York and opened an American gallery, also helped. They knew that Eddie could be counted on to assist—just as his cousin Bettina, through the American Psychoanalytic Association, enabled over two hundred people in her field to reach America—by finding jobs for them as high school teachers, or doing whatever else it took. In the 1950s when Eddie received a drawing from Marc Chagall inscribed “with thanks” and asked “thanks for what?” he learned that Chagall’s were among the papers he had personally expedited.

Something Eddie Warburg had learned in the safe confines of his mother’s sitting room may have given him his special compassion for European Jews. One day in the mid-1930s, when Frieda was upset because of news of Hitler’s progress, she told Eddie that she had realized in the middle of the previous night that there was something important that she had neglected to tell him—that he was the only one of her children who had been “made in Germany.” Whatever its source, Eddie’s empathy and sense of obligation exceeded that of his brothers. When he returned to New York after the war, he worked as hard as national chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee—a position he held for a total of twenty-five years—as he had for the fledgling ballet company. He also served five terms as national chairman of the United Jewish Appeal.

With the issue of refugees, Warburg never had to ask himself why he was doing something. In the ballet years, the rushes of enthusiasm had been accompanied by his own flip, skeptical voice; now he could speak with conviction and intensity and feel that his audience really listened. One of his first listeners was John Hersey. Inspired by Warburg’s account of the Warsaw ghetto, related at dinner one evening, Hersey began research for a short piece for The New Yorker. Warburg led him to various sources and invited him along as a guest on his next trip to Israel, the outcome of which was Hersey’s The Wall. Results like that, and the money he could raise for Israel and for American Jewish causes, were worth fighting for.

Meanwhile, the family was moving more toward service and away from possessions. Frieda dispossessed herself of the house in the country and gave 1109 Fifth to the Jewish Theological Seminary to become the Jewish Museum. While his mother was ridding herself of real estate, Edward began to unload the paintings that had once occupied 1109’s squash court. Over the years the high points of his collection had been at the Museum of Modern Art and in other public institutions almost as much as in his various residences. Gradually the paintings were becoming a burden; not only were there the loans to organize, but there were also insurance and security precautions, and the need for conservation-correct storage. Warburg sold Blue Boy—the painting the customs broker had insisted on reducing to one thousand dollars fetched a million dollars—as well as the Klees. Klee’s Departure of the Ships now belongs to the National Gallery in Berlin—the city where its owner had first admired the artist’s work in Curt Valentin’s gallery. Warburg gave Lachaise’s Dynamo Mother—as well as the Calder wire figures, other Lachaises, the large Siquieros, sculpture by Epstein, Barlach, and Noguchi, Mies van der Rohe’s “Brno” chairs, and photographs by Abbott, Steichen, and Weston—to the Museum of Modern Art. He made similar gifts to the Smith College Art Museum, the Busch Reisinger Museum at Harvard, and the Fogg.

In addition to his work for Jewish charities, Eddie Warburg has served on almost as many boards as his father. He has also been a Regent of New York State. And even if visual arts were no longer the priority they had been in the Harvard and Bryn Mawr days, for years he remained on the board of the Museum of Modern Art. He also served as director of public relations at the Metropolitan Museum, under Thomas Hoving. While this was in fact a paying job—the only one Warburg has ever held—he always returned his earnings to the Metropolitan as part of his annual contribution.

In the past several decades Eddie Warburg has covered the United States and shuttled back and forth between America and Israel to meet with world leaders and raise funds. He has been the recipient of countless honors, and the subject of testimonials. But they haven’t meant much more to him than his parents’ coffered ceilings did when he was working for Calder or Balanchine, and he has always tried to go one step further.