The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  Convincing the board of the efficacy of a move downtown—a return to the Museum’s Eighth Street roots—Adam negotiated the purchase of a large advantageous site between the High Line and the Hudson River, in what would soon become the hottest neighborhood in New York. Architect Renzo Piano became an inspired partner, creating a building that succeeded beyond all expectations in taking into account the Whitney’s character. Now chair emeritus, my mother followed the developments of the Whitney’s downtown building project with keen interest, visiting the site several times and continuing to embolden prospective patrons to become involved in the life of the Museum. With her soulful perspective, she remains an active, interested, and intelligent ambassador and sounding board who cherishes her many friendships with artists and everyone involved with the Museum.

  At the Whitney dedication on May 1, 2015, she introduced First Lady Michelle Obama. My mother—beautiful in a simple copper jacket with a banded collar, cheered by an elegant scarf fixed with a subtle bee pin made by the wife of a Whitney guard—spoke about her grandmother’s goals to increase the audience for American art while finding satisfaction in her work as a sculptor:

  In speaking of her life as an artist, she said: ‘I love my work because it has made me happy and given me confidence in myself, and because it stretches into the future. … It is something that I have made for myself and that I possess and cannot lose for it is part of myself.’

  When my grandmother spoke at the opening of the Whitney in 1931, she said that her collection of art would form the nucleus of this Museum, ‘devoted exclusively to American art—a Museum that will grow and increase in importance as we ourselves grow.’

  She continued: ‘My chief desire is that you share with me the joy which I have received from these works of art. It is especially at times like these that we need to look to the spiritual. In art we find it. It takes us into a world of beauty not too far removed from any of us.’

  At the time that she spoke these words, the country had entered the Great Depression. But I think that in the world we inhabit today, these words have never been truer. The need for art has never been greater, for art can lift us, it can tell us who we are, who we’ve been, and who we can be. I believe, as Gertrude did, that art is a force for goodness in the world and it is limitless.

  Gertrude’s ideas about the role of art in our lives and the centrality of the artist are as fresh and vital today as they were when she founded the Museum. And, my mother’s words in this heartfelt book—an honest reflection that is also the history of an institution in transition—lend wisdom and encouragement as the Museum carries Gertrude’s ideals into the twenty-first century.

  Fiona Donovan

  September 2016

  Preface

  Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist in the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

  — Marcel Proust, Time Regained

  I want to start this book with a recognition of what’s most important: art and artists.

  I’m infinitely grateful for the joy I’ve received, through the Whitney Museum of American Art, from art and artists. Art remains, in the ancient biblical words, “when evening falls, and the busy world is hushed, and our work is done.” I can look at a Johns painting or a sculpture by Andrew Lord, I can read a poem by Mary Oliver, or listen to “Drumming” by Steve Reich, or watch Trisha Brown dancing, or Laurie Anderson performing — or just remember them. A thousand other artists of our time connect me to as many worlds of vision and emotion, unsettle my preconceptions, and enrich my life immeasurably. As George Steiner says, “The encounter with the aesthetic is, together with certain modes of religious and metaphysical experience, the most ‘ingressive,’ transformative summons available to human experiencing” (Real Presences, University of Chicago Press, 1989).

  All contemporary art isn’t equal. For me, though, an open mind is essential. Who knows what wondrous, strange object might fly in? I often can’t see the new right away, and so don’t like making quick judgments. As one entices a wily trout with the right fly, so one teases out the meaning of a work of art — like the trout, it’s not always on the surface, one must explore the depths. In order to reap the reward, I must bring all I can of my mind and feelings to the search. Sometimes it’s easy, more often it takes a lot of time and effort, and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all. I’ve taken what I need, too, not necessarily what the artist intended.

  A Greek temple silhouetted against an azure sky has revealed an ideal world. Michaelangelo’s Vatican ceiling has deepened my sense of humanity. Rubens has delighted me with his understanding of the love of men and women. In Picasso I’ve seen that we are fragmented, complex, but ultimately whole. Agnes Martin and Richard Tuttle, in different ways, have helped me to believe in happiness and innocence.

  In my desire to embrace it all, I lack the discrimmination necessary for a curator, art historian, or critic — but I’m none of these. As a lover, I won’t apologize for my enthusiasm, or for ignoring art I don’t like.

  The imposing granite Marcel Breuer building standing proudly at the corner of Madison Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street in New York City houses the Museum founded in 1930 by my remarkable grandmother, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

  One woman’s perception that American artists needed an institution of their own, her vision, her personal collection of work by contemporary American artists, and her indefatigable dedication created the Whitney Museum of American Art, one of New York City’s — and the world’s — major art institutions. Today, it is renowned both for its architecture and for what the Museum represents artistically.

  Gertrude headed her Museum with Juliana Force, the director she chose, until she died in 1942. After her death, her daughter, Flora Whitney Miller, took the helm.

  Then it passed to me. And today, my daughter Fiona, a fourth-generation Whitney woman, is an active board member of the Museum.

  This is the story of that eminent institution, of my grandmother, of our family — all integral parts of my own memoir. And yet, this memoir does what all memoirs do; it tells only part of the story.

  Don’t memoirs allow writers to keep from revealing all they know?

  One

  Ever since I can remember, the Museum hovered at the edges of my consciousness.

  At first, like New York, the Museum was another faraway place to which my parents would disappear for weeks at a time to see “Mama,” my mother’s mother, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. “Mummy needs to see her Mummy, too, just like you do,” my nurses would say. “She’ll be back soon.” Small comfort. She was surely too old to need a mummy.

  The image of the Museum grew as I did. Much later, in the ’50s, it came to symbolize a completely different way of life from mine.

  I had chosen marriage and family over college and career. My mother, wanting me home, arranging for me to “come out” in society, had persuaded me to give up my dream of going to Bryn Mawr College to attend, instead, New York City’s Barnard. Barnard is an excellent college, but living at home was a return, in part, to my protected childhood. Loving my mother, still wanting her approval, I had agreed. And then, that same year, at eighteen, I fell in love with Michael Henry Irving, a Harvard graduate who had served in the Navy as an officer in the Pacific theater during World War II. Astonishingly, this charming, intelligent friend of my older brother’s loved me too — and I was bowled over. Besides wanting to be with Mike, I felt stifled by what I perceived as my parents’ indolent
lifestyle and saw marriage as a chance to have an independent, adult life with a mature, responsible man. We were married in June of 1947.

  Over the next ten years, we had four children. I aimed to be the perfect wife and mother, in contrast, of course, to my own mother, and to her mother, my grandmother, Gertrude. Not for me the round of parties, beaux, trips, or a career spiriting me away from the home where I belonged. Mike’s and my relationship would be a loving, happy one forever. Our roles, while intersecting and blending, would be clear: he would be the primary worker outside the home, on the way to becoming the successful architect he deserved to be, while I would keep house, care for the children, and limit my outside activities to the school and church within which our children would flourish. And in fact this is the way we lived for many years. Mike was a kind, loving, and thoughtful husband and father, and a very hardworking architect who designed distinguished houses and commercial buildings in Connecticut, where we lived after our first few years in New Jersey and Long Island. We took vacations with the children every summer in the Adirondacks, fishing, swimming, and camping in the very same places where my great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and I had fished, swum, and camped. Later, we also cruised up and down the coast of New England — because Mike was a skilled sailor, and the children grew to love sailing as much as he did.

  I felt, at that time, morally superior to my grandmother, whom I criticized for having neglected her young children. While my mother had survived marvelously well, her brother and sister had, I thought, been harmed by their parents’ lives of traveling, parties, and work away from them, and had passed on their wounded psyches to their own children. Without really knowing, I made unjustified assumptions, blaming my grandmother for the woes of my daring and dazzling but often troubled cousins. Today, I see that I was overlooking part of my own nature. The whole idea of being such a perfect wife and mother was impossible; I was hiding my subconscious aspirations. When I came to recognize them, in the ’70s, that ideal family life no longer seemed possible. I didn’t manage to live in several worlds, as my grandmother had, but chose instead to leave our home and the husband I had loved for so many years.

  All the while, I know now, my grandmother secretly attracted me. Her ways, her style, her behavior, were compelling. Not only had she transcended mediocrity, she had eluded the traditionally confining role of women. Moreover, after her death, she had left to the world the rich legacy of her talents: her large monuments, smaller bronzes, and stone carvings, as well as a whole museum bearing her name. An institution — I was looking through my much younger eyes — where art was all over the walls and floors for us to see. Where creativity reigned. Where people laughed and drank and discussed ideas. Where one could penetrate the mysteries of art. And seek the truth.

  In 1942 my mother, Gertrude’s oldest and closest child, had inherited her mantle.

  In 1967 my mother, Flora Whitney Miller, passed it on to me.

  As I spin out the thread of my life, stretching from a small southern town to a northern New Mexico village, and now back again to New York City, it weaves and knots with people and places. A mother and a father, two husbands, four children and their husbands or wives, all greatly loved. Eight grandchildren, a great-grandchild. A sister, two brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends. That memorable grandmother. Houses, which did or did not become homes, on red clay roads, sandy roads, paved roads; near forests, rivers, mountains, oceans, or lakes.

  Much more past than future, now.

  Joye Cottage, the house I grew up in and still dream of, at the corner of Whiskey Road and Easey Street, in Aiken, South Carolina; the house Mike designed for us in the Connecticut woods, with big windows and warm colors and materials, that gave our family a sense of both openness and intimacy; and the adobe house where I lived in the ’90s in Taos, New Mexico, are like shells, protecting, sheltering, and expanding as we grow. The sense of peace emanating from those New Mexican walls, from the landscape, from the air itself, was familiar, linked emotionally to that house in Aiken with expansive radiating wings that, as a child, I wore like a skin.

  So different, those two villages, those homes, from New York’s noisy, exciting energy, where temptations to look, to listen, and to play abound. In Aiken, as a child, I learned to read, to be alone. In Taos, I found the same kind of serenity in which to write. In New York, where I lived in the late ’70s and ’80s, I could not have written this book.

  One August night in Taos, wakeful, as mountains loomed black in the brilliance of a full moon and coyotes howled, I drifted in memory to the Aiken of my childhood. I saw again the long-ago firelight flicker on my bedroom ceiling as I fell asleep, hearing the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, while a mockingbird sang outside my bedroom, perched in the magnolia tree whose luminous, waxy flowers’ sweet scent weighted the air.

  I heard again the stair creak under the worn red carpet as my brother Leverett and I, at about, respectively, the ages of six and nine, tiptoed past our sleeping parents’ doors. We passed quietly through the big, square red and white living room, past the fox heads mounted on the wall over the bar, through the billiard room where the smell of chalk lingered on the tips of cues lined up against the wall, to the dining room where we sniffed the odor of pancakes and syrup from the kitchen beyond. That house rambles forever, as, in memory, I walk through its rooms: the wide porches with their “Aiken sofas” covered in pale corduroy, the yellow “dove room” where my father eats his poached eggs on a tray borne by fat and dignified Herbert, the British butler, who props the Herald Tribune on a silver holder for my father to read. My older, braver siblings call him “Dirty Herb,” and demand Horses’ Necks and other exotic drinks for themselves and their gang, undeterred by the sometimes hysterical scolding of Sis, their French governess, whom they adore but seldom obey. Afternoons, Sis and I take long walks on the soft roads, across log bridges, past bushes of sweet star jasmine, by big houses set in green lawns where gardeners clip and rake, and further, to cabins with swept dirt yards where we wave at children with tight braids. Singing, singing, singing — she’s teaching me French, and French history as well. Sis describes the dreadful revolution as we bellow out “Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons!” and then we launch into my favorite, the song of the “petit navire qui n ‘avait ja-ja-jamais navigué” who ends up in a stewpot for his starving shipmates. I took for granted, somehow, the bloodthirsty nature of French nursery songs, although that brave little sailor tugged at my heart for years.

  Across the hall, in the pink bedroom, my mother sleeps away most of the morning. At each corner of her French bed, four twisted, inlaid brass posts stand like guardian angels, holding a tulle canopy high over her head. Her dark curls froth over monogrammed linen sheets. By the time her tiny, frazzled French maid Josephine — “Peenabo” to my older sister and brother, who played infuriating tricks on her — allows me in, around eleven, my mother is awake, wearing a quilted satin bedjacket, leaning against her lacy pillows, eating tiny triangles of toast, sipping coffee from a delicate Sevres cup, and talking on the telephone. Captivating smells waft around her: honey, Turkish cigarettes, Chanel perfume, her own particular fragrance.

  Oh, to be grown-up!

  My images of adult life come from my mother and father, my idols. They bring me visions of future happiness. Of pleasure, once freed from the discipline and regularity imposed on my brother and me. Of the never-ending joys of reading, shooting, riding, and fishing. Of late evenings with friends, drinking and playing games after delicious dinners.

  I’m always longing for more attention from my parents than I get. A reward, I’ve decided, that will come from accomplishment, manners, and “being good.” I’m well on the way to becoming a perfectionist, a burden that haunts me still.

  These moments of longing recur when I hear, for instance, all these decades later, the sounds of clinking ice at someone else’s cocktail time.

  My father has taught me to carefully measure gin and vermouth in the silver shak
er. The quiet of tea time, now over, swells as people arrive, talk, tell stories, laugh. Sometimes my parents argue. Oblivious, fixed in the center, I shake and pour and measure again. Nine years old, and I can make the consummate martini. I am showered with praise, until for the moment I have enough.

  Summon all your energy, I tell myself then. Will the darkness away. It is merely a phantom.

  Good cheer is real. The world is in order. God’s in his heaven. Be perfect, I tell myself. Win love.

  May to November, from 1992 to 1998, my second husband Sydney and I lived in Taos, where I wrote most of this book. We looked over a green well-watered valley where horses and sheep grazed, where orchards flourished. Storms and brilliant sun, sunrise and sunset, turned the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the distance from green to blue to red to purple, as clouds, lightning, or rainbows made vivid patterns on their rocky flanks. Infinite space lay before us, although we shared adobe walls with neighbors on two sides.

  As Sydney and I moved into our old house, I watched Antonio Martinez, the carpenter, punch a doorway in a wall about two hundred years old. The powdery surface fell away, revealing thirty-pound adobe bricks, their binding straw still gold in the shadows.

  Antonio removed bricks reverently. Then he mixed a paste of mud and water, and patched and sealed the doorway. Our neighbor, Jim Heese, applied the final coat along the edges: a thin solution of terra vaillita, a pink-beige mud painted on with sheepskin in big sloppy zigzags that would look smooth and creamy when dry. Jim taught me the ancient technique. I delighted in the mud’s smell and silkiness, and in the rhythm of sweeping the walls with the wet, furry scrap of wool. Our house was connected to Jim’s, in the Spanish village way, and for six years Jim was the best neighbor anyone could ever have. We worked side by side in the garden, we ate together, we hiked way up to a mountain lake, we talked about everything. Jim expanded my experience with clay by taking me to his pottery class, where I learned with great satisfaction to make bowls from an Apache master. That sharing walls could lead to such friendship seemed a miracle, beyond even the magic of the house itself and the surrounding landscape.