The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  I had set goals for myself, and believed I was succeeding. Everything about my life seemed ideal. Why then did I sometimes feel unsatisfied? I longed for more time to myself, time to reflect, read, or write, undisturbed by the needs of little ones. How could I be so selfish? Impatient? Anxious? Exhausted? Why was it so hard to be that perfect person whose image already was becoming a bit blurry?

  And what does all this have to do with the Whitney Museum?

  I had always been restless, attracted to different kinds of people and activities. As I began to grow up during my marriage, to accept the needs I’d denied for so long, I espoused liberal political causes, demonstrating against nuclear testing, marching for equal rights, working for an interracial summer program; attracted still to difference. Intrigued by people black, French, Jewish, rich, poor, creative, energetic. Wanting to plumb their secrets, to understand everything in the world. A “groupie,” uneducated, but craving education, wanting to learn, still questing. Spending one day a week away from New Canaan at the Whitney Museum meant a great deal to me.

  Juliana Force, the Whitney’s first director, died in the summer of 1948. Museum minutes record that she was “courageous, swift in decision, prompt in action,” that she had fought gallantly for the recognition of “progressive” art, and had lived to see her belief in it vindicated. She was “always on the side of art that was alive and against the reactionary and dead.” Another big part of the Whitney’s history was gone.

  My parents were in Paris. Mike and I, with our first child, Michelle, were spending our vacation in the Adirondacks, in a log cabin within a family enclave of forests, streams, lakes, and rustic camps. My parents asked me to represent them at Juliana’s funeral. My uncle C. V. Whitney, then a Museum trustee, who summered there as well, flew me in his plane to New York. I only had shorts and bathing suits with me for our month on Forked Lake, so my glamorous aunt Eleanor, a singer, outfitted me with a sophisticated black dress, gloves, and hat. Off we went to New York, and there I met for the first time a large group of artists, all mourning their great champion. As organ music swelled through the lofty chancel, as we sang the old hymns of life eternal, I sensed the deep feelings flowing around me. This compelling woman I’d barely known had even had an impact on me, and I too felt sorrow. Talking with artists after the service, I was very taken by what they told me of her importance to them and to their work, and realized then that this was a world I wanted to know better. I was, however, all too aware that its members accepted me merely because of my heritage. My grandmother.

  From the very beginning, a mix of emotions, reasons, and motives informed my feelings about the Museum.

  Until shortly before her death, all the Museum staff but Juliana had been artists, and Hermon More, the next director, was no exception. I remember him only as a quiet, gentle man with glasses, looking more like a banker than an artist. His curators, Lloyd Goodrich and John I. H. Baur, were the first professional art historians to hold positions of authority at the Whitney. Both were “old school” gentlemen, and both were vivid characters, while differing markedly from each other. Lloyd became director shortly after the move to Fifty-fourth Street, and Jack, associate director.

  What was the Whitney like in the ’50s, and why did I want to be part of it? Why was I following in the path of my mother and my grandmother, as, long ago, I had expressly decided never to do?

  For one thing, as my children grew older, my feeling of loyalty to my extended family increased. So did my awareness that I might one day succeed my mother at the Museum — that she, in fact, was preparing me for that. I’d always backed away from identifying with my family’s past. But what if I could bring the inheritance I’d rejected productively into the present? Into active change and growth? I’d be fulfilling a responsibility, not simply enjoying the residue of long-ago glory. I’d be earning my way.

  For another, at the Museum I felt a tremendous charge of energy, a powerful emanation of ideas and possibilities. The art I found extraordinary, puzzling, intriguing; the people, compelling. And being there with my parents — because my father was a trustee as well as my mother — gave me a whole new relationship with them; for the first time, we were working together as equals. I loved that. I loved them!

  My father, as architect “Gus” Noel’s partner, had been involved in designing the new building and was very proud of it. I was, too. After walking by the beautiful sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art, one passed under the stylized American eagle our friend, the sculptor Lewis “Skinny” Iselin, had cast for the Museum’s entry. On the left stretched a long counter, where, behind it, sat a striking woman, erect and dignified. Marie Appleton. “Miss Appleton,” to my parents and to me. Dressed entirely in black, with a fluffy halo of white hair, a bold silver spiral Alexander Calder had given her pinned over her heart, she presented the aristocratic, elegant aspect of the Museum to all who entered. Sitting beside her, greeting people, in my first official role at the Museum, I was thrilled and proud to represent the Whitney. And I loved hearing Miss Appleton’s stories about the old days on Eighth Street.

  After visiting the galleries, people would ask questions, make comments about the building or the art, and then pay admission to enter MoMA through a passage behind the sculpture court — as they didn’t have to at the Whitney.

  Upstairs, a small windowed room with plants, a desk, and comfy sofas held sculpture by my grandmother. People enjoyed relaxing in this echo of the old Museum. I admired the galleries’ modernity with all the latest in lighting, walls, and floors, and thought the whole place more appropriate than the old building had been — but despite the design collaboration between my father’s architectural firm and Bruce Buttfield, decorator of the old Whitney, the new interiors had lost, I now think, the intimacy and warmth of the old. Never mind; it all pleased me, and my mother too, who had been the most responsible for the new building.

  How I loved hanging around the Whitney! Everyone seemed eager to help me learn. Wiry Jack Martin, with his Scottish brogue and great twinkle in his eye, installed exhibitions with immense skill and speed. I remember Ellsworth Kelly, exacting and critical, saying that thanks to Jack not one of his many exhibitions had ever been installed so fast or so expertly, anywhere, as at the Whitney. And then there was slender, energetic Margaret McKellar, who seemed to actually run the Museum while allowing the director and curators to think they were the bosses. Efficient, hard-working, in a trim suit and low-heeled black pumps, with a warm smile and wry humor, she oversaw the tiny staff — secretary, engineer, preparator, carpenter, guards — keeping a sharp eye on curators and numbers. Margie (with a hard “g”) taught me precious details — I still address envelopes in her correct formal style — and she supervised my reorganization of the Museum’s artists’ files. Aha! Now, I thought, I’m approaching the heart of the matter. Familiar with art since childhood, predisposed to love it, in these photographs, letters, and documents I’d surely discover its secrets.

  What I did find was some of the Whitney’s history.

  When, for example, I met Stuart Davis in front of his painting Egg Beater, No. 1, I already knew that he had first shown his work at the Whitney Studio Club and that my grandmother had paid for his only trip to Paris in 1928, a seminal experience in the development of his painting. His stay made him realize, as he’s said, the “enormous vitality of the American atmosphere, as compared to Europe, and made me regard the necessity of working in New York as a positive advantage.”

  “Paris,” John Russell wrote years later, “was wide open to the intelligent high-stepping American and the dollar went a long, long way.” George Gershwin was writing his American in Paris, and Davis’s paintings from that time were love letters, too. I knew, from the papers in his folder, that his drawing had appeared in the Little Review with the first publication in this country of an extract from James Joyce’s Ulysses. I had read his recent interview with director Hermon More and curator Jack Baur, in which Davis said:

  �
�The Museum in its early days played a unique role in giving the American artist the public importance that he actually should have had. … There was no other center where he was given any importance … it not only gave him a place to show his work but also did a great deal in tangible support, in buying paintings and giving money to live on. … Nobody else did it.”

  Thus certain principles impressed me right away. The worth of the artist, as well as the work. The relationship between Museum and artist, built on trust, supportiveness, friendship, and faith.

  When, at another opening, I met Edward Hopper, I remembered the photographs and writings I had filed, including those about his first exhibition in 1920 at the Whitney Studio Club. Lloyd Goodrich, a close friend and one of the first to recognize the worth of Hopper’s painting, had written, “It is hard to think of another painter who is getting more of the quality of America in his canvases than Edward Hopper.” Hopper himself, agreeing with my grandmother’s feelings about the specific character of American art, had written:

  “Now or in the near future American art should be weaned from its French mother. … We should not be quite certain of the crystallization of the art of America into something native and distinct, were it not that our drama, our literature, and our architecture show very evident signs of doing just that thing.”

  And Hopper’s words about artists brought me insights, not only into his work, but into all art:

  “Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. … The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form, and design. The term ‘life’ as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it implies all of existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it.”

  Inspiring words. How could I develop an inner life, when I could barely keep up with the outer? Look. Read. Write. Think. So I told myself.

  A few years later, in the mid-’60s, traveling with our four children on Cape Cod, Mike and I parked our VW camper in a flat, deserted spot near Truro. We had just set up our tent and were heading for the nearby beach when a tall menacing figure came striding toward us across the cranberry bog.

  “You’re in my view!” he roared, bearing down.

  The children stopped in their tracks. Mike and I recognized Hopper and rushed toward him, our hands outstretched. As soon as we identified ourselves as part of the Whitney “family,” he greeted us warmly and invited us to his clapboard house for tea. We listened to Jo Hopper talk of their lives on the Cape, while Edward gazed beyond her at the landscape we had seen so often in his paintings. He took us to see his small bare studio, where a blank canvas sat on his easel by the window facing the sea. We hoped that the children would remember meeting this towering figure. I was glad to make a connection, through the Hoppers, between them and the Museum — I didn’t want my two lives to be completely separated.

  When Josephine Hopper died in 1968, a few years after her husband, the Whitney inherited Hopper’s estate, more than two thousand works of art. I’m sure that the Hopper collection, one of our major treasures, is thanks to his long relationship with the Whitney and especially with Lloyd Goodrich. Now people flock to see Hopper’s paintings, to ponder their meaning. I do too. Is the woman bathed in golden sunlight, sitting on an empty bed drawing on her stockings, blessed or abandoned by a lover? The serenity of Early Sunday Morning evokes spirituality in an ordinary street in an ordinary city, leaving it up to us to populate its spaces, or not. And the mysterious women on the porch of a country house in Second Story Sunlight—are they mother and daughter? nesting together, or living in that house as strangers? Do they await a man, or men? Hallowed by clear ocean light, or raked? Sexual, though remote, the younger woman stretches like a cat on the railing. We learn from Jo’s notes that Hopper nicknamed her “Toots … a good Toots, alert but not obstreperous — a lamb in wolf’s clothing.” Later, Lloyd quoted Hopper: “This picture is an attempt to paint sunlight as white, with almost no yellow pigment in the white. Any psychological idea will have to be supplied by the viewer.” Yes, one can spin tales endlessly about Hopper’s paintings, but it’s the paintings themselves that draw us in, compelling our attention with their spare intensity of design and color, and, above all, their light.

  I’m especially fond of a photograph of my mother and Edward Hopper at the Whitney, both in profile, greeting each other with big smiles in front of Early Sunday Morning.

  In the early ’60s I worked with Jack Baur, and came to admire this scholar with a big handsome head, a craggy face, and a generous mouth. He was then associate director, and later, from 1968 to 1974, director of the Whitney. Once a professor of English at Yale, he had come from the Brooklyn Museum to the Whitney in 1951 as part-time curator of painting and sculpture. From September 1, 1952, to September 1, 1953, he was paid one thousand dollars! Passionate about art and literature, Jack had a fine sense of humor and absolutely no pretensions. He soon became my friend and closest Museum counselor. Despite his dedication to the Whitney, Jack had put the Museum in its proper perspective and managed to keep it there. His family came first — three children and his intense, energetic wife Louisa, a Quaker and teacher. Even as director, Jack had no trouble leaving a trustees meeting if it continued past train time. He would simply get up, stuff his papers into his ancient briefcase next to a Trollope novel, don his raincoat and brown fedora, and depart.

  Jack was a father figure to his young staff. Kind and supportive, he would suggest rather than demand, guide rather than challenge. Sometimes I would hear his exasperation when a curator’s essay wasn’t good enough, but that curator was only conscious of Jack’s patience in improving it. It was Jack’s way, to work with employees who weren’t doing well enough rather than to replace them. In our private discussions, however, his criticisms could be wonderfully pointed and eloquent. Funny, too.

  Yes, I was infatuated with the Museum. Enchanted by my new life there, I saw what I wanted to see. As usual, alas, it was the possibility for perfection. If only the Museum had more money, there’d be no limit to what it could bring to the world. Jack, of course, was central to this ideal.

  Jack and my mother got along famously. He told wonderful stories about her: in 1951, when he met her in the old Museum on Eighth Street, for instance, he’d just been appointed curator and was “feeling quite grand,” as he later wrote in the memorial book about my mother, the “Flora” book:

  “In the opening hubbub I was talking to the sculptor William Zorach, and failed to hear the name of an effervescent lady who interrupted us to congratulate me on my new job. I shrugged her off, quite abruptly I’m afraid, then asked Bill who she was. When he stopped laughing, he told me.

  “That Flora forgave me was a mark of her usual generosity. She had the great gift of putting people at their ease — even artists … one could multiply examples of Flora’s genuine concern for artists. … Her kindness tamed Philip Evergood’s distrust of the rich and dispelled Charles Burchfield’s social inarticulateness. After the latter’s one-man show at the Whitney in nineteen fifty-six, Flora took his whole family back to Ten Gracie Square for a champagne dinner and bought his Goldenrod in December Her spirit played a crucial part in establishing and nourishing the Whitney’s policy of supporting living artists. We all loved her.”

  And my mother loved Jack. When he retired, she praised him in a ditty that also recalled the other directors she’d felt close to. The ditty ended with the lines “And Hermon and Lloyd and Jack and I/Were minced together like pie.”

  What a different ambiance, in those days! While we needed more money, that need was less obtrusive, less apparent. Jack’s mode was gentlemanly. Not weak, but mindful of the past. His care for artists enabled him to make generous judgments about them, especially if they had shown at the Whitney for years. He honored old associations when, for example, selecting artists for the Biennial
. In addition, his awareness and social concern for problems led him, in the ’60s, to set up various programs for the disadvantaged.

  In the late ’70s, some questioned the validity of those programs. Why should the only museum of contemporary American art in the country, with its great influence and potential, spend valuable time and hard-to-find money on classes for a small number of troubled adolescents? How was this program relevant to the Museum’s mission of showing and buying the best of contemporary American art and interpreting it to the public?

  And should the Whitney, for old times’ sake, continue to show artists whose work no longer seemed vital?

  I admired Jack’s integrity, his ideas, and his belief in the Whitney’s traditional role, and, at that time, gave his policies strong support. Later still, working with a new director, I changed my mind about some of them.

  When I first worked with Jack, he was curating the Bernard Reder exhibition, which opened on September 26, 1961. Today, I think of this exhibition and this experience as quintessential Jack: his distress over Reder’s refugee experience, his respect for Reder’s unrecognized sculpture, his enthusiastic response to the work and to the man.

  Reder, a Hasidic Jew born in Chernivtsi, after many difficult journeys had come to America during World War II His sculpture, suffused with the religious traditions and mythology of his people, came filtered through his own vivid imagination. His big bronzes evoke marvels: flowers sprouting from cats, angels playing immense organs and cellos, voluptuous nude women, one bearing a vast house of cards, another blowing a trumpet looking more like a huge flower. They were joyous and exuberant.