Jack thought him a genius, so, of course, I did, too.
The whole Museum was given over to Reder, the biggest one-person exhibition the Museum had attempted since the move uptown. Special ramps allowed visitors to view the sculptures from all angles, in keeping with Reder’s principles of “volumetricity.” As Jack wrote, this was “the functioning of forms in the round — no frontality, no dominant views, but an organization equally meaningful from every angle and every elevation. … To Reder, this is more than an aesthetic credo. It is a principle of life and a touchstone of morality. It is the embodiment of coherence, from which any departure is a step toward chaos. By projection it is the harmony of love and the meaning of religion.” His words reveal not only the essence of Reder, but, even more, the essence of Jack.
Armed with a brand new tape recorder, I went along to record Jack’s interviews with Reder for the catalogue. To my horror, I later discovered I had pressed the wrong button and the whole tape was blank. It’s a measure of Jack’s tolerance that, with hardly a reproach, he gave me a second chance. Luckily, I did it right.
All this time, the Reders were becoming fast friends with me and my family, spending weekends with us in Connecticut and storing three big sculptures by our pond. In my photo album, our children perch within them. Gutza Reder, “Benga’s” wife, explained that he started every day with “three soldiers”: a radish, a scallion, and a carrot. He ate with the same gusto with which he lived his life, and he delighted our children with his stories and games. At one point he said, “Paper! Quick!” Inspiration was upon him and it couldn’t wait. On a sheet of newsprint, he drew an angel with large breasts descending from heaven onto a horse; then he made a small clay sculpture, which he planned to enlarge to monumental size. Alas, he died before he could complete it.
Doris Palca, a marvelous presence at the Whitney for many years, whose ability and commitment brilliantly guided the Whitney’s publishing program, recalls finding forty boxes, each filled with thirty unsold Reder catalogues, when she arrived at the Whitney in the ’60s. Her assistant labeled them “Reder’s Naders”! I imagine they are still in a corner of the Museum’s storage space, dusty reminders of unfulfilled expectations.
Jack’s influence, both on the Museum and on me, was strong. So were his opinions about art. Philip Evergood was one of his favorites, as were Charles Burchfield, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Ben Shahn, and such disparate sculptors as Doris Caesar, Louise Nevelson, David Smith, Elie Nadelman, and Jacques Lipchitz. The list included some abstract artists — Jackson Pollock, Conrad Marca-Relli, Jules Olitski, Stuart Davis, Joan Mitchell, and Jack Tworkov, to name just a few. I think the artists he responded to most shared certain traits: a joy in texture and material, pleasure in the craft involved; a feeling for nature; often, a strong social content or statement. I well recall “Nature in Abstraction,” a show of abstract paintings evoking the landscapes, mountains, rivers, and sea Jack loved.
A favorite image from a few days they spent with us in the Adirondacks: Jack and Louisa, utterly happy, paddling in a canoe through water clear as glass, the dawn light rosy, loons calling crazily through the still air.
Until an administrator joined the staff in the late ’60s, Jack took care of most day-to-day responsibilities. The collection at this time was very much as it had been in my grandmother’s time. The critic, Henry McBride, described it then in “Hail and Farewell,” a piece published in the New York Sun after Gertrude’s death:
“It is not an exaggeration to say that there is not a contemporary artist of note in America who has not been helped by her. Her collection contains something by all of them, and it is constantly growing. Although I was probably its most jealous critic, due to my high ambitions for it, I never detected any arbitrary leanings on Mrs. Whitney’s part, toward any special schools. She was completely liberal, completely open-minded and never demanding. Life to her, apparently, was an uncharted stream, and the artist-explorers upon it who returned with what John Masefield called ‘cargoes’ were gratefully received ‘and no questions asked.’
“When her collection finally crystallized into the Whitney Museum of American Art it was definitely felt in all our art circles that at last we were on our own, that we had cut loose from the apron-strings of Europe and become adult.”
Lloyd and Jack continued the policy of broad collecting — something of everything — but as the number of serious artists proliferated, this procedure became more complicated. I can see, with today’s perspective, that a kind of triage was necessary. Despite a new acquisitions committee providing both knowledge and money, the Whitney often made conservative choices, missing out on some of the early work of artists emerging in the ’50s and ’60s — most obviously, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Frank Stella, but others as well.
Jack’s theme exhibitions, such as “Nature in Abstraction,” “Business Buys American Art,” “Between the Fairs: 25 Years of American Art,” illuminated the collection and included other contemporary art. Concurring with my grandmother’s and Juliana Force’s preference for realism, the most prevalent American style of their time, Jack continued to emphasize it, but with the help and encouragement of new friends of the Museum he also started to exhibit and to buy more “advanced” abstract works. And he also stressed the importance of the word: catalogues must be well written, designed, and illustrated. As educational tools, enduring documents, and historic evidence of the Museum’s exhibitions, these catalogues must be literate, cogent, and illuminating. That they were not thicker and better illustrated came from a lack of money, not ambition. Until the ’60s, the Whitney had never tried to raise money for any purpose but acquisitions, and that, only since 1956.
On January 30, 1958 — the year of the first credit cards and computers, of Eisenhower and Pope John XXIII — I was elected, at twenty-nine, to the Museum’s board of trustees. Also on the board, besides my parents, were Walter G. “Watt” Dunnington, my parents’ lawyer, who had succeeded my grandmother’s lawyer, Frank Crocker; my aunt, Barbara Whitney Headley; and my uncle, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. Neither my aunt nor my uncle ever showed up for a meeting. (They resigned, respectively, in 1962 and 1971.)
At first, I had protested. “I really don’t have the time,” I told my mother. “The children …”
But she was adamant. “It’s the right moment. You can come in once a week, or even once every two weeks.”
“I don’t know enough,” I went on, assuming a thorough grounding in art to be the most necessary attribute for trusteeship. (One of many assumptions I had later to rethink.)
Lloyd Goodrich, about to become the new director, answered that one. “Look,” he told me. He was standing in front of Jackson Pollock’s Number 27, 1950. I’d first seen Pollock’s work in a Whitney Annual on Eighth Street, in 1946, and had been intrigued, drawn to it, but mystified too. “Just look and keep on looking. You’ll have plenty of time later to read and to listen to others and to learn, but the essential thing is to look. Your eye will develop. You’ll start to see.”
And, as I did, a dance, a rhythm, started to appear in the swirling colors.
Michelle and Duncan, ten and seven, were in school. Cully, three, and Fiona, three months, were still at home.
Michelle, born in 1948, was a perfect baby. Her skin looked and felt like rose petals, she smiled with joy when she saw not only her Mummy and Daddy but any friendly human. She took her first steps in the garden of my grandmother’s — then my mother’s — studio in Paris, where my parents had invited us to stay in 1949 while Mike was in architectural school and had summers off. I still have blurry home movies of her wobbling around on the pebbles, and some of pushing her in a stroller with a blue polka-dot sunshade through the Luxembourg Gardens and the Bois de Boulogne. I ascribe the ease with which she learned to speak the language and her affinity for all that is French to that early exposure! As Miche grew, her creativity delighted us: she loved painting, dancing, music, reading. And animals — especi
ally those upon which she could ride. First, she rode our black Labrador retriever; then a donkey, “Shaggy”; and then a number of ponies and horses, who often escaped. We’d get calls at five in the morning: “Your piebald pony is waiting to be picked up at the gas station on Route One-twenty-three.” Because New Canaan was a fairly small town, everyone knew the parentage of not only children but horses, dogs, and cats. That was nice. But there were negative aspects of New Canaan. A conservative, Republican stronghold, its makeup was mostly Protestant and lily-white. The good public schools that had drawn us there reflected this lack of diversity, and we opted for an excellent private school with a broad scholarship program.
Another of Michelle’s qualities showed in the eager welcome she extended, at three, to her baby brother Duncan. After several miscarriages, we had moved into my parents’ house in Long Island so I could stay in bed for weeks and hang on to Dunc. I still have a giant horse pill my doctor, a family friend, gave me as a joke with a card, “All the pills in one.” Born in 1951 on Easter Day, we called our baby “Bunny” for a while in recognition that he symbolized the Easter “newness of life.” Right away, he and Miche were so very close, jealousy was never an issue. When Dunc went off to nursery school at four, his first friend was Ralph Salomon, who now, more than forty years later, is still one of his best friends — a measure of Dune’s loyalty and constancy. Later, the “D team”: Duncan, David, and Dickie, camped out in our woods, cooking hot dogs, winding dough on sticks, and holding them over hot coals to make bread. Later still, with added members, they formed a band, and often practiced in our house, which resounded with “Turn, Turn, Turn,” or “Mr. Tambourine Man” in the Byrds’ style. At school, Dunc played lacrosse, ice hockey, and other team sports with skill and enthusiasm.
After more miscarriages — was I rushing about too much or was it genetic? — in 1955 we had another beautiful boy: Macculloch Miller Irving, named for my father, born without a doctor (who’d fallen back to sleep after my call!). I remember a couple of panicked student nurses saying fruitlessly, “Stop! Stop! You can’t have the baby yet!” Cully was immediately alert, and smiled at us at only two weeks. He and Duncan bonded immediately and forever. Cully had a phenomenal memory, learned to read early, and was a voracious reader. He loved certain movies and songs — he could sing the whole score of “The Music Man,” for instance, or “Oliver,” after playing them only a few times on the record player. Like his brother, he had many friends and a band, this one including a drummer with a huge drum set — the sound when they practiced was quite astonishing. A natural at sports, Cully was an especially good ice hockey player, excelled at lacrosse, and became a long-distance runner.
When Fiona came along, in 1957, the doctor said “Flora, you’d better stop here. Each one gets smaller, and four and a half pounds is going too far.” Fi had to stay in the hospital for a couple of weeks; when I visited, caring nuns were feeding her in a rocking chair and tying an orange ribbon in her bit of hair for Halloween. Cully took her under his wing and was marvelously protective, but at the same time he was involved with his own big brother — and Miche, then ten, was soon to become an adolescent whose pressing concerns didn’t include a baby sister tagging along! (Later the two sisters became extremely close, and remain so today.) So Fiona became independent and savvy early on, developing her own interests and talents. Figure skating (she went to skating camps in odd places, took national tests, and became an expert ice dancer), ballet, riding, sailing, a wide variety of friends — she seemed to know how to parcel out her time, and to enjoy life a lot.
As I look back, I remember, most of all, the happiness. Time has blurred the inevitable mistakes I made from immaturity, frustration, or anger; the sorrows, squabbles, illnesses, worries, and near-disasters. My perpetual exhaustion, during the years of never enough sleep, when babies would awaken for bottles, or nightmares would bring small bodies to our bed. “Mom, I forgot my homework at school!” and off we’d go for a twenty-minute drive there and another twenty back. Once Cully’s friend John Sargent, running through our hallway, crashed through a plate-glass window and I had to rush him, streaming blood, to the hospital. I’d tied his wounds up, who knows why, in the silk scarves my mother had brought me from Paris, and had nearly thrown poor Fiona at my kind neighbor to keep. (John was terrified but OK after many stitches.) Another time, the house we were staying in while skiing in Vermont, an old inn that belonged to my cousin Douglas Burden, burned down on New Year’s Eve with all of us and my sister-in-law and her children asleep inside. We barely escaped, some of us jumping out second-story windows into a blizzard in our night clothes. A really dreadful experience — but even that has faded, today, like an old photograph whose colors are muted and soft. The pain of childbirth, the children’s and my emotional roller coasters, while still in my memory, are outweighed by past joys and overlaid today by the actualities of grandchildren.
But then it was very different. With our house, our garden, an assortment of dogs, cats, guinea pigs, hamsters, chickens, a goat, even a pony, and with very little help, I was needed at home. And I wanted to be there.
I had grown up in a world where everything was done for me: I’d never entered the kitchen, unless invited by the chef (which was rare) or at four in the morning after a debutante ball, when Mum would cook scrambled eggs while we told her all the juicy details of the evening. I couldn’t cook, sew, clean, or do laundry. Had no idea how to manage a house and absolutely no knowledge of babies. Changing a diaper was further from my experience than looking at a painting. And I had no idea at all about money! So I was pleased with my progress. I’d learned many of the skills necessary to be just what I’d wanted to be: an “ordinary” housewife. Now I could cook pretty well, sew, do laundry. Our children were wonderful, I could adhere — sort of — to a budget. I felt wanted, needed, loved, by my husband and our children.
In 1958, when I decided to become a trustee, to do some work at the Museum, I worried. Would my absence from home, even that little bit, cause all kinds of problems? Was I jeopardizing our children’s sense of security, of self-confidence — the very thing I had tried to avoid? Would they fail in school? In life? And all because I had this urge to explore another world? Was I being inconsiderate? Selfish?
Despite all these concerns, I couldn’t help but see the trusteeship as a big step in my life, and I was honored to be thought ready and worthy. The prospect of this new work filled me with excitement.
I accepted.
I could hardly wait to begin.
I don’t remember asking anyone what they’d expect of me, beyond attending meetings. Surely not money, since I had little to spare and had no idea how to raise any. Surely not great knowledge about art or the art world. I see now that I was supposed to follow my mother’s ways, representing the family, being supportive, learning the traditions I’d uphold. These I absorbed quickly as the character of the Museum emerged: it was inclusive, flexible, enthusiastic, playful, responsive to current art, and adventuresome up to a point. But there were differences between my mother and me.
Mum had money to give. She continued to make up the deficit, every year, as long as she could. Could I consider that money a family gift, and feel it was partly mine? When I knew it wasn’t true?
Our personalities were different, too. She was charming, beloved by all. Despite her modesty, she projected a queenly, aristocratic image. I was of another generation — idealistic, unaccepting of the status quo, eager to work, hoping even then to have an impact on the Museum in some significant way.
Meantime, within me, there was luminosity. Just going in the door was magic. The building smelled wonderfully of plaster, paint, and clay, sounds of hammering and sawing in the basement were intriguing, and I sometimes couldn’t resist running my fingers over a marble or bronze sculpture, the better to absorb it, or going so close to a painting I’d feel my nose right up against it. Art and people were enchanting. For the lover, the beloved is perfect. And this glorious institution yiel
ded to me, becoming intimate and tender, without, it seemed, the dangers of a forbidden liaison. In the glow of a good cause, with the imprimatur of all my family, I felt a part of the Whitney’s radiance.
Trustees meetings in 1958 were extremely informal. We’d listen to a few reports and discuss forthcoming exhibitions. After these meetings, Lloyd and my mother and father would drink martinis on the sofa behind the big table we’d just left, laughing and smoking as they recalled the old days on Eighth Street. Oh, those parties, when Juliana Force would tap her favorites on the shoulder, the secret sign to go upstairs to her private apartment, that Victorian wonderland where Shaker chairs met pleated lampshades, where folk art and fine art hung in harmony, where talk, music, dancing, and drinking went on till dawn! Whenever my mother and father and Lloyd reminisced, they brought those days to life for me.
Lloyd, a bundle of energy, drank a lot, loved to talk, seemed to be everywhere; the most important things in his life were art and the Whitney. He was fun to be with, and he gave me confidence in my future role, saying I was like my grandmother, that I’d be a good leader for the Museum. Garrett McCoy described Lloyd’s “great hooded eyes and great prow of a nose … the rumble of that confident, gruff baritone …” He was the first person I knew who’d been psychoanalyzed. Awed, I imagined this explained the ease with which Lloyd could express emotions, strange to me then but appealing. (Maybe it was the martinis, too!) Devoted to Ryder, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins, for years he was the outstanding authority on their work, lecturing and writing major books on them. But always he emphasized the primacy of the eye. Look, look, and look again, he maintained. “Lloyd was a lover first, who became a scholar later,” I said in my tribute to him at the Whitney after his death in 1987.
Much of Lloyd’s time was spent on the American Art Research Council, an organization he’d founded in 1948 at the Whitney to deal with problems of authenticity in American art. He was also involved in those government agencies that dealt with art policy; sometimes he assumed leadership, for example, on the Council on Arts and Government, predecessor organization of the National Endowment for the Arts. In lectures and articles, Lloyd articulated the Museum’s philosophy — Gertrude’s philosophy — in stirring phrases: “This pluralistic art of ours is the appropriate expression of a democratic society, free and fluid, allowing wide scope to individualism.”
The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made Page 13
