“One of di Suvero’s favorite forms is the bucket of the steam shovel. … Clawing or grasping, the bucket resembles the cupped human hand, harking back to the first wax, plaster, and bronze sculptures that di Suvero exhibited. But then all machines, whose fragments he salvages, are extensions of the hand.”
Mark especially likes these lines from Emily Dickinson’s Of All the Sounds Despatched Abroad:
The Wind does — working like a Hand / Whose fingers comb the Sky.
He himself has said, “I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. … art is a gift which we give to others.” Affirming his conviction, he formed the Athena Foundation, and from a wasteland near his studio in Long Island City he created a garden. Unemployed neighborhood boys cleared this beautiful site overlooking the East River and Manhattan, and now Socrates Sculpture Park presents work by known and unknown artists to the community and to an international art audience.
In his art and in his actions, di Suvero gives us in full measure what he hopes the Park will bring to others: “the energy of hope, the embrace of paradox, the overcoming of despair.”
Trustees were pleased by all the publicity about the di Suvero show, and proud of Tom’s bold outreach to a broader public.
But the cost to the Museum was phenomenal.
Tom hadn’t taken into account the added expense of placing the work outside the Museum, as well as inside. His decision to do that led to the biggest deficit the Museum had ever incurred, more than $500,000. Both old and new board members were horrified. Joel Ehrenkranz and his budget and operations committee expressed their anger.
Howard was especially distressed. He had a minor stroke in 1976, and it seemed to all of us as if the Museum’s financial problems had been part of the cause. I remember how his wife, Jean, shielded him from all contact with the Whitney. She wouldn’t allow me to talk with him.
And Tom must have felt lost without his mentor and supporter, without Howard’s guidance and wisdom.
Howard recovered, but he was never able to resume his active presidency. His passions seemed muted, his frequent advice to me was “Wait, there’s no rush.” His love for art, artists, and the Whitney itself had to adjust to his physical weakness, as the Lipmans spent more and more time away from New York. Howard finally told me he had to resign as president.
Fourteen
Inevitably, in almost half a century my life had changed dramatically. First, from a stable, disciplined childhood of love, lessons, and considerable loneliness to a brand-new domesticity, requiring order, hard work, and all the self-reliance my British nanny had tried to instill in me. There had been more than a few moments of despair. A child with an agonizing earache, a crying baby, the inconsolable misery of a teenager, coming all at once, and all to the wild rhythms of a son’s rock band.
I well remember the unrelenting concentration of tending small children all day. I couldn’t do it, I told myself, not without more sleep! I was incapable of giving enough love, enough energy, enough selflessness, enough anything. And then, unexpectedly, would come the reward. The baby’s smile, its warm, clean smell, and strong suck … or the irrepressible giggles of a small, happy child … Cully telling a joke he’d made up, at dinner, while we all roared. I was so proud of Duncan, his mind quickening, connecting a current newspaper headline to his American history lesson. Playing her guitar, Michelle sang haunting songs, sweetly, fervently — “Blowin’ in the Wind,” or “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme” — with the others joining in for the chorus.
And the whole summer of Oliver. 1963, I believe. Directed by Anne von Ziegesar and me, with rehearsals in Anne and Franz’s garden, it had all started when we’d seen the play in New York, and both Cully and his classmate Lisa von Ziegesar had wished they could be in it. We decided that since we couldn’t make that happen, we’d do it ourselves, with both families and a few others taking part. Cully played Oliver — he was about eight — and I can see him still, so small and brave, singing his heart out or begging for porridge in the most pathetic voice, “Please, Sir, may I have some more?” Dunc as leader of the boys was wild, fierce, and handsome. Miche was bold and brazen in a tight red dress, as the hussy Nancy, and her song rang out clear and lovely. Fiona, the littlest “boy,” took a fearless stance as she belted out “Food, Glorious Food” with the others. All our friends came to the actual performance, and we served them “hot sausage and mustard” at intermission, as the words in the song mandated.
The feelings our family gave me, for instance, when we sat together, a blizzard raging outside, and ate with pleasure the spaghetti I’d made, were to me magical moments. Then the goodness of life would stir from deep within. And sometimes would stay for a long while.
I wanted those meals to be different from the ones I remembered as a small child, seated at a little table in the corner of the big dining room in Aiken. Seeking distraction from the tiresome company of little brother and nurse, pink and green majolica captured my eye. The high sideboard held stippled green plates, bowls, cups, a teapot. I was especially intrigued by the cups, bubble gum pink inside, with narrow perforated shelves on one side. Hard to imagine a long table filled with men sipping delicately, their mustaches held carefully from their coffee on these ceramic supports, but that’s what my father had described, so it must be true. Our meals often consisted of bananas and rice, a cure, according to a new theory, for my brother’s debilitating asthma and allergies. Whenever more interesting meals appeared, so did our older brother and sister and their gang, stealing the best bits despite our pleas.
Later, we frequently enjoyed meals with the grown-ups. But I remember Mother telling me that when I was three or four, I refused to eat.
“We went abroad on the Bremen, that year,” she said proudly, “and I fed you all your meals. That’s when you began to eat.”
She didn’t seem to wonder why I’d stopped.
Eating. A basic need, also a metaphor for love.
As the children grew up, the precarious balance between my family and my outside interests would sometimes tip. The Museum, college, the GVW book, new friends, beckoned. But why did I consider leaving safety once again, leaving the warm, familiar world my husband and I had built?
I was moving, in the ’70s, away from that world and from my good, loving, moral, and supportive husband. Some of the reasons are private, not for this memoir, which is about the Whitney Museum. As our interests were growing in different directions, and I was drawn to other people and other worlds, I was not giving our marriage the attention and nurturing it needed in order to flourish. Increasingly absent, both physically and emotionally, I felt guilty. With reason. Mike and I had shared so much. Not only our children and the Museum, but our extended friends and families, who loved us as a couple. When I broke the bond that had given us so many satisfying years, I betrayed his love and trust. Had it all been false?
No. Those were fruitful years, filled with true joys. I hold them dear and value them highly. They were the central years in both our lives, years during which we developed and became who we are. We grew through the love and support we gave each other.
Our children and their spouses, our eight grandchildren, our great-granddaughter, remain the linchpins of my life. The binding straw, as in the adobe bricks of the Taos house, that ties me to this earth. The connection from past to future.
I have asked myself often about this time of separating from our life together: was it inevitable? And I answer differently at different times. I could have turned to the inner world of study and writing that attracts me still. I’ll never know what that choice would have meant. Instead, I chose New York, exchanging one responsibility for another. The Museum over my marriage. Perhaps, although there were other factors leading to my decision, I was starting to recognize the part of me that sought accomplishment and recognition in the bigger world — the world of my grandmother.
I knew it was my turn to
take charge. Here’s a journal entry I wrote while visiting my mother in Hobe Sound:
Today, we called on Permelia Reed, she talked of a sermon she had heard “about decision — you can’t go on forever sitting in two chairs without falling in between them.” Ah yes. Always I have been ambivalent … my standards have been too high since childhood, for myself and consequently for others, and I do believe I can change this, at least. … Read more of Chinese philosophy. … I am going to try to be alone more, to think and relax and write more. …
… I am unable to concentrate on anything but household matters [later, at home in Connecticut]. … No one is requiring this of me, quite on the contrary, really. It’s as deep within me as a root. But so is the desire to work. … I might as well not try and tell … I am like Gertrude in that way. I hide things deep inside so people can’t hurt me by laughing at them or just not taking them seriously. It all seems to show how difficult it is for me to take myself seriously.
For some time, I had been upset about Tom’s attitude toward certain curators to whom I felt close, curators who had worked at the Museum for years, curators who were bright and energetic. Tom, however, the first director to come from the outside, had virtually no connection to them. Their way wasn’t his way. He wanted his own team. Later, I came to understand this better, but in those days I refused to hear criticisms of the curators or of any other staff members.
First, Elke Solomon, upset over her deteriorating relationship with Tom, offered to resign. Tom accepted with alacrity. Elke, intending her offer only as evidence of her distress, was appalled. So was I. I tried to talk about this to Tom, knowing he could and would make his own decision. But to let go of Elke, who had taught me so much? Cared so much? Elke, with her special knowledge and sensitivity? It made no sense. At the time, I probably didn’t take the Museum’s money problems as seriously as I might have. They were surely affecting all Tom’s decisions.
Soon after, Tom announced to the executive committee and the budget and operations committee, meeting jointly to consider the alarming deficit, that he had fired curator Marcia Tucker. I was aghast.
Among the justifications for his action, he told us that when he’d asked Marcia what she’d recommend buying from the last Biennial, she’d said, “Everything, because the artists need that so much.” She’d voiced exactly the policy Tom wanted to change — no longer must the need of artists be primary, but the quality of the art. This account may well have been exaggerated; still, it represented a historic attitude Tom was determined to change.
What Tom didn’t realize was that for me, Marcia represented what the Whitney was all about. By firing her, Tom seemed to make clear his intention to drastically decrease the Whitney’s commitment to the developing artist. Although he had the technical right to make all decisions about staff, taking such a controversial action without consulting the board was a slap in the face, and I feared it would demoralize the Museum’s staff. I was terribly hurt that he hadn’t even told me about his decision to fire Marcia, that he hadn’t asked my advice.
He proposed to replace Marcia with Tom Hess, distinguished scholar, writer, and later a curator at the Metropolitan Museum. Others at the meeting, however, objected to Hess’s personality. Uninformed, in anger, I voted with them against Tom’s proposal.
Only later, regretting my vote, did I realize what strength Tom Hess would have brought to the Museum. We needed such a curator, whose experience, education, and connoisseur’s eye would have helped us toward the goals stated in the long range planning committee report. He would have filled the role of senior curator. But Tom had not articulated all this, had not prepared the way.
Increasingly dispirited, feeling deep loyalty to Marcia, I informed the committee after that meeting that I could no longer work with Tom. I would resign from the board.
Two days later, a delegation comprised of Bob Friedman and Arthur Altschul visited Mike and me on Sixty-sixth Street, in our apartment on the second floor of my great-grandfather’s carriage house. Bob and Arthur expressed serious concerns about the Museum’s welfare, and reminded me of my family’s responsibility to the Whitney: “Directors and staff come and go, but your family remains. Trustees remain.”
That was the crux of their argument.
While they agreed that problems existed, while they regretted Marcia’s firing, they urged me to reconsider my resignation. They wanted me there. I was so angry that I didn’t completely hear them, and it would be years before I realized the long-range implications of their insistence — a lifelong commitment, regardless of the circumstances. Finally, however, I accepted their suggestion that, as leader of the Museum, I could, with their support, arrange for Tom’s orderly departure better than anyone.
I see now that my reaction was about more than Marcia. First, I hated confrontations. And then, surely I sensed that it wouldn’t be the last time I couldn’t control a situation. That I was entering a world where my sentiments and experience wouldn’t help me deal with this intransigent world, with its manipulations and cruelties. That I might be well out of my depth. Yet, in deciding to remain, I tacitly agreed to enter this world, to participate in some of the practices a good part of me wanted to reject.
On October 1, 1976, Tom came to see me on Sixty-sixth Street. He began by expressing his worries about the budget. Then he went on to Marcia. She was only interested in unknown artists, he said, and she brought her radical, feminist political agenda into her selections. And she was always out of the Museum, in artists’ studios. He could never find her.
I argued.
Our conversation, nervous and guarded, resolved nothing.
I went on seething as articles in the press began to appear about Marcia, as letters arrived from her supporters.
And one from Marcia, too, addressed to all the trustees:
As you know, I have been relieved of my responsibilities as curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art effective December 31st, 1976. I will leave with a deep sense of loss and regret. I have been told by Tom Armstrong that the reason for the termination of my services is a shift in the emphasis on contemporary art toward its acquisition and preservation, and away from its exhibition and written scholarly evaluation. I have also been led to understand by him that my continual involvement with artists outside the Museum is no longer viable in terms of the Museum’s present and future direction.
When the Whitney Museum was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, its purpose was to encourage, support, and preserve the best art being made by living American artists. I have, since my appointment as curator here in 1969, done my best to maintain and enhance the tradition for which the Museum has achieved prominence.
As a scholar, it has always been my conviction that it is the Museum’s responsibility not only to reflect the consensus of educated opinion by which art history is made, but also to seek out the best work at its source, rather than only after it has attained commercial exposure. …
Marcia told me more. Then I began to get new information.
About how the staff was uneasy, now, sensing a lack of conviction and direction in the Museum.
About how Tom criticized his predecessors, saying the Museum was disorganized, the curators, weak, exhibitions and catalogues, second-rate.
About how staff, as well as board members, criticized Tom for his extravagance and his “obsession with celebrities.”
About how David Hupert, head of the education department, disagreed with Tom’s emphasis on the permanent collection, his most dearly held goal, saying other museums had better collections of American art, and with our budget, we could never catch up. Tom, Hupert was convinced, confused education with public relations. And the Whitney had a “big heart and a small head.” It should be the place where people could see what was going on; it should give contemporary art the support of a major institution, while retaining its identity as the place viewers can find out what contemporary art is and how it develops.
At the same time board
committees complained about Tom’s aloofness, saying he had no respect for them.
“I don’t have time to fuss around with trustee committees,” Tom told me, and that was increasingly obvious. A few months later I understood what he’d meant. The committees themselves were the problem. They, with the years, had become overloaded with nontrustee members whose interest had flagged, who contributed neither funds nor knowledge. We badly needed to revitalize these committees.
Tom’s priority, then and always, was the good of the Museum. Courageous enough to face the difficulties of its becoming an important public institution, he saw more clearly than most of us what would be required: more quality-oriented programs, trustees and committee members to give more money, and more space. And he didn’t mind whose toes he stepped on along the way.
At that time, I was angry at Tom’s seeming condescension toward the many people who had helped us to this stage, and for our past accomplishments. But Victor Ganz’s criticisms still reverberated, balancing this anger.
The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made Page 24
