We also paid attention to the many other aspects of running the Museum, including exhibitions, education, publications, conservation, and the shop. But these were mainly in Tom’s bailiwick; he and I worked most consistently and intensively together on those primary fields, although each, at one time or another, encompassed the others. He and I agreed perfectly on these main goals.
The first, of course, was the most important. Everything else was based on art, artists, and the permanent collection, the heart and soul of the Museum. It was that first consideration that gave us the most joy and confidence, that made the others worthwhile. Although Tom and his staff made all decisions having to do with artistic matters, trustees could also participate in a number of ways, which we tried to improve and increase, thinking this would bring them pleasure, too. So we held discussions of specific shows at meetings; openings and parties where trustees could meet artists; seminars and classes where trustees could learn more about the Museum’s wide variety of art, ranging from eighteenth and nineteenth-century paintings to the new forms emerging in the ’80s. We planned trips for trustees all over the country and the world, so they could visit museums and galleries. We did everything we could think of to pique trustees’ interest and advance their knowledge. We also invited each trustee to join a programmatic committee, apart from any financially oriented committee on which he or she might be serving.
In the beginning of our partnership, Tom and I evaluated our non-standing committees and found them deficient. To redefine them, to make them work better for the Museum, we decided to change our hit-or-miss process of inviting anyone we found knowledgeable and caring about art to join, and then hoping for the best. In other words, we thought they’d want to contribute money or art. And sometimes, they did.
More and more often, they didn’t. This was terrible. Worst of all, there was again no money in the budget for acquiring art. So we decided to form new committees to support each department: painting and sculpture, drawings, prints, library, film and video, education. For each committee, we’d ask members for a specific minimum contribution, giving that department, then, a minimum budget. Of course, we hoped members would give more.
This was a brand new idea, then, and controversial — one member was outraged. When he resigned, he told me that at another museum they never asked him for anything, they valued him just for his knowledge.
The time staff members spent preparing for committee meetings would become worthwhile, because more significant works of art could be bought for the permanent collection.
Tom felt that, even if we both did the preparatory work, it was up to me as a trustee to do the actual asking for money. Although I still found asking directly for money difficult, it was getting easier all the time. In fact, I found that most people were understanding and even pleased to know exactly what the Museum expected.
We soon put this system to work when we asked people to join the board, making exceptions for those whom we’d asked for other reasons — like scholars, community leaders, and more. And we “grandfathered” current members who couldn’t pay. Meetings varied. With connoisseurs at the drawings committee, discussions were intellectual, impassioned, and the votes reflected these qualities.
The print committee was similar, but had a national flavor, since its members came from all over the country, and would usually arrange to have a festive dinner with the curator and a few artists after its meetings.
At the painting and sculpture committee meetings, discussions tended to be more diffuse, mirroring the current explosion of forms and styles. Curators often brought older pieces along with the new, hoping to add established masterpieces to the collection, but members, often new collectors of new art, preferred to spend their money where their interests lay. Unsure of the work they were sometimes seeing for the first time, they were likely to be inclined toward artists they already knew or collected. Since the “dues” were high — $25,000 a year for this committee — this group was disparate, with members new to us and to the Museum. Some wanted to be educated, while others wanted to educate us.
Although this committee acquired the most important works for the collection, it was more problematic than the others. Once, after voting down a piece the curators felt strongly about, the Museum found other sources of funds and bought it anyway. All hell broke loose. I received angry phone calls from committee members, outraged to find their decision had been bypassed. One member resigned. Another, a generous man with big foundation money, threatened to withdraw his funds, unable to believe the Museum wouldn’t abide by the committee’s vote. This led to endless discussions and changes in policy.
Staff autonomy versus those who give the money is always the issue. As my daughter, Fiona, said of troublesome committee members, while recounting a meeting I had missed, “But they aren’t curators!” Another problem: some committee members, seeing others but not themselves become trustees, resented this slight. Not that I blame them — $25,000 was a very large contribution to make to the Whitney, and they knew it. But every member could not be on the board. We picked those we most wanted for reasons of personality or potential.
I was very upset with a member of our acquisitions committee for questioning Philip Guston’s integrity due to a change in his painting style. Guston’s best known work had been abstract, but he was now making work related to his earlier figurative mode, and this committee member thought his reversal indicated an unacceptable vacillation, a moral weakness. Ridiculous! At the same meeting, Patterson Sims presented Merfrog and Her Pet Fish, by Gilhooley, a marvelously baroque green figure with purple fish twined around her breasts, another crawling up her arm, a large bunch of flowers on her shoulders, and a blissful smile on her face. Lengthy arguments about art versus craft followed, but we did purchase Merfrog. She’s about four feet long and four feet high, a powerful presence. Other ceramic sculptures were on view that afternoon, and the trustees’ room looked like a glistening aqueous cavern. I loved it.
Besides Patterson, many other curators were part of these meetings. Lisa Phillips, for instance, who started as a student in the Museum’s Independent Study Program, and was a curator until the spring of 1999, when she left to become director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Soho. Like a lean and lovely thoroughbred filly, she rushes energetically from New York to Los Angeles, where she and her husband, film director Leon Falk, have a house. She’s everywhere at once, it seems, and — as with all Whitney curators — spends much time in artists’ studios, absorbing the world through their work. She’s introduced us to many artists who’ve become friends, including Terry Winters and his wife, art historian Hendel Teicher. Terry’s vibrant abstractions never seem to lose a human, organic connection; their beauty draws us to search ever deeper. Terry epitomizes the artist who’s as committed, even-tempered, delightful, generous, and good as anyone can be. This I say, knowing that a stereotype exists of the artist as temperamental, moody, and difficult — as true, and untrue, as any other stereotype!
Other curators left the Museum for one reason or another. Like Richard Armstrong, now director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Tall and skinny, his Midwestern farming background and values have mingled with city art-world sophistication, yielding a kindly Richard with a bite. He knows all that’s happening in his world, enjoys a lot of it, and is as charming as anyone could be. A strong presence at our meetings, he created some memorable shows during his many years at the Whitney, and I miss him still. Sometimes, he brought his Jack Russell terrier to work. I got to borrow her once and take her home for a visit. I can still picture Clover carrying in her mouth a small steel wool piece, Brillo by Richard Artschwager, while Richard Armstrong was installing an exhibition. Through Richard, we met Vija Celmins, now a close friend, whose paintings we love so, whose life intersected with ours in New Mexico as well as in New York.
Since trustees have all the financial responsibility, power is ultimately in their hands. The staff, it seems, has all the fun of dealing with a
rt and artists. Not too surprising that trustees want to deal with programs, especially if they are new to museums or knowledgeable about art. But no matter how much a trustee admires a particular artist, it remains crucial for staff to have the decision-making power in artistic matters. Part-time volunteers’ interest may be educated and wise, but they are not professionals. They don’t have the whole picture. And the museum suffers if it is perceived as yielding to pressures from outside.
The tenuous balance between staff and volunteers only exists through understanding, good will, and sensitivity. Not on written definitions or rules — although they can certainly help. Thus, the makeup of a board and its leadership are vital to its survival and health. There must be some who genuinely understand and love the Museum to maintain its integrity.
Deaccessioning is a thorny issue. Arriving a minute late at the new permanent collection review committee, I found I’d been made its chairman, presiding over a debate between Howard Lipman and Jules Prown of far-reaching importance to the Museum. What, if anything, should we get rid of? So much of the collection was never seen. So much seemed of inferior quality, stemming, Howard felt, from my grandmother’s generous impulse to buy work the artist couldn’t sell, thus leaving him a better chance to sell his best work. Wanting more money for purchases, certain that buying contemporary art was the Museum’s basic mission, Howard wanted to review the collection with a view to selective deaccessioning. Only work by artists no longer living would be considered.
Jules, however, opposed this. We didn’t have enough perspective or judgment yet, he said. We would be destroying our history, by far the most complete and most interesting history of early-twentieth-century American art in existence. Store it less expensively outside the city, make long-term loans, but don’t deaccession. Besides, he pointed out, what Howard wanted to deaccession was worth little on the market. Jules’s view prevailed, I’m glad to say.
In 1981, however, we decided to sell the Museum’s valuable pre-twentieth-century works, which we hardly ever exhibited. Other institutions would make these works more available to the public. Feeling that the Museum should keep its masterpieces, whatever the period, Leonard Lauder opposed this view. Jules and Howard led frequent, provocative discussions on these issues. Howard believed most in quality, a concept more easily definable then than now, and believed with Leonard that we should sell only lesser works but keep the finest. Howard was a formal modernist. Jules saw art as a part of culture. He believed in context, in crossing boundaries, in diversity, and in the political nature of art, and thought we should keep all the pre-twentieth-century collection or sell it all.
After that first meeting, at supper with the artists in the new Biennial, I felt a surge of joy. Fourteen trustees, a record high, showed up for Tom’s inspired menu of hot dogs and chicken à la king with artists like Chuck Close, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Arneson, and H. C. “Cliff” Westerman, the quirky sculptor whose wood pieces combine extraordinary craft with extraordinary inventiveness. In his introduction to the Whitney’s one-person exhibition of Westerman’s work, Tom wrote: “As a creative spirit, he is a distinct individual among those of us motivated by conformity. His art and his impressions of the world are filled with compassion for things disappearing, lost, or triumphant.” Cliff charmed me. He refused solid food, saying he “only drinks and dances,” which he’d already done for two hours at the Carlyle before coming to the Whitney. We had a fine and acrobatic dance. I saw us like his wonderful drawing of him and a lithe lady twirling.
And once again, I realized how lucky I was.
In 1980, the Whitney opened Cy Twombly’s retrospective. I discovered both his work and the fact that we were cousins — distant, perhaps, but kissing cousins for sure. We haven’t tracked down the exact relationship, but my great-great-aunt, Florence Adele Vanderbilt, married in 1877 a relative of Cy’s, Hamilton McKown Twombly. And from that day, I developed a deep friendship with Cy. I wrote about the opening in my journal:
Whitney Circle tour of Twombly exhibition with Tom Armstrong. It looks superb. Like walking through roomfuls of visual poetry. Isabel Bishop came, spoke to the group very movingly about the exh, about T’s work meaning much to her — surprising and nice. Raced home, changed to new gray dress, Charles [Simon] picked me up in limo … Don [the caterer] had called earlier in fear the place was too cold, asked me to turn the heat up!! The things I am asked to do! Sat between Cy T. and Henry Geldzahler, fear I was rude to the latter simply by not lavishing all my attention on him. Was captivated by Cy — he is charming, open, not uptight, happy with the exh, and the evening — esp because Bob Rauschenberg came. … He talked of poetry — says he reads 4–5 hours a day, doesn’t paint enough, has gotten lazy. NYC gives you energy; Rome drains you of energy, he says. Says he’ll come to Florence for a couple of days when I’m there, will show me some things. Wow. [I was planning my first trip to Italy, a 50th birthday present to myself.]
The exhibition was extraordinary, but alas, it was badly reviewed in the Times and very few people came to see it. I remember going with my present husband, Sydney Biddle, and spending at least an hour in just one room with beautiful paintings suffused with color, inspired by the ancient cultures of Europe and America, Dionysian rites, and Greek pastoral poetry. Who could imagine that paint laid so poetically on a flat surface could encompass emotion, time, history?
My friendship with Cy and his wife, Tatia, grew, and I was reminded how many friendships with certain artists changed the way I think about art, and therefore the way I perceive the Whitney. I did indeed stay with Cy and his wife Tatia, herself a fine artist, in Italy, in the summer of 1980.
It was my first trip to Italy, my first trip alone anywhere. Leo Castelli had arranged for me to visit Count Giuseppe Panza to see the minimalist and light art he had installed in his house and stables in Varese. Panza, after driving me through the green hills and treating me to my first Italian omelet, introduced me to the work of James Turrell, Sol Lewitt, Robert Irwin — and Maria Nordness, whose piece was in a horse stall. I’ll never forget sitting on a bale of hay there, in total darkness, waiting, waiting, for many minutes, until a faint sliver of light shone. As it brightened, I felt I was experiencing the dawn of the world.
Just before my trip Brendan Gill had agreed to become a trustee. At lunch at the Algonquin, he’d advised me to follow Emerson’s words: “Give all to love! / When the half-gods go / The gods arrive.”
“Have adventures in Florence,” he said. “Make love!”
I fell in love with Italy. Staying mostly in Florence, I visited and revisited my favorites, sometimes with artist Dorothea Rockburne, through whose clear blue eyes I saw her beloved Brancacci Chapel with Masaccio’s frescoes, and the glories of Siena.
Stopping at Cy and Tatia’s palazzo in Bassano in Teverino, I slept in a four-poster with deep blue curtains all around, placed in the middle of a white cube of a room with a painted wooden ceiling and seventeenth-century Flemish tapestries on the walls. A suit of armor sat artlessly on an ancient brocaded chair. From my windows I looked down at the medieval part of Bassano, a tiny walled town mostly in ruins, with a glorious view beyond over the plains and mountains of Tuscany.
Rooms opened off a grassy sward in the middle of this glorious palazzo, stone stairways led to one studio up high and another down below, and an arched space on the very top looked over the world, with swallows flying through and a breeze scented with acacias and jasmine blowing sweetly in the soft Italian light. Ancient objects were everywhere — an Etruscan sarcophagus, a fifth-century B.C. Greek helmet, old watering troughs, a beautiful pale green stone object, thin, pierced in a design around the edges. And Cy’s paintings. One with Shelley’s words from his lament for Keats: “Weep for Adonis — he is dead!” I especially liked two of his god-drawings, one of Apollo, one of Venus.
Those days helped me sense the true life of an artist, the dedication as well as the playfulness. Cy and Tatia deepened my belief that art is essential to life.
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Coming back from Italy marked, for me, both an ending and a new beginning. I kept my tender feelings for Mike, but my new life and emotions were pulling us apart, and in the summer of 1979 we separated. We both remained close to our children, sharing their joys and concerns, conferring often about them and their lives. Mike in Rowayton, Connecticut, continued to practice architecture, while I lived full-time in New York. Before long, Mike met his present wife, Patricia, and they were married in 1981.
Despite being on this earth a whole half century, a surge of energy surprised me with its intensity. I loved New York City and sometimes, at night, drove around its clamorous streets just for pleasure, absorbing the sounds and sights, the flashing lights, and the varied people. Other times, I walked for miles, or jogged in Central Park with a new friend, Sydney Biddle. I realize now that the feelings growing between Sydney and me were linked to the passion for life I felt then. They were embodied in this relationship that, of all these new experiences and emotions, was to last the longest.
Elegant and good-looking, Sydney has a high domed forehead that makes him look a bit like an “egg-head,” strong well-defined features, and often, an intense, inquiring expression. His essential kindness is sometimes masked by his sharp sense of reality and a conscious wish to be forthright and honest. Sydney’s life had been lonely and difficult — he grew up without the presence of his parents, who existed in their own separate worlds. I find it extraordinary that, despite this virtual abandonment, he has been able to become such a whole human being. A splendid companion, imaginative, highly intelligent, and eager for new ideas and experiences, he loves to read, to converse, to listen to classical music and jazz, to visit museums and castles and temples. Together, we have traveled to exotic places — we decided, for instance, to get married in Hungary, on the banks of the Danube! Sydney is extremely understanding and supportive of my life and goals. We share household tasks, like today’s younger generation — Sydney shops for many of our groceries and other quotidian needs, from toothpaste to vitamins. And he is never boring!
The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made Page 31
