The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  When we met, Sydney was at a turning point in his life and career; he had worked for years in the insurance business, but it was nearly time for him to retire. He hoped to return to the painting he’d done seriously in the ’50s at the Art Students’ League of New York, when he’d won the Macdowell Prize, enabling him to spend a year in Italy. I greatly admired his large abstract paintings that I’d seen in his apartment on Central Park West. Now, he also followed his heart. We whirled through the city like children, we danced and laughed and talked in every free moment we could find. Even a five-minute meeting on a street corner was precious. No problems, then, seemed insoluble.

  We fell in love.

  On September 15, 1981, we were married.

  Beginning in Taos, in the ’90s, and continuing in New York, Sydney works most days in his studio, creating vibrant abstract paintings in exceptional colors and forms. They appeal to me enormously, as they do to many artists who have visited his studios. Agnes Martin, for example, and George and Betty Woodman are enthusiastic about them. These works seem to spring directly from Sydney’s mind and emotions unhampered by influence or hesitation. Enigmatic but appealing dark shapes float or fly over fields of yellow, blue, or green; red motes scatter like flocks of birds in a pale sky; delicate white lines tangle on black paper. Ribbons of blue or gray roll and billow over canvas like clouds or waves on some unknown planet. Unearthly, mysterious, these paintings and drawings are beautiful. I take great pleasure in them. I see them as young, exuberant, and joyous.

  During the Whitney’s birthday year of 1980, an opportunity suddenly arose — not only to acquire a masterwork, but to affirm our desire and capacity for so doing to the whole world.

  The Whitney was only considered a minor force in the art world. We hadn’t ever made the kind of purchases the media featured, our openings didn’t hit society pages, and our public relations seemed woefully lacking to those experienced in such matters, such as Leonard Lauder and Gilbert Maurer, a trustee who was then the head of Hearst Magazines, and later, in the ’90s, would serve a term as the Whitney’s president. If we were to raise big money, we had to improve.

  Tom thought of one way to do that, and to benefit the Museum’s collection as well. Collectors Emily and Burton Tremaine had recently transferred their interest in art to a concern for overpopulation, and, through the Pace Gallery, were selling works they’d collected, including Jasper Johns’s Three Flags. What a splendid acquisition it would be for the Whitney! Its subject, the American flag, made it particularly appropriate for the Whitney Museum of American Art. This painting’s layers of paint and other materials, mirroring levels of meaning, satisfied anyone who cared to delve deeper. David Sylvester wrote lyrically about Johns’s use of the flag image in Art in America (April, 1997):

  “It was in one of the earliest versions, White Flag, 1955, that the metaphorical implications of simultaneously clarifying and obscuring were most richly realized: forming and melting, tightening and loosening, appearing and disappearing, flowering and decaying, brightness falling from the air. All participles but for one noun, and that an ethereal one. In other words, I see the work as being about process, not about matter. I don’t see the surface as signifying, say, skin or wood, but as paint that composes an objective correlative for change. The change has two speeds. In the stars it’s allegro vivace, agitated movement, flickering and exploding. In the stripes it’s andante.”

  The price: $1 million. Then the highest price ever for a work by a living artist.

  Leonard was eager to get Three Flags. He helped Tom to obtain pledges from four friends of the Museum, Sondra and Charles Gilman, national committee members Alfred Taubman and Laura Lee Woods (anonymous at the time, by her request).

  Tom informed Leo Castelli of our wanting the work. Leo had originally sold Three Flags to the Tremaines in 1958 for a pittance, and he was convinced that the Whitney could not raise so much money. “No, no, I’m sure it’s going to a Japanese buyer,” he said, exemplifying the contemporary attitude.

  At the executive committee meeting of September 17, 1980, Tom announced that we’d purchased the painting. Howard Lipman was concerned. Since $250,000 had not yet been pledged, the Museum’s endowment funds were being put at risk.

  Later, while on a trip to North Carolina with Tom and Brendan to cement relationships with national committee members, we heard that Grace Glueck, art critic for the Times, was about to announce the purchase. This was nearly two weeks before the acquisition would be presented to the full board of trustees. We rushed back to New York and contacted everyone we could, so, when the news hit the front page of the Times on September 27, it wouldn’t come as a surprise to our trustees.

  The consequences of this purchase were contradictory.

  There was lots of publicity. Three Flags, shown in a special installation for several months, was much admired. Many people came to the Museum especially to see it. Those of us, including me, who loved the painting were grateful to those whose confidence and generosity had made it possible for the Whitney to own such a seminal work.

  On the other hand, we lost a board member. Arthur Altschul, one of the original nonfamily trustees, had never really trusted Tom’s ability. And, for Arthur, Three Flags was the last straw. He said it was too much money for any contemporary painting. He didn’t like the Museum any more; our exhibitions, purchases, and policies were trendy and money-ridden. He wanted out.

  Even more serious, perhaps, was the rift between Tom and Leonard, widened when Leonard obtained a gift from Ed Downe, a wealthy friend of Leonard’s, Tom’s, and the Museum’s. Tom had decided to list on the Three Flags wall label all donors of $50,000 or more. While Leonard had asked Ed for $50,000, he only gave $25,000. Leonard sent the check to the Whitney, along with a note asking Tom and me to write proper “thank-yous,” as Ed had abandoned another museum when these hadn’t been forthcoming.

  I wrote a long appreciative letter to Ed, with copies to Leonard and Tom. After reading it, Tom decided an additional letter from him was unnecessary. But fireworks over the omission from both Ed and Leonard followed. To add to Tom’s perceived “insult” to Ed, having already announced the “wall label” policy, Tom felt he couldn’t add Ed’s name to it with the $25,000 donation.

  Furious, Leonard lost interest in raising or giving the missing funds. I was saddened because I had really counted on him — and I felt caught in the middle of a little war, unable to find a solution.

  Ed never made another contribution to the Whitney.

  It is extremely difficult to raise money for a fait accompli, I found out. We never did raise the final $175,000. It came from the Whitney’s already inadequate endowment.

  The painting, Three Flags, however, remains a cornerstone of the collection. A magnificent painting. Emblematic of Tom’s high standards as director.

  Jasper’s work affects my senses, through its rich surfaces, colors, layers, and patterns. My mind is affected as well, because I want to make connections — between play and work, for instance, or love and hate, or good and bad. Life and death, even. Between his pictorial symbols of agony and those of creativity and change. Looking at a Johns exhibition is mysteriously unifying. It’s like reading Eliot’s Four Quartets or Proust.

  One of the very nicest evenings I can remember at the Museum took place on November 17, 1982, in the Lobby Gallery, where seventeen Savarin monotypes by Jasper Johns were installed. They fit perfectly in that space and looked wonderful. Jasper had made these in January; they were based on Savarin, a lithograph depicting a familiar image in his iconography: a Savarin coffee can filled with paintbrushes.

  A small group of Jasper’s friends gathered to celebrate, at tables right in the midst of these vibrant works. Sitting next to Jasper, I could imagine no better Museum moment. There was a unity of feeling in that room: everyone loved the Whitney, the art, and each other. Collectors Victor and Sally Ganz, Philip Johnson, and, from Baltimore, Bob and Jane Meyerhoff epitomized long-term commitment to Jaspe
r’s work and affection for the artist. Judith Goldman had written about Johns with insight. Leo Castelli, dean of New York dealers, had represented him ever since he first began showing his work. John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Jasper had worked together on dances and performances, and were old and dear friends.

  Tom and I persisted in our wish for expansion. We kept discussing our wish lists of art for the permanent collection galleries. Jasper Johns, of all the living artists woefully underrepresented in the collection, headed both Tom’s list and mine. But we were facing our same problem: the Museum couldn’t afford to buy his past works, and could only afford the new very rarely. What could we do?

  Hoping Jasper would make the Whitney the ultimate home for those works he himself still owned, we decided to talk to him about it. Had we not shown our commitment by having his retrospective exhibition, by buying as much of his work as we could, and by our purchase of Three Flags, the most expensive painting by a living artist at that time? Surely he knew how much we believed in him and his work. And our trustee Victor Ganz, after all, was his earliest and biggest collector! His friend! On July 8, 1982, Tom, Victor, Jasper, and I met for lunch at the Knickerbocker Club, an appropriate ambiance for an important talk. We had a fine time, but it was difficult for us to broach the subject. After all, when asking for a bequest, one speaks of mortality. We were awkward, I’m sure, but we asked — and Jasper, as always, was gracious. He said he’d think about it.

  It was many years later before the subject arose again, this time with an entirely different cast of characters. Victor had died. Tom was no longer director. I was no longer president or chairman. In 1994, trustee chairman Leonard Lauder and I visited Jasper in his house on Sixty-third Street. Leonard did the talking, this time, offering a large gallery just for Jasper’s work on the Whitney’s soon-to-be-remodeled fifth floor. Asking to see the plans, Jasper looked carefully at a model of the proposed space.

  Gracious as ever, his response was exactly the same. He’d consider it.

  We’re still hoping. After all, though, great artists probably want to be remembered in a wider context than the Whitney, with its focus on American art, can provide. Would want their work to be seen with that of other great artists of all time and all cultures, at the Metropolitan Museum or the National Gallery, perhaps. The Whitney can’t offer that, no matter how much space we provide.

  The opening of Andy Warhol’s Portraits of the ’70s in November 1979 was a gala benefit for the Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition Fund, our way of raising money so we wouldn’t have a 1980 budget deficit. We went all out to get trustees and friends to give dinners for everybody who’d bought tickets. Tom and I realized we’d forgotten to put our own names down for a dinner, so we decided to give our own. But where? Tom’s inspired choice, the little Greek diner next to the Whitney.

  We arranged for a red carpet and searchlights, just like those in front of the Whitney that night. The family who owned the restaurant promised all kinds of special Greek treats and were excited to have been picked for the gala. In honor of the great occasion, they decided to do a huge clean-up, so thorough that Tom remembers the place smelling “like the mens’ room in an Esso service station!” Sitting at plastic booths in our best black tie outfits, we had a wonderful time, finding the event and the place very Warhol. Collector Henry McElhenny’s sister, Bonnie Wintersteen, an old friend of Tom’s from Philadelphia, got right into the spirit of the evening, roaring with laughter, in her diamonds and white mink. Leo Castelli was there, as was Marion Javits, and Jerry Zipkin, known as “The Social Moth,” elegant and sharp-tongued escort for glamorous ladies whose husbands preferred to skip social events. And of course Andy dropped by with his gang and his little dachshund, very much approving of the dinner his friend Tom had arranged.

  In February 1980, the Whitney held a birthday party at the Museum for Isamu Noguchi during his show, “The Sculpture of Spaces.” During the Museum’s fiftieth anniversary year, we wanted to honor the living artists most often shown at the Whitney, and Noguchi was one: he had been in the Museum’s inaugural exhibition in 1931, his work had been included in eighteen annuals and biennials, and he’d had a major retrospective in 1968. Eleven of his pieces, dating from 1929 to 1965, were in the permanent collection. Because Noguchi’s eloquent sense of space had been expressed with special clarity in the performing arts — he had collaborated with composers, choreographers, and dancers — the focus of this show was on these collaborations. Noguchi himself wrote the catalogue, saying, on the first page, “space itself gives validity to sculpture — beyond objects there is always the situation, the time, the performer and the spectator. …”

  In 1981, in our continual effort to exhibit distinguished American artists, we were struggling to have a big Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective. Lloyd Goodrich had done a show at the Whitney in 1970, but this one would be more comprehensive. O’Keeffe was in New York for a rare visit from her home in New Mexico with her young companion, artist Juan Hamilton, when he was having his first New York show of sculpture. We arranged a lunch. At ninety, elegant in a simple black dress with a snow white collar, she looked, as Sydney described her, like a “Hungarian nun.” He’d stayed with her in Abiquiu, years before, while traveling with a friend who was her cousin. He’d given me impressions: Georgia beating egg yolks for a delicious zabaglione; the rocks and bones she’d lovingly arranged in her rooms; the spareness and austere beauty of her house; the desert, where she’d showed them her favorite places, had walked and talked with them.

  At this time, though, Georgia was nearly blind, and since I was seated next to her in the restaurant, it fell to me to feed her, an intimate procedure allowing me, despite my awe, to have a real conversation with her. Looking deep into her eyes, I couldn’t believe she wasn’t looking back at me. Her intelligence and intensity still shone in that darkness. I was awkward putting her chicken and rice into her mouth, thinking she’d mind, but not at all — she seemed happy to be fed, and to recall the past. Her memory was stunning. She talked to me about the times she and artist Max Weber used to have Chinese lunches in Greenwich Village — he seemed to be one of the few artists she recalled with pleasure. She spoke of her then-husband, Alfred Stieglitz, who had showed her work and photographed her so often — but now she remembered her impatience with Stieglitz. Life with him had been too busy, too full of people, and she’d needed tranquillity in order to paint. She’d been especially frustrated during their summers at Lake George. Hearing her still-impassioned tales made me think that her new relationship with Hamilton was somewhere between that of grandmother/grandson and two lovers. The teasing between them had a flirtatious ambivalence.

  We never did the show. Georgia and Juan wanted too much autonomy. Since curators need to be responsible for the choices, the installation, and the catalogue, they would have been dissatisfied. Thanks to our new friendly relationship, however, O’Keeffe made paintings available to the Whitney, which we then found patrons to buy and promise to the museum. Each year, they would give a percentage to the Whitney until the gift was completed and the work entered the permanent collection. We arranged, for example, for my cousin Sandra Payson, then a Museum trustee, to visit O’Keeffe in Abiquiu, and she returned with an abstraction that Sandra has now given to the Whitney. Calvin Klein, in the same way, bought Summer Days and has completed his gift to the Museum of that masterpiece.

  We were longing, too, for an Agnes Martin show in the early ’80s, and Tom traveled to Galisteo, New Mexico, in a vain effort to persuade this artist to agree. It just wasn’t the right time, though, and wasn’t until 1993, when Barbara Haskell curated the Agnes Martin show that traveled around the world. By then, Sydney and I were living in Taos and were Agnes’s neighbors. Today, thanks to Agnes herself and other generous donors, especially Leonard Lauder, the Whitney has a superb collection of her paintings.

  Most of the parties we gave for the Museum had specific agendas. There is no question but that if they were enjoyable, they were nonethel
ess work-related. One in 1982, however, was about pure pleasure. After a small opening at the Museum of John Cage’s scores and prints, Sydney and I gave a dinner in the garage under our carriage house apartment where we and members of our family kept their cars. Money was always an issue, so when I discovered a large bolt of red cotton in a budget store, red became the motif for our party. We draped it as scrims over the cars, painted the floor red, scattered seashells and pretty stones we’d gathered from a Long Island beach on the long, narrow red-covered table, and lit it with candles anchored in sand. Place cards had names on their backs for a change of seats halfway through the meal. Chef Lauren Berdy and I had lengthy discussions about the menu. John and Merce were on serious macrobiotic diets, and they’d agreed not to bring their own dinner, as they usually did, when I’d promised them to provide the right food. We’d learned we couldn’t have tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, or potatoes (the nightshade family of plants) or sugar, or dairy products. So we started with sushi, buckwheat noodles, and seaweed, continued with fish baked in broth, very long Chinese green beans, and brown rice with vegetables. For dessert, dried figs stuffed with nuts, papayas, kiwi fruit. John and Merce Cunningham said it was the first time in eight years they hadn’t brought their own food, and it tasted good, even to less macrobiotically oriented guests. We had our piano tuned, hoping John might play. Instead, Bob Rauschenberg, after many drinks, decided to do a performance piece, and sat down at the piano for about ten minutes without touching the keys, a parody of an old piece of Cage’s that we feared would be upsetting to John, but his lovely smile remained despite the bad joke. But the party was fun and lively and a big success — and no wonder, considering that John Cage had chosen the guests, including William Anastasi and Dove Bradshaw, Jasper Johns, Mark Lancaster, Porter McCray, Robert Rauschenberg and Terry van Brunt, Louise Nevelson and Diana Mackown, Teeny Duchamp and Dorothea Tanning, Cy and Tatia Twombly, Kathan Brown and Margarete Roeder, Tom and Bunty, curator Patterson Sims with writer Honor Moore (who was writing her book, The White Blackbird, about her artist grandmother), Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, originator of the show, and her curator husband Joe Rishel.