Should we have added a few trustees? Probably. But the party was full of fun and in many ways seemed perfect as it was, and we all felt relaxed and comfortable as we might not have if … well, if it were a party-with-an-agenda.
Monday, April 12, 1982. A Times headline announced “WHITNEY COULD LOSE CALDER ‘CIRCUS.’ ”
In the Whitney’s lobby, a photograph of Calder installing his Circus in 1976, the year of his retrospective, illustrated the ensuing long article. The French government had empowered cultural officials to take Circus for the Beaubourg in lieu of a cash tax settlement. By now, though, Circus was a Whitney icon, with its full troupe of miniature circus performers and animals, and a nearby videotape playing a film of Calder, maneuvering the figures he’d created and talking them through their paces while his wife Louisa played circus music in the background.
In his book, Alexander Calder, James Johnson Sweeney remembered, in 1951, the way it had been.
At the beginning, the circus was merely a few ingenious figures which Calder had made for his own amusement. There was nothing elaborate about them: bits of articulated wire for arms and legs and a wooden body — a spool, or a cork. Still their creator could make them perform some most remarkable feats. Gradually the troupe increased. Word got around Montparnasse. A casual turn or two to amuse a friend soon became a full-length performance.
The circus was given in Calder’s narrow room; the guests would crowd onto the low studio bed; the performance would take place on the floor in front of them. A bit of green carpet was unrolled; a ring was laid out; poles were erected to support the trapeze for the aerial act and wing indicators of the “big top”; a spotlight was thrown on the ring; an appropriate record placed on a small portable phonograph; “Mesdames et Messieurs, je vous presente —,” and the performance began. There were acrobats, tumblers, trained dogs, slack-wire acts à la Japonaise; a lion-tamer; a sword-swallower; Rigoulet, the strong-man; the Sultan of Senegambia who hurled knives and axes; Don Rodriguez Kolynos who risked a death-defying slide down a tight wire; “living statues”; a trapeze act; a chariot race: every classic feature of the tan-bark program.
For the most part these toys were of a simplified marionette character. Yet they were astonishing in their condensed resemblance achieved almost entirely through movement.
Museum visitors of all ages loved Circus. The Whitney had the best collection of Calder’s work anywhere, and this was the centerpiece, emblematic of the artist’s career. As Jean Lipman, major collector with her husband, Howard, of Calder’s work, wrote in the catalogue, “The circus esthetic — a combination of suspense, surprise, spontaneity, humor, gaiety, playfulness — has always been the basis of Calder’s work.”
We just couldn’t lose it.
The Calder estate had given us a first option, until May 31, to buy this work for $1.25 million. A staggering sum, for us. And higher offers reportedly had been received from European museums. So we knew we couldn’t bargain, although as Harold Daitch, their lawyer, reassured us, “The family would like to see it stay with the Whitney.”
An all-out, countrywide campaign to “Save the Calder Circus” was decided on. Buttons everywhere, printed in red, white, and blue; clowns from Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, now owned by Irvin Feld and his son, Kenneth, collecting money all over the city; school children, even circus children, helping. Newsday announced “THE BIG CIRCUS TRIES TO HELP THE LITTLE ONE STAY IN U.S.,” showing the Felds at the Whitney kicking off a drive for $1.25 million, and illustrated by a photograph of Targa the elephant hoisting me high above Madison Avenue, in front of the Museum, both of us laughing. Clowns, showgirls in sequined costumes, acrobats, and hordes of children crowded around, cheering, collecting small donations. All traffic on Madison Avenue stopped. I’d invited a Whitney patron who seemed interested, and when I spotted him in the crowd, I yelled from my perch, “Hello Seymour, great you’re here!” He’s smiling in the corner of that photograph, next to the Felds. I called him later to ask if he’d contribute, and he suggested a visit.
Meanwhile, trustees and others rushed to help, especially Leonard Lauder and Howard Lipman, each pledging $100,000. Howard declared that “Calder and the Whitney are one and the same. The Calder circus is the heart of Calder’s youth and it must remain at the Whitney Museum.”
The Robert Lehman Foundation, thanks to financier/writer Michael Thomas, gave $125,000.
You could hardly move in the city without becoming aware of our Circus. And newspaper articles appeared all over the United States, many with photographs of Circus, of the clowns, of Targa, and me.
On April 29, Tom and I showed up at the law offices of Shea and Gould. Seymour Klein was waiting. Before we were really into our request, Seymour let us know he’d already decided what to give us. “The foundation will contribute five hundred thousand dollars,” he said. He’d already checked it out with the Johnson trust (the Robert Wood Johnson Charitable Trust, of which Seymour was a board member), and he’d like it announced to the press immediately. I was about to leap from my chair to hug Seymour, but Tom answered quickly: it was a wonderful offer, could we consider it overnight? When I found out why he’d been so cautious, I realized he was right. We needed more time to raise the rest of the money, and it would be difficult if not impossible if such a big gift were known. The next day, we called and asked Seymour to give half the necessary funds, and to give us three weeks to raise the rest before announcing the gift. Seymour understood our reasons, and pledged the $625,000. Now I could hug our generous patron!
With over five hundred recognized donors, not counting the thousands who remained anonymous, we were able to more than match the Johnson trust’s extraordinary gift. In only twenty days! Editorials and articles in newspapers and magazines across the country rejoiced along with us. Mayor Koch came to our press conference on May 5, along with Seymour and the circus people, who had by now become our dear friends. Standing in the lobby, Tom announced: “The Calder circus has been saved and will remain in the United States at the Whitney!”
The scheduled May 20 benefit of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus would now be a celebration, with contributors invited to a gala performance. And what a celebration it was. A cocktail party to meet the performers, a tour backstage. I remember “The Mighty Michu, Titan of Tinyness, Sultan of Smallness, The Smallest Man in the World,” drinking a whole celebratory glass of red wine with awesome effects. Since he was so small it affected him powerfully, he said, and he almost couldn’t go on. Best of all, the clowns invited Tom and me to join them. Tammy Parish and Wayne Sidley, who went through sixteen changes of identity during a performance, made us up, generously lending us not only their “faces” but their costumes. The Times:
“ ‘They decided I was the street tramp type,’ Mr. Armstrong said with an uncertain smile as he greeted guests wearing his grayish makeup, pink cheeks, a plastic red nose and a patched clown jacket, which only partly covered his preppy bow tie.
“Mrs. Biddle, in white face, manic red hair and tablecloth checked overalls, … and Mr. Armstrong appeared, center ring, in the clowns’ Wash-the-Fierce-Dog act.”
We also marched in the opening parade with the clowns, playing trumpet and tuba, clowning along with the rest, enjoying ourselves immensely.
The Whitney put out a newspaper celebrating this joyous moment. Among many tributes to Calder and his circus, I like John Updike’s poem:
CALDER’S HANDS
In the little movie
at the Whitney
you can see them
at the center of the spell
of wire and metal:
a clumsy man’s hands,
square and mitten-thick,
that do everything
without pause:
unroll a tiny rug
with a flick,
tug a doll’s arm up,
separate threads.
These hands now dead
never doubted, never rested.
&nbs
p; Artist and writer Robert Osborn, Alexander Calder’s friend, occupies a whole page of that newspaper. Across the top, over Osborn’s drawing of Calder-as-mountain, smiling and recumbent, a poetic tribute in his flowing cursive:
We can’t compress Sandy into a few words./ Too much of him. … too large … and his qualities are too varied & contradictory. Engineer-Artist./ Capricious yet totally logical. A serious Santa Claus./ Mobile as a dream … Stabile as the very earth, & sometimes both./ A lover of fun, full of wit & play, but confronted by things evil he is as grim a battler as one could ask for. He is that rare combination of delight & powers with which he has blessed us all.
Thus was Circus saved.
Tom’s dream for the permanent collection was evoked in an exhibition he curated in 1981 for the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The trustees and national committee members who went to the opening saw a group of extraordinary paintings. Tom had had his eye on them for some time, hoping their owners would give them to the Whitney. Viewers seemed impressed by the entire show and by Tom’s tour de force in assembling all the various paintings. He had arranged them thematically rather than chronologically, with interesting juxtapositions: a Wyeth looked surprisingly abstract next to an Avery and a Hartley. The Germans crowded around those they most liked, especially the “individual expressions” section: Ivan Albright, Richard Lindner, Jim Nutt, Peter Saul. I remember noticing the many young Germans looking as funky as young Americans.
This show had reinforced our awareness of the tremendous interest in American art that exists in Europe, and back in New York, I reported this to the other trustees. We had seen hundreds of fine works by American artists of the ’40s through the ’70s, installed in museums that, in several instances, were created solely for the display of these works. Since these European museums and collections were generally supported by governments or government agencies, I was all the more grateful for, and impressed by, the extent of private patronage in our country — especially at our own Museum. In that year’s Bulletin I wrote, “The United States today is on a par with the ‘old countries’ in abundance, quality, and geographical dispersion of cultural institutions of all kinds — and yet, we are comparative newcomers, regarded until recently as not only upstarts but philistines!”
At that time, once again, we felt impelled to grow, to build, so that Americans would not have to go to Europe to see their own twentieth-century art. We wanted to fulfill our mission to “increase public awareness of the significance of American civilization of the twentieth century.” We wanted to have the best Museum for the best art of our century right here in New York City.
To give a hint of what we could do, with funding from the Alcoa Foundation, whose visionary CEO, Krome George, was a good friend of Tom’s, we installed the first long-term exhibition of masterworks from the permanent collection. For five years! On the whole third floor! This was a response to the long range planning committee report, which recommended, in part, that “Examples from the permanent collection will, when possible, have first exhibition priority; a program to achieve this will be initiated.”
One important result of the exhibition was its demonstration of the Whitney’s need for more space. From six hundred works in 1930, the permanent collection had grown to more than six thousand works in 1981. In that third floor installation, we could only show seventy-three. To again quote the planning committee’s report:
“Space in the present building is inadequate for the ideal needs of the Museum. While the building is currently manageable and enjoyable, it is too small to function as the major center for the permanent exhibition of American art of the twentieth century, as a showcase for temporary exhibitions, and as an educational center.”
This introduces our second goal, physical expansion. Over the next decade, it would occupy most of our time and cause most of our troubles.
Twenty-one
Was more space necessary? Was it even possible?
Those I respected were beginning to encourage me to think this was indeed the right time. The Whitney in 1978 was emerging at last from a long, barren slump into a period of bursting creativity and excitement. Sylvan Cole, erudite senior gallery owner, told me. Philip Johnson, mischievous dean of architects, leaned toward me at an opening and whispered with his sharp, silken tongue that he’d been noticing how the Whitney was doing many more vanguard shows than the Modern — for decades, “his” museum. And, on a rare moment alone with Johns Hopkins president Steve Muller, former chair of the long range planning committee and still on the Whitney’s board, he said that institutions were always either on the rise or declining. This was the right time for the Whitney to be rising. He and others were interested only in this aspect of the Museum; we’d lose them if we opted for “gentility” instead. I was the right person to be leading now, Steve went on — and Tom was, too. I’d learned to “use my vulnerabilities.”
What did he mean? That if I felt shy about leading a meeting, or asking for money, that quirk could make my plea more effective? Make people want to help?
In the September 1978 issue of the AIA Journal, Bernard P. Spring, dean of the school of architecture at City College, wrote a long article entitled “Evaluation: The Whitney Suffers from Success.” Perfect for our purpose, to persuade trustees, and others, of the urgency to expand. Spring talked about many of the changes causing this need.
The first sign of the difference is the regular presence of a hot dog vendor’s cart at the corner of 75th Street and Madison Avenue. … In New York, this can only mean that this once sedate location has become a lively center of popular culture. On Tuesday evenings when a major oil company underwrites free admission, a large crowd begins to gather an hour before opening time and with considerable camaraderie lounges along the granite balustrade surrounding the sunken outdoor sculpture court. …
My own recollections of the building in its first few years … remind me how much like a club or a private mansion it was at first. The people who conceived this original design must have been thinking of serving that small group of aficionados who before the 1960s were devoted to American art. … Even as the building was under construction, the recognition of the importance of American art and artists was growing rapidly along with the size of the audience for museums in general and American art in particular. …
Tom, he reported, believed that the building functioned perfectly for about one thousand visitors per day, not for the three thousand to five thousand people who now visited on a busy day. These crowds altered the nature of the building itself — small galleries, for instance, had changed from “intimate stopping places to part of the irresistible traffic flow patterns of the adjacent large galleries. Gone are the parquet floors. They have been covered with commercial carpet. Gone is the wood paneling on the walls. It has been covered with plaster to accommodate more works of art. Gone, too, is most of the domestic furniture. It has been replaced by the familiar museum bench which tells you not to linger if you must sit at all.”
Spring continues with a detailed analysis of changes in partitions and gallery use, necessary in view of the changing perceptions of American art, the numbers of visitors, and the program itself. He concludes:
“The program has been so successful that it has outgrown its home. The collection is larger than the storage areas can hold. … Breuer and Smith’s building continues to hold up well as a public monument to the importance of American art. Its only failure has been in keeping up with the success of the program it houses.”
A good overview, it seems to me, of the years since 1966: changes in the building, changes in the art world. Convincing. An objective, qualified outsider was singing our song. We made copies for each trustee. Discussing our needs in trustees meetings, we made charts, curators led tours of our building — including the basement, including our storage facilities, including the permanent collection installation, including offices once generous and windowed, now divided into tiny cells; including outmoded heating and air-conditioning systems; in
cluding guards’ lounge areas; and even including public rest rooms. All, all, ranging from inadequate to uncomfortable to downright dangerous — for people, for the building, and for art. We pointed out the large knockout panel in the wall that Breuer and the building committee had installed to make expansion to the south easier.
While we couldn’t immediately expand our building, we began to explore other ways to get the collection out into the world, and decided to enlarge our branch museum program. We found corporations, also expanding, that needed an “amenity” in exchange for more height, or to counter some kind of bad PR. By adding a public component to their building, they could make it bigger, and a museum space was just the thing. The corporation, the museum, and the public all benefited.
Ulrich (“Rick”) Franzen, a leader of the young architects whose ideas and buildings were modifying and softening the strict tenets of modernism, had originally brought the Whitney and Philip Morris together in an art purchase program. He had then encouraged them to include a branch in their new building. Franzen also was the broker in our arrangement with Andrew Sigler, CEO of Champion International, where we had our first out-of-town branch in Franzen’s fine building in Stamford, Connecticut. When Rick showed me his model for our branch museum in the new Philip Morris building he had designed at Park Avenue and Forty-Second Street, I was thrilled at this new opportunity to reach a new public, to put sculpture in a public place, and to make a new marriage between the corporation and the Museum. As in the ancient cities of Europe, we too have the potential to create art-filled buildings, streets, and parks, with fine sculptors like Frank Stella, Mark di Suvero, Tom Otterness, and many others who design their work for the public as well as for the museum-goer.
The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made Page 33
