To accept the final separation of death is the hardest thing in life. “Never” is the word that recurs, again and again. When it’s your parents who have died, besides the emptiness, your whole perspective on life changes. You are senior. It’s all up to you. You must hand down to the next generation whatever you can of your parents, their history, their values. Maybe that’s why we cling so to objects and their associations. Why I like to serve dessert on my great-grandparents’ monogrammed plates, even though their gold monograms and fluted edges can’t go in the dishwasher. Why I treasure my father’s desk, although it’s really too small to write on. Why I love the yellow sofa my mother sat on. Why I’m so careful of the pretty glass with painted roses and translucent lozenges I keep my toothbrush in, used by my grandmother and then my mother, which I took from the long white marble counter in their Old Westbury bathroom. Why I wear Mum’s pearls and the strange, bifurcated star ruby ring she always wore, her mother’s engagement ring.
Dead objects, to recall a living mother and father.
One spring day in 1987, I went to lunch at Susan Gutfreund’s magnificent home on Fifth Avenue. Alfred Taubman had called me, after John Gutfreund had left Solomon Brothers, suggesting it would be a good time to show warm feelings to these acquaintances we’d never brought close to the Museum. They’d be pleased, and the Whitney would be the beneficiary. So I called Susan. She showed me up the curving staircase, past a gorgeous Monet, into a vast living room overlooking Central Park. Turning left, she seemed to await a special response, and suddenly I noticed my favorite chair, formerly in my parents’ yellow library, covered in the same fabric we’d used for the “Flora” book. Surely she thought I’d be delighted to see it again, but it was hard to be polite, imagining Mum’s reaction, wishing I could have kept that particular chair.
But we’d had to sell it, along with so much else, to pay taxes.
Twenty-nine
The media, especially the Times, seemed to have it in for the Whitney. Michael Brenson, for instance, observed a shift from anticommercial ’70s art to that of the ’80s, reflecting the larger society. Many of the most popular artists were too young, he said, and galleries showed too few of them, too often. Their works were too big, too easy, and too often mass-produced and mass-marketed.
Following Hilton Kramer’s lead, Brenson maintained that museums, especially the Whitney, were guilty of following this trend. “With their passion for spectacle, with the way they allow corporations to serve business interests, particularly through advertising, museums are part of the problem. It is in the context of this general failure that the criticism of the 1985 Whitney Biennial for trying to reflect the moment rather than confront it needs to be understood.”
The Whitney Biennial had been intended to “reflect the moment” ever since my grandmother’s time. Adam Weinberg, who was then curator of the permanent collection, and is now director of the Addison Gallery of American Art, quoted in one of his catalogues Lloyd Goodrich’s response to a group of artists criticizing the Museum in 1960 for showing abstraction at the expense of realism. “The Whitney’s job is to recognize the best in all tendencies … In the past the Whitney Museum’s showing of successive trends among younger artists — expressionism, the American scene, social realism — met with the same kind of criticism as its present showing of abstraction and surrealism. To surrender to such opposition and confine its activities to the popularly acceptable would be to betray its primary duty to the public, to the artist, and to the future.”
Weinberg amplifies this when he writes of the Whitney’s philosophy, as defined by Jack Baur: “The ethical, art historical imperative to exhibit and collect a complete range of artistic production at any given moment. For to exhibit only one or a few stylistic directions is to potentially fall prey to fashion and misjudgment. …”
The artists to whom the Museum gave exhibitions — most recently, Eric Fischl and David Salle — comprised part of a program carefully balanced between different eras and different styles. That they were young and widely shown in museums and galleries didn’t prove them worthless. If a context that would place them more clearly was lacking, was that not exactly the rationale for our expansion project?
However, we knew that our public — even our trustees — read and probably believed much of what they read in the Times. We must address Michael Brenson’s criticisms, at trustees meetings, in smaller meetings, whenever we had the chance. Soon, on the first page of the Sunday Times’ Arts and Leisure section, he reproduced Roy Lichtenstein’s spectacular sixty-eight-foot-high Mural with Blue Brushstroke in the Equitable lobby. Under the headline “Museum and Corporation — A Delicate Balance” Michael Brenson explored all the pluses and minuses of the Whitney’s partnership with business. Calling the opening of the Equitable branch “an event of major artistic importance,” he maintained, nevertheless, it placed the Museum “in an uneasy relationship with an essential and enduring aspect of influential twentieth century art. That is its wariness of institutional power.” Postwar artists, Brenson maintained, had resisted the artistic and cultural values they saw around them — Jackson Pollock, for instance, had rejected easel painting, and Johns and Rauschenberg had attacked the whole idea of “good taste. … The radical content of the work could be appreciated because it was in some basic way consistent with the museum environment. That environment has been changing. The issue is not ideological purity. Nor is it corporations. It is the ability of a museum to maintain its clarity of purpose and broad understanding of art and leave no doubt that the values it stands for are paramount. To prove itself worthy of public trust, a museum’s ongoing struggle for independence and purpose has to be unmistakable.”
Brenson thought it would be difficult for us to ignore our situation, while quoting both Equitable and Tom as to the inviolability of the Museum’s autonomy. Tom emphasized that any lapse of our contract allowed either party to terminate the agreement on short notice. But Brenson found it “jarring” to see some paintings in a corporate setting, in galleries with big windows opening onto the busy streets of New York, especially for “a painting as dense and wistful as Johns’s ‘Racing Thoughts,’ or as spiritually absolute as Rothko’s ‘Untitled,’ with its silent fields of color.” While he recognized the possibilities — bringing shows that bypassed New York to our galleries, exposing a new public to art — he feared the Museum might “cheapen and diminish the art whose job it is to consider, support, and defend.”
We had recognized the dangers. But we’d decided the benefits outweighed them. Especially in view of the inaccessibility of our permanent collection; we could show only seventy works on our third floor, while ten thousand were in storage. Now, just as the Whitney published a new book by Patterson Sims showing one hundred of its masterpieces, along with a new award-winning video by Russell Connor to go with that book, we had a whole new gallery just for the collection.
We thought we could handle the problems Michael Brenson thought might overwhelm the Museum and the art. We liked the streets, so visible from the galleries; we felt they gave context to many contemporary paintings and sculptures.
Actually, though, we’d experienced some of the perils of partnership with corporations.
Ben Holloway, executive vice president of the Equitable, was our contact. He was now on our board, serving on the building committee and the campaign committee. An ideal trustee, we thought: generous, enthusiastic about art and artists. I’d given a dinner for him and his wife, Rita; had arranged a special meeting with Michael Graves to show him our plans; had taken him to visit Bill Goldston, presiding genius of the print workshop ULAE (Universal Limited Art Editions) in Long Island, to see prints in process and have a delicious lunch with artists and artisans. In other words, we did all we could to make him one of the Whitney “family.” We liked him. Also, we expected more from Equitable — a seven-figure campaign contribution.
Ben had initiated expansion of Equitable’s real estate holdings and the acquisition and commissi
oning of considerable contemporary art. We didn’t realize that powerful figures in the traditionally conservative company opposed the revolutionary upstart in their midst and worried about all the money he was spending. To emphasize the importance to the company of the image he was creating, to show all he’d accomplished, Ben had arranged an elegant dinner in Equitable’s new corporate dining room, for after the opening of the two galleries. John Carter, CEO of the whole corporation, was to speak.
Just as all this was about to happen, leaks were discovered in one of the galleries. Impossible to open, with water coming in, possibly on the Whitney’s paintings. The curators were adamant.
Then we found out how corporations react to adversity.
Ben was frantic. First, he tried everything in his arsenal to change the curators’ minds, finally losing his temper and making dire and personal threats to the staff, who stood firm, but were hurt and upset.
Next, Ben called Tom, who backed his staff.
Then he called me. Horrified by Ben’s lack of understanding about danger to the art, I supported the curators and tried to explain that art came first. Fruitlessly. Larry Tisch’s earlier visit reverberated in my mind as I faced similar fury, similar threats.
Bill Woodside overrode everyone, as he had the power to do, and insisted that we open on schedule. After a mad scramble to fix the most dangerous leaks, the paintings were hung — but removed immediately after the opening festivities.
I’d had a clear indication of Bill’s priorities.
Did I learn anything? Did I connect the merciless will of powerful executives with the Whitney’s future?
Not enough.
Calvin Tomkins in the New Yorker wrote:
The main event of this somewhat lackluster art season has been the furor over the proposed expansion of the Whitney Museum. Breuer’s dark, granite blockhouse — a highly aggressive form that stands out like a mailed fist from the urbane gentility of Madison Avenue — was praised by architecture critics but greatly disliked and disparaged by the public in its early years. Although it has become a familiar part of the uptown East Side landscape, the current surge of affection for it is something new. …
The emergence during the last decade of what has been called postmodernist architecture, with its borrowings from historical styles, its bold use of color and ornamentation, and its playful (or frivolous, depending on your point of view) mixing of forms, represents an almost total break with the austere, “less is more” aesthetic of Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and the other giants of architectural modernism. (It also represents an economic threat to architectural firms that have based their practice on steel-and-glass office towers, which many clients no longer seem to want.) …
Saying that “for much of its history, the Whitney has been looked upon with great affection,” Tomkins felt this attitude had changed:
But it is clear that the climate of affection in which the Whitney once basked has chilled considerably, and one of Armstrong’s big problems is that the Museum has not yet gained enough professional respect to give it real power as an institution. The Whitney’s board of trustees wields relatively little clout in New York’s social or political life. …
After describing the additional space and explaining our justification for a seemingly large expansion, he described the process we were faced with:
Armstrong has indicated that if the building expansion and the development plans that go with it are shelved he will resign. The Whitney’s trustees would then be obliged to sit down and rethink a number of issues. This could turn out to be an interesting process. There has been very little hard thinking lately about the nature and the purpose of art museums. Should they really try to be all things to all people, as so many museums feel they must these days — community centers as well as research institutions, places of entertainment as well as temples of high culture? Must they forever grow larger and more “comprehensive” in their appeal? Is public education in the visual arts really part of the museum’s job? The Whitney has already expanded its activities by establishing three branch museums — and this week it will open a fourth branch, in the Equitable Life Assurance Society’s new building. … Could this be an alternative to enlarging the Breuer space — Whitney branches exfoliating across the country, spreading the good word about American art? …
Tom’s statement struck me forcibly: he’d actually leave, if the expansion failed? This was news to me, and I was upset he hadn’t told me. I think now it was a reaction to all the bad publicity, to all the hassles, and — most of all — to the impossibility of getting Bill to focus.
No matter how absent he was from day-to-day activities, Bill, it seemed, was nevertheless having a positive effect on the Museum’s budgetary situation: the projected deficit was way down, and trustees were beginning to fund exhibitions above and beyond their regular annual giving. This spirit, these gifts, reflected the confidence his financial experience and control inspired. I was grateful for that. But I was concerned that he and Tom weren’t talking, that the nominating committee wasn’t meeting, that Bill wasn’t asking trustees if they wanted to be reelected, wasn’t asking officers if they’d continue to serve, wasn’t following through with trustees who were no longer attending meetings or otherwise participating. That trustees meetings were getting shorter — an hour or less — with little time for discussing art.
Was I expecting too much of a busy businessman? Was Bill’s apparently successful fiscal management more important for the Whitney than any hands-on involvement? If so, it seemed to negate much of what I’d done, as president. I felt frustrated, confused, and, worse, useless.
Now that some time has passed, I see an inevitable tidal ebb and flow. More businesslike approaches both preceded and followed my style of personal contact and supportive partnership. They represent growth and consolidation. We made no mistake in choosing a business leader as president, we only chose the wrong one.
Tom and the Whitney were honored at the annual award dinner of the National Arts Club, in November 1986. Among others, Arthur Danto, professor of philosophy at Columbia and art critic for the Nation, spoke:
“The Whitney is like the rest of us in the art world today, confusion writ large. Its mistakes are those of the well-intentioned person facing intolerable pressures but obliged to make decisions. They are not the mistakes of an indifferent institution, nor of an authoritarian one, but of a human one. The Whitney is the only museum there is in which affection is an ingredient in our attitude toward it, and a degree of understanding and compassion. To imagine an art world without it is to imagine a desert of greed, vanity, and meretriciousness.”
In October 1987, Victor Ganz died.
Speaking at his memorial service was unbearable. I felt I couldn’t possibly do justice to that extraordinary man, couldn’t possibly say all that was in my heart. I quote the beginning of my eulogy because it bears on the Whitney, and also because Tom suggested the generational idea.
“Victor’s relationship with the Whitney Museum of American Art was very personal, very specific — as mysterious, perhaps, as the profound relationships of a devoted couple, of loving siblings, or of two close friends.
“I want to speak to Victor and Sally’s family, to convey to them something of what Victor means to the Whitney. I know how important grandparents are — the direction of my life has been influenced by my grandmother, she who founded the Whitney Museum and gave it its shape, that shape which Victor came to believe in, to modify, to revitalize. Having a passionately committed, articulate, and creative grandmother has been a challenge, a joy, and a constant source of energy and faith for me — I feel that this will also be the case for you, Victor’s grandchildren.”
Victor’s passion for art and artists, his lifelong search for understanding, had made me feel more and more intensely the centrality of art to life. And Victor himself was central to the Whitney, to all we were trying to do. Even when he was very ill, he asked me about the building project, wanting to k
now who was impeding it, who was helping. “You must persevere,” he insisted.
In the Whitney Bulletin, Brendan Gill distilled Victor’s essence:
Victor Ganz was a short, stocky man, with a well-shaped head and a resonant voice; behind large, black-framed spectacles, his eyes were exceptionally alert and, on the many occasions that we shared as Trustees of the Whitney, nearly always merry. It is a commonplace to speak of collectors as having a good “eye” — a gift that Victor had in abundance — but eyes in the plural are also worthy of praise, as being in physical terms extensions of the brain and therefore the means by which we are able to look into people’s minds and pass accurate judgment on them. What shone out of Victor’s eyes was high intelligence and an eagerness to be in affectionate contact with his fellow human beings. He and Sally Ganz were accustomed to speak their minds, openly and with humor but also, if need be, with compassion. The number of distinguished collectors is very large; the number of distinguished lovable collectors is, shall we say, comparatively small, and Victor and Sally have been notable among them.
The Museum continued, in public, as if nothing was wrong. In May, we presented Michael Graves’s new designs to different membership categories at lunches and special meetings in the Film and Video gallery. We presented them to the Landmarks Conservancy, to the Municipal Arts Society, and three times to Community Board 8. We went to an eight-hour public hearing at the Landmarks Commission on our “certificates of appropriateness to demolish the rowhouses and construct an addition.” Tod Williams, architect of our newest branch museum near Wall Street, had prepared a well-researched book on the brownstones, showing that their original fabric, at best a “handful of store-bought lintels, jambs and cornices,” had deteriorated beyond restoration by the time the Whitney moved next door. Madison Avenue, he pointed out, with photographs as proof, had “evolved in only 100 years from open farm land to the premier international shopping street of a world class city.” Speculative builders, including Silas Styles, “architect” of those buildings, had quickly moved in to build mile after mile of “repetitious brownstone rowhouses right out of the pattern books … architectural design appears to have been incidental to his real estate development interests … rectangular boxes with uniform fenestration and builders’ standard details.” Whatever the value of the original fabric of these buildings, most of it had disappeared long before the Whitney came along.
The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made Page 44
