No, I answered, but back in my office I thought better of it, and called him, saying maybe we could go back to the situation as it was, and then review the building program and the trustees’ complaints in an orderly way.
Tom agreed to talk with Bill. He promised to do his best to mend matters. Tom thought I should be present at their meeting, but I believed they could work things out better by themselves.
I was wrong.
Bill had opened their conversation, Tom told me, with insults, saying Tom was an arrogant son-of-a-bitch and a goddamned snob and that he had an overwhelming consensus of the board for Tom’s removal.
He said that the board had problems with Tom’s judgment about art, which he did not want to discuss.
Only then did Bill broach the subject of a reconciliation.
When Tom gave his conditions, Bill ended the meeting.
On Wednesday, Leonard came over to 110. We talked for an hour. He was very persuasive, very reasonable, even very sympathetic.
Wary, trying to be polite, I said I’d been lied to by Bill.
We arranged to meet later that day, with Bill.
Leonard was worried. We were in a dangerous situation, considering public relations, as well. And I, being unpredictable, exacerbated his fear.
The comments from trustees were varied: some felt Tom had been a terrific director, but fifteen years was enough, that anyone would begin to get stale. Some said Tom should have another chance. Others believed the process was all wrong. Tom shouldn’t leave now, they said; trustees need self-evaluation. Still others felt the main problem was the building; it was Tom’s fault we had failed, the Museum was ridiculed for that, they thought.
At 2:30, Bill and Leonard came to my office. They assured me that they agreed with me, we were seeking to reunite the board, therefore no votes of any kind would be taken. (No official vote could be taken, anyway, since the notice of the meeting was insufficient.) There was to be no discussion of Tom based on personality. No inflammatory conversation. No one should take notes. Tom would not be present. They asked me to read them my notes on what I’d say to open the meeting; naively, I did. Bill outlined what he would say: a short history of why he did what he did, then a suggestion of a cooling-off period, with the matter referred to a committee.
At 4:00 the trustees met and I made a plea for unity, for the spirit of a family, for no votes, for a cooling-off period.
Bill followed: the meeting was to discuss calmly the question of Tom. Bill loved the Whitney. He loved Flora.
And then, despite his promise, he inflamed the trustees by telling of a threatened action by B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League in the first year of his presidency, only averted with the great help of Leonard. He was not Jewish, but Migs (Bill’s wife) was. He understood such things, said Bill.
The implication was clear. Tom was being accused of anti-Semitism.
Bill said that he’d asked Tom to resign in order to be kind, in recognition of his great accomplishments of the past, and to save him from being fired.
But, in the ensuing conversation, it became apparent that at least ten, if not more, trustees had not been approached, as Bill said several times they had been.
Brendan spoke eloquently of Tom’s fine leadership, and emphasized the necessity for board involvement in any such proceeding. He was sure, he said, that Joel had spoken to many trustees individually to convince them that Tom should leave, and now Brendan went on, saying to him in front of all the trustees that Joel had a moral responsibility to the Museum to give facts and reasons for his feeling. To say why.
But Joel answered that he had no such responsibility and would not.
Someone proposed a vote to decide whether to vote to give Bill a consensus with which to pursue his demand for Tom to resign.
Despite Bill’s and Leonard’s promise of no votes, they did allow this vote: two to one, in favor of a straw vote.
At that crucial point, a hero emerged. George Kaufman, at most meetings a quiet trustee, rose, insisted on being heard, and won the day with a motion to refer the matter to the executive committee, with a few additional trustees.
Bill left, triumphant, borne on a cloud of glory by a smiling group of trustees, revealed in this parade as his cohorts in the shameful plot.
The board was hopelessly split.
Despite sorrow and distress, I went on to the Library Fellows’ celebration of the new book by Richard Tuttle and poet Mei Mei Bersenbrugge that the Whitney had published. Richard and Mei Mei had met and fallen in love through this project. Seeing the joy in their eyes helped a lot to renew my own sense of life and love, to put things into some perspective.
At the meeting of the beefed-up executive committee, Bill read his notes of trustee criticisms, and I challenged Bill with my criticisms of his presidency; but the committee voted, 7 to 3, to recommend to the board that Bill should again ask Tom to resign. I was unprepared for the ugly insinuations and feelings surfacing among a group I’d perceived as congenial and intelligent human beings, all of them dedicated to the Whitney — mostly people Tom and I ourselves had brought on board.
A curator called: the staff could help. To some of them, it appeared that Tom didn’t have the support of the board. So few trustees had spoken out in favor of Tom — maybe Tom should accept the idea of resigning rather than rupture the institution by being fired? What we’d built would continue. Don’t topple it. An easy transition was best, this curator thought.
This was the voice I heard but didn’t listen to, this, the other option. Caught up in the struggle, determined we should do the “right thing,” the “fair thing,” for Tom and, I thought, for the Whitney.
Was I wrong?
After all, the staff were those I felt closest to; if some had doubts, why didn’t I pay more attention? Was this one curator speaking for most of the curators, for all of them, perhaps? (No, others told me they’d support Tom to the end.).
Did trustees have any idea what was involved in actually running a museum? What did “vision” mean? The dictionary defines it as: “Unusual competence in discernment or perception; intelligent foresight.”
Tom, I thought, had plenty of vision.
“Fifteen years is too long,” “Tom is tired,” were some of the criticisms we heard. And the list went on.
I was certain that Larry Tisch was a pervasive force. He was capable of influencing his friends and his business associates. And, surely, he still bore a grudge against Tom. But how could we counter that might? That ill-will?
We couldn’t.
Although Larry’s role in the “cabal” was probably the most important, he was invisible, an éminence grise.
Nothing appeared in the media until Sunday, December 10, and then it was just an item in a gossip column. But on the following Tuesday, Grace Glueck wrote an article in the Times headed WHITNEY DIRECTOR SAID TO BE UNDER FIRE, claiming as her sources “board members who would not speak for attribution.” Since we had all agreed not to talk to reporters, this was further evidence of dissension and lies. Bill had denied rumors that he had asked for Tom’s resignation, but he’d added, hurting any tender feelings I might have had left, “The Museum is still coming out of its family stage.” Tom, Glueck claimed, had “mustered support among a minority of the board’s trustees, including Flora Biddle, the board’s chairman.”
From then on, the media had a feast. “The Whitney Museum is participating in the art world rather than standing outside it, but that’s part of what it means to be a museum of American art in New York City now,” Arthur Danto wrote in the Nation.
The New York Observer’s Clare McHugh, on the front page of the Christmas day issue, asked, “What is it about the Whitney that generates such intense feeling?” Concluding that it was a variety of issues, she summarized the Museum’s history, then quoted “sources at the museum”: “Mrs. Biddle is Mr. Armstrong’s staunchest supporter among the trustees. ‘She thinks that as long as he’s there she’ll be controlling the place,�
� one staff member said.”
I fumed. It was I who had originally supported strongly our decision to have nonfamily trustees, I who had urged a first nonfamily president (David Solinger), I who, as president myself, had set a term limit for the presidency, I who had passed the baton to Bill, I who had wanted the Museum to be a truly public institution.
I lay awake long hours, examining my motives, wondering whether I was helping to destroy or preserve the Museum, feeling sometimes guilty, sometimes angry.
The next trustees meeting was remarkably easy, since the work had been done ahead of time. Bill, Leonard, or I had spoken with all trustees. Bill and I proposed a committee to “review the current status and consider future directions of the Museum, including the performance of the director, and to report its recommendations to the full board of trustees early in 1990.” The motion was unanimously approved, and Jules was appointed chairman. From then on, Bill, Leonard, and I were removed from the process, which continued for several months as the committee Jules appointed interviewed all trustees in depth. The Museum continued to function, with Jennifer Russell taking increased responsibility.
Nineteen eighty-nine ended. We were launched into the last decade of this millennium.
Following is text from a letter to Bill from an interested observer, Robert Rosenblum.
Dear Mr. Woodside,
I was disturbed to read the news about the current dissension over Tom’s directorship. I hope it isn’t presumptuous of me to offer my own opinions; but as a decades-old member of the art world (I’m a professor of fine arts at New York University, a member of the Museum of Modern Art’s Dept. of Painting and Sculpture Acquisitions Committee, a trustee of the Hirshhorn), I have a serious view, I think, of the Whitney’s achievements.
Above all, I believe — and this against the constant onslaught of cheap journalistic attacks on the Whitney — that no other major museum in Manhattan (i.e. the Met, MOMA, & the Guggenheim) can come near its exhibition record. Assuming that the Whitney’s mandate has been to keep us all fully informed about the widest range of American art, from c. 1900 to the present, then it has done exactly that in an amazing abundance of shows that, for number and coverage, put other museums to shame. Where else could we have seen such astonishing diversity — from Sargent to Salle, from Hopper to Turrell, from Kiesler to Katz, from Storrs to Red Grooms, from Demuth to Warhol, from Avery to Johns, from folk-art to high-style design? The list is mind-boggling, and happily includes exhibitions originated by other institutions (a practice other NY museums are often too haughty about, leaving many traveling shows unseen here). And there have been first-rate period shows as well by the Whitney’s own curators (I’m thinking, for instance, of BLAM, and of the ’50s sculpture round-up). And I would cite the admirably quiet achievement of presenting the Mapplethorpe show without ever raising the red flag of censorship, public decency, etc., that has disgraced the Corcoran and its director. This, too, is a tribute to the firmness of the Whitney’s conviction that the fullness of our changing moral codes and values should not be hidden from the museum-going public.
I would applaud as well the selection of Michael Graves for the Whitney extension, a choice that, whether one liked it or not (I happen to be a fan of the initial design), indicated an infinitely more adventurous stance than that taken by most museum directors who would select tepid, uncontroversial designs for a new building campaign.
I also find that, despite predictable backlash in the press, the Biennial is a thriving institution important to NY art life, where we can immerse ourselves in a buoyant anthology of what’s up and down, in and out, and where we can all learn and argue. No other museum here offers this kind of regular, feisty round-up. And I would also cite the many lectures and educational activities sponsored by the Whitney. …
All of these assets, and countless others, strike me as immensely positive. I could certainly not muster up this kind of enthusiasm for any of the Whitney’s competitors in the NY museum world. And I cannot help concluding that the director of an institution that has done so much in the last decade must be steering it firmly in the right direction.
And Arthur Danto addressed the following letter to Bill:
Dear William S. Woodside:
I would move rather carefully out of what the Times records you as describing as “the family stage” of the Whitney, on its evolution into just another museum. Yours is a unique and remarkably personal institution, it has a personality unlike its sister museums in New York, it has a human side that none of the others have, and which in my view is priceless. I have been a frequent critic of your shows and even of your practices in my column in the Nation, but the Whitney remains for me the true New York institution, the one that plays the role and takes the heat and runs the risks of the true leader in the arts in a living artworld.
In my view, Tom Armstrong deserves enormous credit for the Whitney’s vitality over these past years, and I would regard him as priceless among directors. I am sure there are frictions within the institution of which I am unaware — there always are — but as an interested and concerned outsider, I urge you to think long and hard before doing anything drastic.
I do wish you well, personally and institutionally, and hope that you can survive this crisis without losing someone as conspicuously valuable as Tom is.
Because of my respect for them both, Arthur’s and Robert’s letters were most important to me. Bill, however, never answered or acknowledged them. Presumably, they, and all the many others, meant little to him.
In an eloquent letter to the board, my daughter Fiona first gave her qualifications for writing: not only her lifetime of exposure to the Whitney, but her current experience on the print committee and the budget and operations committee, her volunteer work at the membership desk, her observations as an art historian and a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, her professional contacts with members of the art community, and her ability to make comparisons with the museums she’d worked in.
My four years as a member of the Print Committee have left me with the impression that the director and curatorial staff have well-founded, precise goals that they wish to meet as far as acquisitions are concerned. … Such exhibitions and publications as “Art in Place” are a testament to the sound acquisition program conceived by the Whitney’s current director. His vision about the collection continues to lay a solid foundation for the Museum’s future. …
The Whitney is the liveliest of New York’s museums. … Where else can one go to see at the same time a scholarly exhibition of the work of an American modernist, a controversial program of videotapes by American filmmakers, a comprehensive survey of twentieth-century American art composed from the museum’s collection, and an exhibition that traces a significant theme in American art from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present? Consider also such education programs as the Independent Study Program, the annual Whitney Symposium for art historians, and the multitude of gallery talks and tours for schoolchildren and adults. The variety of such exhibitions and programs reveals the director’s conception of what the museum should be. And it is in almost all instances both engaging and intelligent. …
It is time to look at the Whitney’s uplifting spirit, to see the joy and wonder in the faces of all those who look at the Calder Circus. The Whitney has achieved a vitality in the last fifteen years unparalleled by any other museum I know. That is not to say that everyone likes it, only that it provides a challenging forum for the most significant issues in American art today. Credit for this must go to the Whitney’s director.
The increasingly active role Fiona was taking at the Museum gave me great pride and pleasure. She was “hanging around” the Museum, the only way I know to become intimately connected with it — a process very few trustees had either the time or the interest to pursue.
Thirty-one
In January 1990 I met with the committee. I remember feeling I couldn’t possibly convince that group of anything, that their minds w
ere made up. After the meeting, I made notes only of my concern about how the Museum could survive with a split board, whether the “losers” would leave the Museum, how to heal wounds made by cruel words and deeds. Jules and the other members told me, emphatically, that everyone they’d spoken with insisted I remain central to the Museum’s future, no matter what happened. But why, when they disagreed so profoundly with my views? I asked. “You are the only one who can heal it. You are the soul of the Museum,” they said oxymoronically, each in his or her own way, knowing that for me the Museum would always come first.
Frances and Sydney Lewis sent me a copy of her letter to Bill:
“How does one get rid of a person when there are no valid charges? Smear tactics!
“The unfounded rumors that Tom Armstrong is an anti-Semite and ‘elitist’ are good indications that there are probably no solid grounds for his dismissal.
“Tom is not an anti-Semite. He is a true egalitarian. If you have any real charges against him, let’s hear these, instead of the character assassination being leaked to the press. As long-time supporters of the Whitney Museum, we’re extremely embarrassed.”
In despair over inaccuracies in the press, and also over quotes from insiders who had promised silence, Tom and I decided to talk with Kay Larsen of New York magazine. On the cover of the February 12 issue, Tom, cheerful in a polka-dot blue bow tie and a pin-striped suit, in front of Jasper Johns’s Three Flags, faces the art world. Heavy black print proclaims “WAR AT THE WHITNEY: Whose Museum Is It, Anyway?” Inside, five revealing photographs:
On the Whitney’s fifth-floor terrace, an oversized statue of a nude male towers over Bill Woodside, who’s smiling grimly.
Larry Tisch smirks in his leather office chair, hands folded over his stomach.
Seemingly entangled with Eva Hesse’s poignant Untitled—Rope Piece, I’m gazing sadly from its webbed and dripping ropes, looking as old and tired as Tom was accused of being.
The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made Page 47
