She was one of three women who created the museum, and her gifts of art and money still make a difference after 90 years.
Georges-Pierre Seurat, Port-en-Bessin, Entrance to the Harbor, 1888, oil on canvas.(The Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Today I’d planned to write about the 200th anniversary of the Brooklyn Museum, the trove of treasures from every era and inch of human creativity, but, alas, I slipped on some ice and took a tumble on the subway steps at Grand Central on the way. Nothing broken but not because I was suddenly balletic. I was dressed like a Vermonter, wrapped in more layers than an Egyptian mummy. As I walked down the steps, gingerly, I’ll note, I thought about my three church friends who’ve fallen this winter, and in a second or two I joined their hobbling ranks. “Go figure,” as they say in Brooklyn.
New Yorkers are unusually good in a crisis like this. Strangers helped me up, sat me down, and gathered what fell from my book bag, which is really a man bag. I started carrying one a few years ago. Hand sanitizer, my date book, a bottle of Perrier, moisturizer, lip balm, tissues, a bottle of Tylenol, which I’d need, spare glasses, and pens galore had scattered. I wish I could say I carried a copy of National Review. I did have the latest catalogue from the silver dealer S.J. Shrubsole. I was thankful for that small bit of grace. Shrubsole is a classy place. I thought, “At least no one can say I’m a bumpkin,” though I surely looked like a derelict one. No need to call 911, though people were willing to do it. If I’d fallen in Boston, I would have been mugged.
I wasn’t hurt but was terribly shaken and, before long, sore. No way in Hell I was going to Brooklyn, which, for me, is adventure travel, as much as I worship the Brooklyn Museum. So I teetered and tottered a few steps before taking a cab to the Museum of Modern Art. I hadn’t visited since I wrote about its very good Meret Oppenheim exhibition two years ago, she of the iconic fur-lined teacup and saucer. I thought warm and fuzzy thoughts, which, at that moment, were a salve. I knew MoMA was doing Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern, a new exhibition about one of the museum’s founders. Last week, I wrote about Belle da Costa Greene, the first director of the Morgan Library and, like Bliss, an institution builder. Consider this a companion piece.
It’s not beyond the scope of human emotion, as exhibitions go, but Lillie Bliss is a pleasure for those of us who like discovering pivotal but unheralded people, institutional history, and the history of American taste. For a contemporary art museum, MoMA is a stickler when it comes to its history. It defines Bliss (1864–1931) as one of its three founders along with Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, who was John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s wife, and Mary Quinn Sullivan, an art teacher from Indianapolis who married a prominent New York lawyer. The three women formed MoMA in 1929 after years of collecting new art for themselves and agitating for a public gallery for cutting-edge art.
Lillie Bliss is part biographical and part aesthetic. There are childhood photographs, photographs of her apartment at 1001 Park Avenue, and, in a treat for we inveterate fundraisers, a solicitation letter from 1929 signed by MoMA’s seven trustees, including Bliss. MoMA was blessed by assiduous donors and cursed by the Depression coinciding with the museum’s birth. Bliss’s will gave MoMA $1 million on the condition that it establish itself as financially stable within a set timeframe. It didn’t exactly meet her criteria but, given the Depression, the executors of her estate gave MoMA the money anyway. The gift was essential — and substantial — money for a fledging and experimental museum.
Bliss’s taste aimed at edgy classicizing French art. Cézanne’s Bather, from 1885, is probably her best-known acquisition, along with two large Cézanne still lifes from late in his career. Cézanne is avant-garde, but his logic, balance, and use of geometric shapes to make his forms draw from French Old Masters as far back as Poussin. For me, the high point was five works by Seurat, among them four drawings.
Once I see a Seurat drawing, I tend to think of it like our dog thinks of food — a lot, and with protean concentration. Seurat uses black crayon and, here and there, a bit of pencil and a bit of gouache. His figures are dreamy, like apparitions, that look as if they’re growing from the paper. There are a few Gauguin prints, too.
Bliss’s collecting, at least of French art, focused on a period of about 20 years, from the early 1880s to around 1900, though sometimes she wandered. In 1921 she bought a splendid Picasso still life to go with her Cézannes. The grand Modigliani portrait of Anna Zborowska, painted in 1917, might have been outside the box for her, but it’s one of his best late portraits. Bliss’s bequest of art was transformative for MoMA, which, until then, didn’t have much of a permanent collection, and its leaders at the time were still uncertain about whether or not the museum would collect art. Some were happy for MoMA to be a gallery for exhibiting new art only. Today, MoMA owns more than 100,000 works of art, a superb collection Bliss launched.
I would have done the exhibition differently but it’s still worth a visit, as is, always, MoMA. Lillie Bliss remembers Bliss on the 90th anniversary of her bequest of her art to the museum, a fair enough occasion. It also recognizes the publication of Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped the Museum of Modern Art, co-edited by Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn, both curators at MoMA.
Their new book profiles 14 women, which is a lot and, chronologically, runs to 1945. Since the 1934 exhibition and until Inventing the Modern, MoMA hasn’t done much in the way of all things Bliss. At her instructions, her brother, Cornelius, burned her correspondence at her death, which, alas, limits what we know, though I expect she was a discrete letter writer.
Why not treat Bliss, Rockefeller, and Sullivan together, each a collector, each with different twists and turns, and each one of the officially sanctioned founders? This would have meant a broader, deeper exhibition but, with Inventing the Modern on the shelves, the research is done. It would also have meant more loans. Lillie Bliss does feel improvised, not totally tossed together, but, given that nearly everything is from MoMA’s own collection, it’s an easy exhibition to have done.
Related to this, and I have to be selfish, the Addison Gallery at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., got a bequest from Bliss, too. MoMA got her European art, but the Addison got almost all her American pictures as well as her furniture. I was the director of the Addison for years, and, during my era, Bliss’s sofas and easy chairs were in the galleries as seating for visitors. The snazzy, Art Deco furniture, still there, adds a funky touch to the space.
Bliss didn’t start collecting art until she was around 40. She actively collected contemporary American art, but you’d barely know it from the MoMA exhibition. Her American works, many by Arthur B. Davies and Maurice Prendergast, landed at the Addison. Bliss was a close friend of Addison founder Thomas Cochrane. Her brother was, too, and both persuaded Bliss to leave her American art to the Addison, which opened in 1931. Some of this art should have been in the MoMA show. Bliss jumped into the modern-art world when she financed the Armory Show in 1913. Davies, Prendergast, and Walt Kuhn, another Bliss favorite, were deeply involved in what would be the first introduction of avant-garde art in bulk to the American art-savvy public. Bliss’s will gave the Addison first dibs on whatever American things it wanted above and beyond what she’d left to other museums.
Bliss’s bequest to MoMA allowed works to be sold for new acquisitions, and here she proved, once again, to be a heavy hitter from the grave. Using money from these sales, MoMA purchased Van Gogh’s Starry Night, from 1889, and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, his megastar from 1907. Starry Night is in the Bliss exhibition and always worth seeing. It happily lives with the art she collected, and she might very well have purchased it herself. Other works bought with Bliss money, including the Picasso, a Gorky painting, a Mondrian from 1920, and Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, are in other galleries, and that’s best. In scale and style, they don’t play well with Bliss’s things. The show is about her art, but how she lived as well, and she wouldn’t have wanted to live with a painting of soup cans.
The museum seems to have sold most of the art that Bliss left. That was within the scope of her bequest. Her money came from a family textile fortune. Her father was the secretary of the interior under President McKinley. She never married and, in the compact New York art world of the 1910s and 20s, seemed to know all the movers and shakers.
The sizzling current beneath all that MoMA now does is probably who will succeed Glenn Lowry as director. He announced his retirement this past fall after nearly 30 years as director. The MoMA he inherited in 1995 is unrecognizable today after three controversial expansions, the absorption of PS 1, which is MoMA’s branch in Queens, and a vast expansion of every department. Like the Met, it’s as much a university as an art gallery, given the number of moving parts and the range of its programs. I’ve known Lowry for years. His late father taught me how to ski, though, not how to ski down subway steps. I admire him not so much for MoMA’s campus evolution but for the number of memorable exhibitions I’ve seen there. He has stewarded a wonderful scholarly program.
Succeeding a director of so long a vintage is not impossible — someone will have to do it — but a challenge for the gods. Everyone knows what the expectations are, so veering becomes traumatic, especially for the curatorial class, which tends to be easily traumatized. Given that it’s in Manhattan, where vanity is a prime motivator, race and gender might figure as much as vision, scholarly chops, good taste, and diplomatic skills. Trustees love to do “firsts,” since it makes them popular — for a time — on the cocktail-party circuit and with the art press. It seldom has a happy ending.
I’m in Houston this coming week for National Review Institute events and to visit the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, another favorite. As much as I love Texas, I won’t be getting to Dallas and Fort Worth this round. I’ve got to be back for Americana Week in New York and, God willing, a visit to Brooklyn.